Ramana's teaching · His greatest hymn

Aksharamanamalai: the Marital Garland of Letters

The most intimate thing the silent sage ever wrote ~ 108 verses of aching love sung to Arunachala in the voice of the longing bride. He composed it, they say, while walking around the hill, and to sing it with full heart is itself to practise.

Add hero image ~ /images/articles/ramana-aksharamanamalai-marital-garland-hero.jpg

← Part of Who Was Ramana Maharshi

There is a story that when Ramana first gave the Aksharamanamalai to his devotees, and they began to sing it, some of them wept ~ and that Ramana himself, hearing his own hymn sung, would sometimes be moved to tears. That is worth holding in mind, because it tells you what this poem is. It is not a treatise. It is the most intimate and impassioned thing the silent sage of Arunachala ever composed ~ a hundred and eight verses of pure, aching, exalted love, sung by a soul to the mountain it cannot live without. If you want to meet not the philosopher Ramana but the lover Ramana, this is where you go.

The Marital Garland of Letters

The title itself is a small poem. Akshara-mana-malai means, unfolded, the “Marital Garland of Letters” ~ a garland (malai) woven to wed the soul to God, its verses strung like flowers, each one beginning with a successive letter (akshara) of the Tamil alphabet, from the first letter to the last. So the whole hymn is an alphabet ~ the complete range of speech, of expression itself ~ made into a wedding-garland and hung around the neck of Arunachala. Ramana takes, deliberately, the voice of the bride, and sings to the hill as to the bridegroom she longs to be united with, wholly and forever, with no separation left between them. That the great teacher of the impersonal Self should sing to God in the most personal, intimate voice there is ~ the voice of the longing bride ~ is one of the most beautiful paradoxes in all of spiritual literature.

How it was born

The hymn came, like so much of Ramana’s poetry, out of a practical need and a welling love. In the early days, the devotees who lived with him at Virupaksha used to go into the town to beg their food, and they wanted a song to sing as they went ~ something of their own, about their own hill and their own master. Ramana, tradition holds, composed the Aksharamanamalai for them, and it is said he wrote much of it while walking around the hill on Girivalam ~ the verses rising in him with his footsteps, the love of the hill becoming the song of the hill, circuit by circuit. So the poem is not only about Arunachala; it was, in a sense, breathed out by the act of circling it. The devotees carried it into the streets, and it has been sung ever since ~ to this day it is chanted daily at the ashram, and on the great festival days it fills the pradakshina road.

He wrote it, they say, while walking around the hill ~ the verses rising with his footsteps, the love of the mountain becoming the song of the mountain, circuit by circuit.

The cry of the hymn

We will not reproduce the verses here ~ they are Ramana’s, and best met whole, in a good translation. But the movement of the hymn can be pointed to, for it is unforgettable. Across its hundred and eight verses the bride-soul does everything a lover does. She pleads with Arunachala to take her, to not hold back, to not tease her with the appearance of distance. She reproaches the hill for its silence, its seeming coldness, the way it draws her and then does not move to meet her. She confesses her helplessness, her inability to save herself, throwing herself entirely on the hill’s mercy. And again and again she cries the one thing she wants above all: to be utterly united with Arunachala, to have the last trace of separateness between them burned away, so that the two become one with no remainder. It is the whole drama of the soul’s longing for God, and its refrain returns and returns like a heartbeat: Arunachala, Arunachala.

Love as the highest inquiry

And here is the deep thing, easy to miss under the beauty. This impassioned love-hymn is not a departure from Ramana’s teaching of self-inquiry ~ it is that teaching, sung in the key of love. For what does the bride finally long for? The complete dissolution of the separate self into the beloved ~ which is exactly what self-inquiry accomplishes when the false “I” sinks into its source. The union the lover cries for and the Self the inquirer seeks are one and the same reality; the burning-away of separation that the hymn begs for is the very death of the ego that inquiry brings about. Ramana simply gives the seeker two doors into one room. Through the sharp door of inquiry: who am I? Through the melting door of the Aksharamanamalai: take me, Arunachala, and let there be no more me. Both open on the same silence. To sing this hymn with full heart is to practise ~ which is why Ramana gave it, and why the devotees wept, and why it is sung still. It is one of the Five Hymns to Arunachala, and the jewel among them.

Last updated 17 October 2026. Following the documented record preserved by Sri Ramanasramam and his devotees; where an account is traditional, it is told as such.