Ramana's life · The leaving

The journey to Arunachala

Weeks after the awakening, the old childhood pull of a name became a command. This is how a boy of sixteen slipped away from home, left a famous note, and travelled to the hill he would never leave.

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The boy who came down from that upstairs room in Madurai was no longer quite living the life around him. For a few weeks he tried ~ he went to school, sat in class, kept up the appearance of an ordinary sixteen-year-old ~ but the old world had gone thin and strange, and he was only waiting, though he did not yet know for what. And then the old childhood spell returned, the one that had haunted him since he was small, and this time it spoke a single word he now understood completely. Arunachala. The name was a place. And the place was calling him home.

The name that had always pulled

Since childhood, the word Arunachala had stirred something vast and holy in him, though he had taken it for the name of some unreachable heaven, not a hill he could walk to. Now he knew: it was a real mountain, in a real town, Tiruvannamalai, and it was ~ he was utterly certain ~ his very Father, God in the form of a hill, summoning him. After the death-experience, there was no question of refusing. There was only the practical matter of getting there, and of getting away unseen.

The note he left

On the morning of the 29th of August, 1896, he made his move. He told a small untruth ~ that he was going to a special class at school ~ to get the money for the journey from his brother. And before he left, he wrote a short note and set it down for his family, a note that has become one of the most quietly famous things he ever wrote. In it he told them, in essence, not to grieve for him and not to waste money searching ~ that he had set out in search of his Father, in obedience to his Father's command, and that this was a virtuous undertaking, so no one should feel sad.

“I have set out in search of my Father, in obedience to his command. Let none grieve, and let no money be spent in search of me.” ~ the sense of the note he left

The journey

What followed had the quality of a pilgrimage disguised as a muddle. He calculated the fare, took what he thought he needed, and set off for the train ~ but his knowledge of the route was imperfect, the money was not quite enough, and the journey became long and roundabout, by rail and on foot, over several days. There is a much-loved episode along the way: needing food, the boy pledged a pair of gold earrings to a kindly innkeeper, who gave him a meal and some money and the promise of redeeming them later ~ a promise the boy, of course, never meant to keep, because he had already left the whole world of such things behind. Little touches like this run all through the story: a soul entirely absorbed in God, moving through the ordinary machinery of tickets and coins and meals as though half-remembering how they worked.

“I have come”

And then, on the 1st of September, 1896, the journey ended. The boy walked into the great Arunachaleswarar temple at the foot of the hill, went straight to the innermost shrine ~ which, remarkably, stood open and unattended, as though waiting ~ and stood before the presence he had crossed a country to reach. He had come to his Father. His journey, he said in later years, was over from that moment. He was sixteen years old, and he would remain at Tiruvannamalai, in the shadow and the embrace of that hill, for the rest of his life ~ another fifty-four years ~ and never once leave it again.

Last updated 6 October 2026. Following the documented record preserved by Sri Ramanasramam and his devotees.