Paul Brunton
1898–1981 · English journalist and philosopher who introduced Ramana Maharshi to the West.
Paul Brunton (born Raphael Hurst) spent the 1930s travelling in India and Egypt in search of living teachers. His 1934 book A Search in Secret India - a bestseller in its time - brought Ramana Maharshi to the English-speaking world for the first time, and remains the doorway many Western students still take.
After his time at Ramanashram he returned to Europe and Switzerland and wrote a long sequence of quieter, more philosophical books - The Wisdom of the Overself, The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga, The Quest of the Overself, and others. He kept private notebooks for the last forty years of his life; those notebooks were edited posthumously into the sixteen-volume Notebooks of Paul Brunton - a compressed, paragraph-by-paragraph guide to sādhana, jñāna, meditation, and the still centre. Excerpts appear regularly on the Still Center anthology.
On the site: the Ramana Maharshi page collects Ramana's own works and biography; Brunton's are here.
Off-site resources
Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation - the official non-profit that stewards Brunton's writings, sustains the Wisdom's Goldenrod study centre in upstate New York, and publishes the Notebooks in English + several translations. The best single starting point for a serious reader.
The Notebooks - paragraph-level search - every entry from the sixteen volumes is indexed and directly searchable. Individual paragraphs have stable URLs (e.g. `/notebooks/para/13953`) - cite them the way you'd cite a chapter and verse.
Paul Brunton Daily Note - a Swedish-hosted daily-reading site with each day's paragraph available in English, Spanish, French, and German, plus audio (mp3) in each language. The Brunton entries on our Still Center anthology link to this site for translations.