Ramana's devotees · The seeker who became a teacher

Papaji (H.W.L. Poonja): the boy who knew Krishna, and found Ramana

A six-year-old boy in Punjab was so absorbed in an experience of pure consciousness that he could not respond to the world around him. Decades later, in Ramana Maharshi's presence, the grown man recognised that very same peace ~ the beginning of a life that would carry self-inquiry to a global audience.

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Long before he became known to thousands of Western seekers as Papaji, he was a boy in Punjab whose mother despaired of ever getting an ordinary answer out of him. This is his own story ~ not yet the story of how his teaching later travelled to the West through Mooji and the satsang movement, which we have told separately, but the earlier, more intimate story of a childhood vision, a long search, and a meeting with Ramana Maharshi that closed a circle opened decades before.

A child who already knew

Papaji was born Hariwansh Lal Poonja on 13 October 1910 in Punjab, in what was then British India. At around six years old, he had a spontaneous experience of what he would later describe as supreme consciousness ~ so complete and absorbing that, for a time, it left him unable to respond to anything around him. His mother, herself an ardent devotee of Krishna, responded not with alarm but with guidance: she encouraged him to turn his devotion toward Krishna. By his own later account, Krishna appeared to him repeatedly in childhood, and the two, in his telling, simply played together, as children do.

A long search, and a name half-remembered

What follows in the standard accounts of his life is less a single dramatic turning point than a long unfolding. He grew into a seeker who carried, without quite knowing what to call it, the memory of that childhood absorption ~ certain that the peace he had touched as a boy was real, and certain, too, that he had not yet found his way back to it through the ordinary means of ritual and belief. It was this unfinished search that eventually brought him, as an adult, into the presence of Ramana Maharshi at Tiruvannamalai.

A boy who once played with visions of Krishna grew into a man who, decades later, recognised in Ramana's silence the very state he had touched at six years old.

Recognition in Ramana's presence

By the accounts that have come down through his own later teaching, his path to recognition in Ramana's presence was not instantaneous ~ it involved more than one encounter and, as devotees tell it, a teaching delivered through a simple image of a train and a bullock cart, pointing him past the idea that liberation was something to be arrived at gradually. What emerged from these meetings was a settled recognition: that the state of profound peace Ramana pointed to in his teaching was the same state the boy in Punjab had touched decades earlier. From that point on, whatever the twists of his subsequent life, Poonja regarded Ramana Maharshi as his master, without qualification.

A teacher in Lucknow, and the years that followed

In the years after his time with Ramana, Poonja lived an active and, by most accounts, a materially engaged life, eventually settling in Lucknow. It was there, from the late 1980s, that his life took its most consequential later turn: a stream of Western seekers began to find their way to him, and in his fierce, direct and often startling presence, many reported experiences of recognition that echoed his own decades earlier. He continued receiving visitors and teaching self-enquiry in Lucknow until his death on 6 September 1997, at the age of eighty-six.

Why Papaji's own story matters

It is worth reading Papaji's life on its own terms, apart from what came after. The story of a child who knew an unshakeable peace, lost sight of it in the ordinary business of growing up, and then recognised it again, fully, in an old man's silent presence on an Indian hill, is one of the most striking realisation stories connected to Ramana Maharshi ~ complete in itself, long before it became, as it later did, a channel through which self-inquiry reached the modern world.

Last updated 17 September 2026. Drawing on the documented record and Papaji's own recounted testimony; where an account is traditional or devotional in character, it is told as such.