The main entry's brief mention of Ramana Maharshi's twentieth-century revival of neti neti as self-enquiry deserves fuller treatment, since his formulation became, more than any classical text, the channel through which the method reached practitioners with no background in Sanskrit philosophy.
Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) underwent a spontaneous experience of self-realization as a teenager in 1896, reportedly triggered by a sudden fear of death that led him to investigate who or what would die, an investigation that resolved, he later taught, into the recognition that the "I" has no independent reality apart from pure awareness. He settled permanently at Arunachala, a mountain in Tamil Nadu long associated with Shiva, living first in near-total silence for several years and later teaching visitors through atma-vichara, self-enquiry, which reduces the philosophical apparatus of classical neti neti to a single, repeated question, "who am I?", turned back on any thought or experience that arises, including the sense of being a questioner, rather than answered discursively.
Ramana's teaching differs from classical Advaita instruction in its practical simplicity and indifference to scriptural study or ritual, presenting self-enquiry as sufficient regardless of formal learning, which is a significant part of why his teaching became so widely accessible outside India and influential on later Western teachers of nondual spirituality with little formal grounding in Vedantic philosophy, a lineage the main entry's brief reference to his role in the method's modern currency compresses into a single clause.