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, and the order they came

The Arunachala Stuti Panchakam gathers five poems, composed across roughly two decades, each with its own character and its own small story of how it came to be. Read in the order they were written, they trace an arc from the first great outpouring of love to a late, careful, almost scholarly distillation.

Navamanimalai ~ the Necklace of Nine Gems

The second of the five, the Navamanimalai (“Necklace of Nine Gems”) is unlike the others in how it was made: nine verses, composed separately, in different metres, at different times, later gathered and strung together into a single necklace ~ hence its name. It sits quietly between the Aksharamanamalai and the three shorter hymns that followed, less often translated or discussed than its companions, but part of the same continuous offering of verse to the hill.

Arunachala Patikam ~ the Eleven Verses

The Arunachala Patikam has one of the most charming compositional stories of all five. Ramana wrote it over ten days ~ one verse a day for nine days, then two more on the tenth ~ and used a demanding chain-verse form called antadi, in which each new verse must begin with the last word, or the first sound of the last foot, of the verse before it, so the eleven verses lock together end to end like a bracelet. In tone it is an outpouring of surrender and longing, the soul claimed by grace and left waiting, wistful, for the hill to show itself fully.

“Now that by Thy grace Thou hast claimed me, what will become of me unless Thou manifest Thyself to me?”

~ Arunachala Patikam, verse 1 (trans. Arthur Osborne)

Arunachala Ashtakam ~ the Eight Verses

The Arunachala Ashtakam followed close behind the Patikam, and was composed, tradition says, while Ramana was walking Girivalam ~ a devotee accompanying him with paper and pencil to take the verses down as they came, much as the Aksharamanamalai itself is said to have arisen on the pradakshina road. Of the five it is the most overtly philosophical: the love-song deepens here into direct teaching, the hill addressed not only as beloved but examined as the very nature of reality ~ still, apparently without awareness, and yet, the poem insists, the most active power there is.

“It sits calmly as a hill bereft of awareness, but ah, its action is pre-eminent, difficult for anyone to understand.”

~ Arunachala Ashtakam, verse 1 (trans. Michael James)

Arunachala Pancharatnam ~ the Five Gems

The last of the five to be composed, the Arunachala Pancharatnam came about differently again: a Sanskrit scholar among the devotees asked Ramana for verses in a specific classical metre, the arya vritta, on a set of traditional yogic topics. Ramana obliged, composing five verses in Sanskrit from 1917 onward, and rendered them himself into Tamil some years later, in 1922. Being addressed first to scholars, it is the most concentrated and jewel-like of the five ~ five gems indeed, each a complete statement of surrender and non-dual union in miniature.

“Ocean of nectar, full of grace, engulfing the universe in Thy splendour! Oh Arunachala, the supreme itself!”

~ Arunachala Pancharatnam, verse 1

He, who at all times glorifies Thee and loves Thee as none other than the Self, is the master without rival, one with Thee, and lost in Thy bliss.

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