Ramana's devotees · The book

Paul Brunton: the book that opened the door to Ramana

Before 1934, almost no one outside India had heard of the silent sage of Arunachala. One book changed that, and the journalist who wrote it ~ a complicated, restless figure ~ became, almost by accident, the reason the West found Ramana Maharshi at all.

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It is not an exaggeration to say that the worldwide fame of Ramana Maharshi begins with one man and one book. Paul Brunton was not a lifelong disciple in the way others on this hill were; his relationship to Ramana was, in the end, brief and singular. But the door he opened in 1934 has never closed, and nearly everyone who has heard of Ramana Maharshi in English owes something, however indirectly, to him.

From Hyman Hurst to Paul Brunton

He was born Hyman Raphael Hurst on 21 October 1898 in London, to a Jewish immigrant family, and would die on 27 July 1981 in Vevey, Switzerland, at the age of eighty-two ~ by then long since remade, in print and in life, as Paul Brunton. Before India, he worked as a journalist and bookseller, contributing to the Occult Review and taking a partnership in the Atlantis Bookshop in London's Bloomsbury, where he moved through the literary and occult circles of 1920s London. It was a restless, searching life even before he set foot in India.

The meeting at the ashram

Brunton travelled to India in 1930 and spent time with a number of spiritual teachers before his path led him, in 1931, to the ashram at Tiruvannamalai. He asked Ramana, as so many would after him, how one might come to realise God. Ramana's answer was the one he gave to nearly everyone who asked: vichara ~ self-enquiry, the investigation "Who am I?" It was not a dramatic exchange, by most accounts, but it marked Brunton permanently, and it became the emotional centre of the book he would write three years later.

A Search in Secret India

Published in 1934 under his adopted name, A Search in Secret India was an immediate sensation ~ eventually translated into more than twenty languages, and one of the works credited with popularising Indian spirituality in the West in the twentieth century. For countless readers in England and America, it was their first knowledge that a sage named Ramana Maharshi existed at all. The book sent a steady stream of Western seekers ~ writers, wanderers, the merely curious ~ on the long journey to Tiruvannamalai in the years that followed, among them several who would go on to become devotees in their own right, such as Major Chadwick.

Almost everyone who has heard of Ramana Maharshi in English owes something, however indirectly, to the book a restless journalist wrote in 1934.

A complicated later life

Brunton's own path after the book is less simple to tell. From the 1950s onward he stopped publishing books altogether and turned inward, producing an estimated twenty thousand pages of private philosophical notebooks over the following decades. After his death, his son and colleagues founded the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation and published sixteen volumes drawn from these notebooks between 1984 and 1988; his papers are now held at Cornell University Library. His legacy is genuinely disputed: a 1993 memoir by Jeffrey Masson, My Father's Guru, portrayed him critically as a guru-like figure in the Masson household, a characterisation others close to the material have pushed back on, noting Brunton stayed with the family only some six months in total and never claimed to be anyone's guru. The honest picture is of a complex, sometimes contradictory man ~ which does nothing to diminish what his one early book achieved.

Why Brunton matters

It would be a mistake to measure Brunton only by his later years. His significance is specific and historical: he is, more than any other single person, the reason Ramana Maharshi became known outside India. Where a devotee like Arthur Osborne stayed and spent a lifetime making the teaching accurate, Brunton's role was the opening act ~ brief, brilliant, and permanently consequential. The door he opened in 1934 is the reason this page, and this whole website, exists in English at all.

Last updated 17 September 2026. Drawing on the documented record and published biographical sources; where an account is disputed, it is presented as such.