Upadesa Undiyar - tr: Sadhu Om and Michael James

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Upadesa Undiyar

Upadesa Undiyar is a thirty-verse philosophical poem composed by Ramana Maharshi in 1927. The original was in Tamil, but Bhagavan later wrote other versions in Telugu, Sanskrit and Malayalam.

Sadhu Om and Michael James made a word-for-word translation of the Tamil text in the 1980s and added a long introduction and a commentary on each verse. This work (Upadesa Undiyar of Bhagavan Sri Ramana) was published by Sri Ramana Kshetra but it has been out of print for many years. Since it is not likely to be published again in the near future, I sought and received Michael’s permission to post the whole work on this site.

I am also posting Muruganar’s prose rendering of Upadesa Undiyar, translated from Ramana Jnana Bodham, volume nine. Bhagavan asked Muruganar to do this work and checked the final version himself. This is the first time that this work has appeared in English.

 

 

verse 18:

 

 

The mind is only [the multitude of] thoughts. Of all [these thoughts], the thought ‘I’ [the feeling ‘I am the body’] alone is the root. [Therefore]what is called mind is [this root-thought] ‘I’.

 

Note: The term ‘mind’ is generally used as a collective name for the multitude of thoughts. Of all thoughts, the thought ‘I am the body’ alone is the root, since it is the one thread on which all other thoughts are strung (as stated by Sri Bhagavan in verse 2 of Atma-Vidya Kirtanam) and since no other thought can exist in its absence. Therefore what is commonly called mind is reduced on analysis to this root-thought ‘I am the body’.

It is important here to note the difference between this thought ‘I’, which is the mixed feeling ‘I am the body’, and the real ‘I’, which is the pure existence consciousness ‘I am’. When ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’, it is the mind or ego. Refer here to Maharshi’s Gospel, Book One, chapter six.

The thought ‘I’ is the knowing subject, whereas all other thoughts are objects known by it. Hence, though other thoughts come and go, the thought ‘I’ always remains as the background upon which they depend, and when the thought ‘I’ subsides, all other thoughts must subside along with it. Thus the thought ‘I’ is the one and only essential characteristic of the mind. Therefore, the ultimate truth about the mind can be discovered on when one scrutinizes the truth of this first person thought ‘I’. Hence, when Sri Bhagavan says in the previous verse, ‘When one scrutinizes the form of the mind...’ we should understand that He means, ‘When one scrutinizes the nature of the thought ‘I’...’, because only when the nature of the thought ‘I’ is thus scrutinized will the ultimate truth that the mind has no existence whatsoever be realized. This point will be explained in more detail in the forthcoming third edition of The Path of Sri Ramana Part One, chapter seven.

 

http://www.davidgodman.org/rteach/upadesa_undiyar.shtml