Guru

Ramana puts very clearly in focus the fact that the hill Arunachala shines as Guru. Here it must be mentioned that there is a contemporary notion that the guru should be in a human form. Based on this belief people would think that Ramana had no guru. This is a misconception. Ramana has made it clear not only in his `Five Hymns' on Arunachala but also in his conversations that he regarded Arunachala as his guru. There is a conversation which took place between him and Dilip Kumar Roy of Sri Aurobindo Ashram in the late forties which reads as under:

• Dilip : Some people report that Maharshi denies the need of a Guru. Others say the reverse. What does Maharshi say?

Bhagavan : I have never said that there is no need for a Guru.

• Dilip : Sri Aurobindo often refers to you as having had no Guru.

Bhagavan : That depends on what you call Guru. He need not necessarily be in human form. Dattatreya had twenty four Gurus-the elements, etc. That means that every form in the world was his Guru. A Guru is absolutely necessary. The Upanishads say that none but a Guru can take a man out of a jungle of mental and sense perceptions, so there must be a Guru.

• Dilip : I mean a human Guru. The Maharshi didn't have one.

Bhagavan : I might have had sometime or other. And didn't I sing hymns of Arunachala? What is a Guru? Guru is God or the Self. First a man prays to God to fulfil his desires, then a time comes when he does not pray for the fulfillment of a desire but for God himself. So God appears to him in some form or other, human or non-human, to guide as a Guru in answer to his prayer.