Isanya Jnana Desikar (1750 – 1829 CE) lived in Tiruvannamalai. He was a great siddha and famous for his teachings based on Advaita. Here is a collection of quotes of Isanya Jnana Desikar.
I do not know when you (Shiva) will bless me with the state of mauna, or when I will become the eternal pure knowledge, full of the light that is unborn. I do not properly learn the path to freedom from the liberated ones, nor do I do service to them. Instead, I go round the world as if in bondage, dumb, like a blind man, caught in the birth-cycle created by maya. How I have suffered! Protect me with your radiant jnana.
Like a lame man who cannot reach out for wild honey, I am unable to realise your greatness. You are the plenitude, the knowledge and bliss attained by yoga. Bondage, actions, illusion and desires expand from one to a hundred, and then to a thousand. If one of them leaves, the others pull me down. I believe in you alone. Kindly tell me on which day I will receive the direct experience that is flawless, supportless, and the unbroken whole. Raise me up from the eight-limbed yogic states to the sovereign state of true Siva-jnana.
Though it is known that all things will pass away, the mind still regards them as real. Ignorance fights with me. This mind, joining hands with the intellect and the ego, goes astray and ends up wandering in the forest, weeping and wailing. How can I overcome the mind? Blissful plenitude! Eternal grace! Clearly show me the truth or entrust me to the hands of your devotees.
Please instruct me about the supreme state: the single, infinite state that is full of silence, in which the flood of the unified taste of peace prevails, where the body and all enjoyments are blissfully forgotten, where true knowledge shines like the sun. This is the yogic state that is called ‘Being still’.
Without knowing the Self, I played with the body through the senses, the breath and the mind. I thought that I was born and that I will die. I considered my parents, women, the world and all its enjoyments to be real. But then you possessed me and made me join the select band of your devotees. You made me realize the complete knowledge that has neither birth nor death and let me enjoy the simple essence of remaining as the Self.
Bondage in the form of birth and death has crept in without my knowledge. If I analyse, I discover that it is nothing but the mind. The Vedas proclaim that all this is a function of the mind, but still I remain ignorant.
Like the scent in a flower, like the taste in honey, blissfully you have entered into me. Self of all souls! Immanently you pervade the whole world, manifesting as the sky, the wind, fire, water, earth, the moon, the sun and the individual soul. You are the soul, the ‘you’ and the ‘I’. Up till now I have considered the world, which is only a mirage – like appearance, to be real. Who am I? What is this body? What is it that speaks ‘I’? What are all these relationships that appear as ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘women’? Tell me!