Ramana's life · The creatures

The animals of the ashram

The same boundless regard that Ramana gave to kings and scholars fell, without the slightest difference, on the ashram's dogs and monkeys and squirrels ~ and on a cow named Lakshmi, whom he called a devotee and guided, at her death, to freedom.

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If you want to understand what kind of a sage Ramana Maharshi was ~ not what he taught, but what he was like ~ you could do worse than to forget the philosophy for a moment and look at how he treated the animals. For the same steady, level, boundless regard that fell upon kings and scholars and the poorest villager fell, without the slightest difference, upon the ashram's dogs and monkeys and squirrels, and upon a cow named Lakshmi whom he spoke of, without a trace of sentimentality, as a devotee. In an age that drew a hard line between humans and beasts, Ramana simply did not see the line. To him the same Self looked out of every pair of eyes, and he treated it so.

No line between the creatures

Devotees noticed it constantly and never quite got used to it. The animals of the ashram were not pets, tolerated at the edges; they were, in Ramana's eyes, beings on their own path, deserving of exactly the courtesy and attention he gave anyone else. He knew them individually. He noticed when one was unwell or unhappy. He would interrupt what he was doing for them. He insisted they be fed properly and never driven away or ill-treated. When he spoke of an animal's death, he spoke of it as he might of a person's ~ with the calm certainty that the Self within it was untouched, and sometimes with the striking claim that this or that creature had been liberated.

Lakshmi the cow

The most beloved of all these stories is that of Lakshmi, the ashram cow. She came to Ramana as a young calf, a gift, and from the first she showed an extraordinary attachment to him ~ she would seek him out, come to the hall to be near him, rest her head against him, and time her visits, uncannily, to be with him at certain hours. Ramana returned her devotion openly. He fed her by hand, spoke to her, made sure she was cared for, and treated her arrivals not as a charming nuisance but as the visits of a devotee keeping her appointments with her master. There are accounts of Lakshmi coming into the hall on Ramana's own birthday to honour him, of her being given a place and a garland, of a bond between the sage and the cow that everyone who saw it found deeply moving.

He fed her by hand and spoke to her, and received her comings not as a charming nuisance but as the visits of a devotee keeping her appointments.

And when Lakshmi lay dying, in 1948, Ramana did for her what he had done at the deathbed of his own mother. He went to her, sat with her, placed his hands upon her ~ one on her head, one on her heart ~ and stayed with her to the end, holding her attention, as he had held his mother's, to the Self. Afterward he said plainly that Lakshmi had been liberated. She was given the honour reserved for a realised being: she was buried in the ashram grounds, with a proper samadhi, and her tomb can be seen there to this day, bearing the inscription that she attained liberation. It is one of only a handful of samadhis Ramana ever ordered ~ and one of them was a cow's.

Dogs, monkeys, a crow, a white peacock

Lakshmi is the most famous, but she is not alone. The ashram's dogs were known to Ramana individually and treated with dignity; he would not have them shooed. He understood the fierce social world of the monkeys on the hill with a naturalist's precision and a sage's sympathy, and told stories of their kingdoms and quarrels and of individual monkeys he had known over the years; he is said to have been accepted by them as a kind of arbiter. Squirrels ran over his couch and were allowed to. There are stories of a crow, of a white peacock sent to the ashram, of a snake that passed over him without harm and which he would not let anyone kill. In every case the response was the same: no fear, no disgust, no dismissal ~ only the level, attentive kindness that saw, in the creature, the very thing he saw everywhere.

Why this matters

It would be easy to file these as charming animal anecdotes, and miss what they actually show. Ramana's tenderness to animals was not softness of temperament ~ it was the direct, practical expression of his realisation. If the same deathless Self truly looks out of every pair of eyes, then there is no creature that is merely a creature, nothing that can be treated as a thing. The cow, the dog, the monkey, the beggar, the maharaja ~ all are equally that one Self, and the only fitting response to any of them is reverence. Ramana did not preach this about animals; he lived it, hand-feeding a cow and grieving no death because he knew none was final. The animals of the ashram are, in the end, one of the clearest windows we have into what he had seen ~ and into the immense, impartial tenderness it left in its wake.

Last updated 8 October 2026. Following the documented record preserved by Sri Ramanasramam and his devotees; where an account is traditional, it is told as such.