Ramana Maharshi
At sixteen the schoolboy Venkataraman was seized for no reason by the terror of imminent death, lay down on the floor and set about finding what in him would die and what would not. Within weeks he left home for Tiruvannamalai, to the hill of Arunachala, and did not leave it for fifty-four years, to the end of his life. In the first years he kept silence and sat in an underground temple where insects ate at him; then an ashram formed around him, drawing Indian pilgrims and Europeans like Paul Brunton, whose book carried his name to the West. He taught one thing: to ask “who am I?” and hold to the source of that “I” rather than to its thoughts. He died of sarcoma in 1950, receiving visitors to the last.
He was born at Tiruchuzhi on 30 December 1879 at 01:00 local mean time; the hour is known from the ashram’s account and the family record — no document of the birth survives.