Hariwansh Lal Poonja was born in 1910 in what is now Pakistan. He served in the British Indian army in his twenties, married, raised a family, and worked for thirty years in mining and engineering in eastern India. Through all of it he carried a deep devotional pull and an early experience of God-presence that he could not satisfy through worship alone. In 1944, on the recommendation of a wandering sadhu, he visited Ramana Maharshi at Tiruvannamalai. Ramana looked at him in silence, and the looking ended his seeking. He returned many times in the years that followed.
After Ramana’s death in 1950 Papaji continued to work and to travel, living a quiet outwardly conventional life. Only in retirement, in Hardwar and then Lucknow, did he begin to receive students openly. Through the 1980s a thin stream of Westerners found their way to him. By the early 1990s the stream had become a flood. The recognition transmitted in those small Lucknow rooms produced a generation of Western nondual teachers who took the Ramana transmission, in plain English, around the world.
His own teaching was direct to the point of bluntness. Find out who you are, and be quiet. He distrusted technique, distrusted seeking, distrusted spiritual identity. He could be playful, fierce, or silent in turn. He died in Lucknow in 1997 at the age of eighty-six.
Where to start
- The Truth Is — Papaji’s most concentrated published teaching.
- Wake Up and Roar (Eli Jaxon-Bear, ed.) — transcribed dialogues from the Lucknow satsangs of the early 1990s; the easiest way to meet his voice.
- Nothing Ever Happened (David Godman, 3 vols) — David Godman’s monumental three-volume biography and oral history of Papaji’s life.
