H. W. L. Poonja (Papaji)

What is H. W. L. Poonja (Papaji)?

Papaji is the affectionate name given to Hariwansh Lal Poonja (1910–1997), an Indian Advaita§ teacher. He met Ramana Maharshi§ at Tiruvannamalai in 1944 and recognised him as his master. From the early 1990s he taught from a house in Lucknow, where Western seekers gathered. Mooji§ was among them. The Hindi word papaji means father.

From soldier to seeker

Born to a Punjabi Brahmin family in 1910. As a young man he was a Krishna devotee, a bhakta in the classical Hindu sense, longing for direct vision of his chosen form of God. He served in the British Indian Army during the Second World War. The turn came through a wandering sadhu. When Poonja described his decades of devotional searching, the sadhu told him there was one man left in India who could give him what he wanted. That man was Ramana Maharshi§.

The recognition

Poonja arrived at Tiruvannamalai in 1944. By his own account the recognition was not gradual. In Ramana's silent presence the search ended. He continued visiting through the late 1940s. After Ramana's death in 1950 he returned to ordinary life as a manager in a mining concern in southern India and held the recognition privately for several decades. The wider transmission only began in the 1980s, when Westerners started to find him. It intensified after he settled in Lucknow in 1990.

His instruction and his caution

Papaji's teaching was sparse. It came down to variants of Ramana's self-enquiry§ and the single instruction keep quiet. The format was satsang§: the student arrived with a question, sat in the room, and was directed back to the questioner. He kept no organisation and ordained no successors. He was equally famous for warning against premature claims of awakening. Many of those who later taught in his name did so with his blessing. Others, he said publicly, had mistaken a deep glimpse for the final recognition. That caution is part of his lineage.

Papaji vs Ramana, Mooji, Nisargadatta

Papaji is not Ramana Maharshi§. Ramana was his teacher and lived as a silent renunciate at Tiruvannamalai for fifty-four years. Papaji was a former soldier and householder who worked as a mining manager for decades before he began to teach openly. Papaji is not Mooji§. Mooji is the most visible figure in his lineage but a student, not a peer, and a generation younger. Papaji is also not Nisargadatta Maharaj§. Both are twentieth-century Indian non-dual teachers, but Nisargadatta belongs to the Navnath Sampradāya in Bombay and was trained by Siddharameshwar Maharaj§, not by Ramana at Tiruvannamalai.