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.

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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 hymn's form carries its own quiet discipline. Akshara means letter, and each of the 108 verses opens with the next letter of the Tamil alphabet in strict order, so the whole composition is, among other things, a complete alphabet turned into a garland ~ every sound the language can make, offered up as praise. It is a form used elsewhere in Tamil devotional poetry, but Ramana's use of it here, verse after verse of unbroken longing, is what has made the Aksharamanamalai endure.

The cry of the hymn

We do not reproduce the 108 verses here in full ~ they are Ramana’s, copyrighted English translations exist in several careful editions, and the hymn is best met whole, chanted or read slowly in one of those. But the movement of the hymn can be traced, for it is unforgettable, and it unfolds in roughly five stages across its length.

It opens (verses 1–12) with invocation: the bride-soul first addresses Arunachala directly, establishing the marriage-metaphor that will carry the whole hymn, and asking, in the very first verse, that the hill root out the ego of anyone who holds it in their heart. Through the next long stretch (roughly 13–48) comes entreaty ~ verse after verse of appeal for grace, mercy and revelation, the tone swinging between tender pleading and open reproach for the hill's apparent silence and delay. A middle movement (49–72) deepens into surrender: the bride grows more vulnerable, more undone, begging now not just for a sign but for direct contact, for the hill to hold her and not let go. Then comes the hymn's most radical stretch (73–96), a kind of mystical absorption in which the language turns paradoxical ~ sacred confusion, the "madness" of love, the dissolving of the very distinction between lover and beloved. It closes (97–108) in settled devotion: grace acknowledged, human limitation owned plainly, and a final verse of thanksgiving in which the completed garland is offered and, in the same breath, received.

Across that arc 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, the way it draws her and then does not move to meet her. She confesses her helplessness, 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, every trace of separateness burned away, so the two become one with no remainder. It is the whole drama of the soul’s longing for God, and its refrain returns like a heartbeat: Arunachala, Arunachala.

“Thou dost root out the ego of those who meditate on Thee.”

~ Aksharamanamalai, verse 1 (trans. Sadhu Om & Michael James)

That first line sets the whole hymn's terms in a single stroke ~ not comfort, but a plea to be undone. Deep in the entreaty section, one verse turns the usual language of asking on its head:

“Unasked Thou givest; this is Thy imperishable fame.”

~ Aksharamanamalai, verse 22 (trans. Sadhu Om & Michael James)

And the hymn's very last verse, true to its form, closes the alphabet and the offering in the same gesture ~ the completed garland handed over, and, in the handing over, received.

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 September 2026. Following the documented record preserved by Sri Ramanasramam and his devotees, and the English translation by Sadhu Om and Michael James; where an account is traditional, it is told as such.