Ramana's teaching · The lineage west

From Ramana to the West: Papaji, Mooji & the lineage

Ramana appointed no successor ~ yet his self-inquiry travelled the world, passing heart to heart from Arunachala through Papaji to Mooji and the modern satsang movement. The remarkable chain that carried a hill's silence to the West.

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Ramana never appointed a successor. He founded no order, initiated no line of gurus, and when asked who would carry on after him, pointed only to the Self and to the hill. And yet his teaching did travel ~ not through an official lineage, but through the living force of transmission, passing from heart to heart down a chain of teachers who carried the essence of self-inquiry out of Tiruvannamalai and, eventually, around the world. If you have encountered self-inquiry in the West today ~ in a satsang hall in London or California, in a bestselling spiritual book ~ the path back almost always leads, through one or two links, to a silent sage on a South Indian hill. This is that chain.

The lineage that was not a lineage

It matters to be honest and careful here. Ramana himself did not create a formal lineage of empowered successors, and Sri Ramanasramam has always maintained that Bhagavan's true “successor” is his teaching and his living presence, available to anyone who turns within. So what follows is not an official parampara in the traditional sense. It is something looser and, in its way, more remarkable: a series of individuals who were profoundly touched by Ramana or by his teaching, realised something real, and then found themselves ~ often without seeking it ~ transmitting it onward to others. The teaching spread the way fire spreads: not by appointment, but by contact.

Papaji ~ Poonja

The pivotal figure in the westward journey is H. W. L. Poonja (1910–1997), affectionately known as Papaji. A Punjabi by birth, a devotee of Krishna from childhood, Poonja came to Ramana in the 1940s ~ and it was Ramana who, the story goes, redirected his intense devotion inward, showing him that the God he sought outside was the very Self within. Poonja had a profound awakening in Ramana's presence, and always regarded Bhagavan as his master. In his later years, living in Lucknow, Papaji became a powerful and charismatic teacher in his own right, and something extraordinary happened: from the late 1980s a stream of Western seekers found their way to him, and many experienced, in his fierce and joyful presence, a taste of the very awakening he had known with Ramana. Papaji became the great conduit through which Ramana's self-inquiry poured into the modern Western spiritual world. He sent his people back out to live it ~ and some of them became teachers who would reach millions.

Mooji, and the teachers of today

Among those who came to Papaji was a Jamaica-born, London-based man named Anthony Paul Moo-Young, who became known as Mooji. Having met Papaji in the early 1990s and been deeply transformed, Mooji in time became one of the most widely known non-duality teachers in the world, with an ashram (Monte Sahaja) in Portugal and an audience of millions online, pointing seekers ~ in Ramana's own spirit ~ back to the awareness they already are. He is only the best known. Papaji's influence flowed through many others ~ Gangaji, and a whole generation of Western satsang teachers ~ so that the “satsang movement” that spread through Europe and America from the 1990s onward is, in very large part, a flowering of the seed Ramana planted, carried west by Papaji. When a seeker in the modern West hears the words “just be,” or “who is aware of that?” ~ they are hearing, at one or two removes, the sage of Arunachala.

Ramana appointed no successor. And yet the teaching spread the way fire spreads ~ not by appointment, but by contact, heart to heart, until it reached the world.

And the ones who wrote it down

Alongside the transmission through teachers ran the transmission through words. The Western devotees ~ Brunton, Osborne, Chadwick ~ and later scholars and translators, above all David Godman, whose careful books have made the authentic teaching available to English readers with rare accuracy, kept the source pure and reachable even as the living transmission spread. Between the teachers who transmit and the writers who preserve, Ramana's one question has become perhaps the most widely practised of all the direct paths to truth ~ and it all traces back to a hill, and a boy who asked, at sixteen, what it is that dies.

Last updated 15 October 2026. Following the documented record preserved by Sri Ramanasramam and his devotees; where an account is traditional, it is told as such.