Ramana's teaching · His final words

Ekatma Panchakam: the last verses he ever wrote

Five short verses on the one Self, composed a little over a year before his death for a devotee who had asked for something in her own language ~ and, as far as anyone knows, the last lines Ramana Maharshi ever put down.

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Of everything Ramana Maharshi ever wrote ~ and he wrote little, preferring silence to ink ~ the Ekatma Panchakam holds a particular kind of weight, because it is believed to be the very last thing he composed. Five short verses, asked for by a devotee, given in February 1947, a little over a year before his passing in April 1950. There is no drama in how it came to be, no grand occasion ~ which is, in its way, exactly the point. Even at the end, the teaching kept arriving as simply as it always had: because someone asked, and he answered.

Written for Suri Nagamma

The devotee who asked for it was Suri Nagamma, a Telugu woman whose own story is worth knowing. Widowed at twelve, she turned to spiritual life, taught herself to read and study the scriptures, and years later came to live near Sri Ramanasramam, drawn by a teacher she had glimpsed, she said, in a dream long before she ever saw Ramana in the flesh. At her brother's urging she began writing home regular letters describing daily life and teaching at the ashram; collected, they became the book Letters from Sri Ramanasramam, one of the most vivid and intimate records we have of Ramana's last years. It was for her, and in her own language, that Ramana first composed these five verses ~ in Telugu, which he then rendered himself into Tamil, using the venba metre, and later into Malayalam as well. A related Tamil work in a more elaborate chain-verse metre, the kalivenba, covering much the same ground, is known as Ekatma Vivekam, and the two are often read as companions.

Five verses, the teaching entire

What the Ekatma Panchakam says is nothing new ~ and that, too, is the point. In five tightly compressed verses, Ramana gathers the whole of what he had spent a lifetime pointing to:

• Verse 1 ~ forgetting one's true nature and identifying with the body alone is what drags the soul through countless rebirths; waking up to the Self is no stranger, and no harder, than waking from an ordinary dream.
• Verse 2 ~ questioning and argument alone, without turning the inquiry inward, cannot reach the truth; the intellect can circle the matter endlessly without ever arriving.
• Verse 3 ~ the true relationship between consciousness and inert matter, worked out with the same careful logic found in the Ulladu Narpadu: matter cannot know itself, so what knows must be other than matter.
• Verse 4 ~ the difference between ignorance and self-knowledge is not the difference between two kinds of knowing, but between mistaking oneself for an object and being simply what one is.
• Verse 5 ~ the close: that which always exists and shines by its own light is the one Reality, the Self ~ and if even the primal Guru taught this ultimately through silence, how can it ever be fully caught in words?

That which always exists and shines by its own light is the one Reality, the Self ~ and if the primal Guru taught it in silence, how can words ever hold it?

The last words, and no ending at all

There is something fitting, almost gentle, in how the Ekatma Panchakam closes: not with a flourish, but by admitting the limit of its own form ~ verses about the Self ending by noting that the Self was never really taught in words to begin with, only pointed to, the way Dakshinamurthy, the primal Guru of the tradition, is said to have taught his own aged disciples in total silence. It is the same silence Ramana himself so often preferred, and the same one that met the last days a year later, when asked where he was going and answered that he was not going anywhere. The Ekatma Panchakam is not a grand final statement so much as a last, quiet instance of an old and constant habit: someone asked, in love, and he gave what could be given ~ five verses, and then, as always, the rest was silence.

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