Self-enquiry

Gambhiram Seshaier was a Municipal Overseer at Tiruvannamalai about 1900. He became a devotee of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi who was then living at the Virupaksha cave on the Arunachala Hill.
A student of yoga, he was especially interested in Swami Vivekananda’s lectures on Raja Yoga, Jnana Yoga, etc. Finding some difficulty in understanding these and similar books, he brought them to the Maharshi for elucidation. Sri Bhagavan then went through each of them and wrote out in easy Tamil prose the gist of these works on bits of paper and answered supplementary questions put by Seshaier. Thus Seshaier had quite a sheaf of these papers written by the Maharshi in 1900, 1901 and 1902; and he copied them into a small notebook.
After Seshaier passed away his notebook and some of the papers were obtained from his elder brother, G. Krishna Iyer and the contents were published with the title Vichara Sangraham.
This may therefore be regarded as the gist of the Maharshi’s earliest teachings. The Vichara Sangraham has unique value in that it constitutes the first set of instructions given by Sri Bhagavan in his own handwriting.