Ramana's teaching · His own poetry

The Five Hymns to Arunachala

The sage of ‘who am I?’ was also a poet of melting devotion. His greatest own compositions are not philosophy but love ~ the Five Hymns poured out to the hill as to a beloved, where the knower and the lover in him are revealed as one.

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It is one of the quiet surprises of Ramana's life. This sage of the dry, precise inquiry ~ who am I? ~ this teacher who so often taught in pure silence, was also, when it came to the hill he loved, a poet of the most melting devotion. The greatest of his own compositions are not works of philosophy at all but of love: the Five Hymns to Arunachala, poured out to the mountain not as a doctrine but as a beloved. In them the two Ramanas ~ the knower and the lover ~ are revealed as one, and the hill itself becomes the living face of the Self he pointed to within.

Poetry from the silent one

That Ramana wrote poetry at all can seem surprising, given how little he wrote in general and how sparingly he spoke. But the Five Hymns (the Arunachala Stuti Panchakam) came, in a sense, not from him but through him, drawn out by the sheer force of his love for Arunachala and by the asking of devotees. He regarded the hill, from boyhood, as his very Father and guru ~ God in the form of a mountain ~ and these hymns are the overflow of that lifelong love affair, the most personal and tender things he ever gave. They are counted among the treasures of the whole tradition, and are chanted at the ashram to this day.

The Marital Garland of Letters

The most beloved of the five is the Aksharamanamalai ~ the “Marital Garland of Letters,” a hundred and eight verses arranged as an alphabet-garland, each beginning with a successive letter of the Tamil script. Its tone is astonishing: it is a love song to the mountain, in which Ramana takes the voice of the bride longing for the bridegroom, pleading with Arunachala, teasing it, reproaching it for its silence, begging it to take him wholly and let no separation remain. That the calm sage of self-inquiry should sing to a hill in the aching voice of a lover tells you everything about how completely, in him, knowledge and devotion were one. The tradition says he composed it while walking around the hill, and that the devotees who first heard it wept.

The calm sage of ‘who am I?’ sang to the mountain in the aching voice of a lover ~ in him, knowledge and devotion were never two.

The five hymns

The Arunachala Stuti Panchakam gathers five poems, each with its own character:

• Aksharamanamalai ~ the Marital Garland of Letters; the great love-song, 108 verses.
• Navamanimalai ~ the “Necklace of Nine Gems,” nine verses on the glory of the hill and the Self.
• Arunachala Patikam ~ the “Eleven Verses,” an outpouring of surrender and longing.
• Arunachala Ashtakam ~ the “Eight Verses,” the most philosophical of the five, in which the love-song deepens into the direct teaching of the Self and the hill as the one reality.
• Arunachala Pancharatnam ~ the “Five Gems,” composed by Ramana first in Sanskrit and then rendered by him into Tamil ~ a jewel-like distillation of the whole.

The hill as the Self

What makes the Five Hymns more than beautiful devotion is what happens in them, especially in the Ashtakam and the Pancharatnam: the love-song quietly becomes the teaching. As Ramana sings to Arunachala, the outer hill and the inner Self are revealed as one and the same ~ the mountain he circumambulates on his feet is the very Heart he points to within; to be taken by Arunachala is to be dissolved in the Self. The hymns thus do something no discourse could: they let the deepest non-dual teaching arrive not as a proposition to be understood but as a love to be fallen into. For the seeker whose path is the heart rather than the knife-edge of inquiry, the Five Hymns are Ramana's greatest gift ~ a door into the same realisation, opened by love. To read them ~ in a good translation, for we do not reproduce them here ~ is to meet the tenderest, and perhaps the most revealing, of all his teachings.

Last updated 11 October 2026. Following the documented record preserved by Sri Ramanasramam and his devotees; where an account is traditional, it is told as such.