Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna (born February 18, 1836, Hooghly [now Hugli], Bengal state, India—died August 16, 1886, Calcutta [now Kolkata]) was a Hindu mystic and priest whose teachings and religious thoughts inspired the founding of the Ramakrishna Order. He was also the spiritual guru of the Hindu monk Vivekananda, renowned for promulgating Ramakrishna’s teachings and Vedanta philosophy in India and overseas.

Early life and family

Born into a poor Bengali Brahmin family, Ramakrishna had little formal schooling. He spoke Bengali and knew neither English nor Sanskrit. His father died in 1843, and his elder brother Ramkumar became the head of the family.

Spiritual awakening and religious worldview

In 1852 poverty forced Ramkumar and Ramakrishna to leave their village to seek employment in Calcutta (now Kolkata). In about 1855 they became priests in the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, on the outskirts of Calcutta. In 1856, however, Ramkumar died. Ramakrishna, now alone, prayed for a vision of Kali, whom he worshipped as the supreme manifestation of God. When he did not receive any such vision, he sank into despair. According to traditional accounts, Ramakrishna was on the verge of suicide when he was overwhelmed by an ocean of blissful light that he attributed to Kali. He once described Kali as “a limitless, infinite, effulgent ocean of spirit.”

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Philosophy 101

Soon after his first vision, Ramakrishna commenced on a series of sadhanas (austere practices) in the various mystical traditions, including Bengali Vaishnavism, Shakta Tantrism, Advaita Vedanta, and even Islamic Sufism and Roman Catholicism. After each of these sadhanas, Ramakrishna claimed to have had the same experience of brahman, the supreme power, or ultimate reality, of the universe. Later in life he became famous for his pithy parables about different religious traditions leading to the same ultimate reality.

It is not good to feel that one’s own religion alone is true and all others are false. God is one only, and not two. Different people call on Him by different names: some as Allah, some as God, and others as Krishna, Śiva, and Brahman. It is like the water in a lake. Some drink it at one place and call it jal [Hindi], others at another place and call it pani [Urdu], and still others at a third place and call it water. The Hindus call it jal, the Christians water, and the Mussalmans pani. But it is one and the same thing.

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by Mahendranath Gupta, translated from Bengali by Swami Nikhilananda

His teachings also emphasized the need to cultivate love and yearning for God and divine realization. He upheld the idea that service to humans should be considered service to divinity. Ramakrishna’s spiritual pursuits received the unwavering support of his wife, Sarada Devi, whom he had married at the age of 23. Ramakrishna advocated celibacy, so the marriage was never consummated; they remained together until his death. Sarada Devi was later deified and is considered a saint by devotees who treat her as their spiritual mother.

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Final years and legacy

A small band of disciples, most of them Western-educated bhadralok (“respectable people”; an elite social class in Bengal composed of educated and affluent individuals) gathered around Ramakrishna in the early 1880s, drawn by the appeal of his message and by his charisma as a guru and ecstatic mystic. Narendranath Dutta, who later became the widely acclaimed and world-traveling monk Vivekananda and also Ramakrishna’s spiritual successor, was one such disciple. It was about this time that Calcutta newspaper and journal articles first referred to Ramakrishna as “the Hindu saint” or as “the Paramahamsa” (“the supreme swan”; a religious title of respect and honor). Ramakrishna battled throat cancer during his final years.

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In a nation that had witnessed longstanding interfaith tensions and was navigating the arrival of British missionaries and the onset of religious reforms in the 19th century, Ramakrishna’s message that all religions lead to the same end was a politically and religiously powerful one. In 1893, at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Vivekananda presented the same religious worldview to representatives from different faiths and parts of the world. After Ramakrishna’s death, his teachings were disseminated through texts and organizations. Notably, Ramakrishna’s teachings are preserved in Mahendranath Gupta’s five-volume Bengali classic Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita (1902–32; The Nectar-Speech of the Twice-Blessed Ramakrishna), best known to English readers as The Gospel of Ramakrishna.

Vivekananda laid the foundation for the twin spiritual organizations Ramakrishna Mission and Ramakrishna Math, whose teachings, texts, and rituals identified Ramakrishna as a new avatar (“incarnation”) of God. The headquarters of the mission is in Belur Math, a monastery near Kolkata. The Ramakrishna Math and Mission have also played an important role in the spread of Vedantic ideas and practices in the West, particularly in the United States.