Ramakrishna

• 1. Introduction

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  Ramakrishna was born on the 18th of February 1836 in the Bengali village of Kamarpukur, and before he was a teenager the sky had already knocked him senseless. One morning he was picking his way along the narrow ridges of a paddy field, eating puffed rice from a small basket. A flock of white cranes crossed the dark face of a rain cloud above him. The sight held him so completely that he lost all awareness of his surroundings and fell, rice scattered around him. People nearby carried him home.

  Years later he described the moment in his own words. "One sees light, feels joy, and experiences the upsurge of a great current in one's chest, like the bursting of a rocket." He and his followers called it samadhi, a state of meditative consciousness that many Indian traditions treat as essential to spiritual liberation. Skeptical readers have called it a trance, or even an epileptic seizure.

  The boy in the paddy field barely learned arithmetic, yet he grew into a temple priest, a guru sought out by Calcutta's elite, and a man whose name travelled well beyond Bengal. How does a poor village child end up there? What did he hope to find when he worshipped as a Hindu, then as a Muslim, then as a Christian? And why, long after his death, do scholars and devotees still argue over who he really was?

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• 2. A Poor Brahmin Household

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  Khudiram Chattopadhyaya, born in 1775, lost his ancestral land because he refused to lie under oath. A landlord named Ramananda Roy, angry at the refusal, filed a false petition in court and took the property. Khudiram and his second wife, Chandramani Devi, born in 1791, left for Kamarpukur. There a friend named Sukhlal Goswami gave them one bigha and ten chataks of land to live on.

  Family tradition says the birth of their youngest child was announced in advance. While in Gaya, Khudiram dreamed that Bhagavan Gadadhara, a form of Vishnu, would be born as his son. Chandramani Devi reportedly saw a light enter her womb from the lingam in Yogider Shiv mandir. The boy's childhood nickname became Gadadhar. The household worshipped Rama, so every son carried a name beginning with Ram: Ramkumar, Rameswar, and Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna later told the diarist known as M, "I was a pet child of my father. He used to call me Ramakrishnababu."

  At nine, Ramakrishna received the sacred thread, which allowed him to conduct ritual worship and help with his family's deities. School was less successful. He learned to read and write but disliked arithmetic and never went past simple addition, multiplication and division. He read the Ramayana and the Mahabharata with devotion. Watching scholars chase wealth, he compared them with his father's detachment and dropped what he called "bread-winning education." He became skilled at making images, acting and painting. At fourteen he founded a drama group with friends and left school to pursue it.

  Kamarpukur lay on a pilgrim route to Puri, so wandering monks and professional Purana reciters passed through constantly. From them Ramakrishna absorbed the Puranas, the Bhagavata Purana and more, and he sang and acted out their scenes for the village women. A trader named Durgadas Pyne, who kept the women of his house in strict purdah, objected to these gatherings. Ramakrishna argued that education and devotion protect women better than seclusion. Durgadas then dared him to get into the inner rooms. Ramakrishna dressed as a weaver woman, walked in unnoticed, and won the bet. Durgadas allowed the women to attend.

  In 1843 Ramakrishna's father died, and the loss left the boy quiet. He took to visiting the nearby cremation ground alone to practise spiritual disciplines. Responsibility for the family passed to Ramkumar, who was about thirty-one years his senior. When money grew tighter, Ramkumar opened a Sanskrit school in Calcutta, on Jhama pukur lane, and also worked as a priest. In 1852 Ramakrishna followed him to the city to help. A wealthy widow there was about to build a temple that local Brahmins refused to serve.

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• 3. The Rani's Temple

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  Rani Rasmani had inherited the estate of her husband, Rajchandra Das, and she ran it with such skill that Calcutta came to love her. She resisted British colonial authorities, gave generously to the poor, and had four daughters. Her devotion to Kali was so public that her estate seal bore the words "Sri Rasmani Dasi, longing for the Feet of Kali." Before a pilgrimage to Kashi, she dreamed that the goddess told her to stay home instead. Kali instructed her to set up a stone image on the Ganges bank and arrange daily worship, and promised to manifest in it. Rasmani bought land at Dakshineswar and began a nine-spired temple.

  A problem followed. Local Brahmins judged her caste unworthy of offering food to Kali, and the pandits she consulted around the country sent opinions against her. Then Ramkumar wrote with a workaround. If she gifted the property to a Brahmin, he could install the deity and arrange the offerings without breaking scripture. She agreed. Ramkumar was asked to serve temporarily as priest, and after the opening on Thursday, the 31st of May 1855, the Rani asked him to stay on as chief priest.

  Ramakrishna did not want to come. He reminded his brother that their father had never officiated for those regarded as lower castes. Ramkumar insisted, and Ramakrishna came. Within three months, the Rani's son-in-law Mathur Babu was impressed enough to assign him the task of dressing the deity. Ramakrishna's sixteen-year-old nephew Hriday became assistant to both brothers. Ramkumar began teaching him the worship of the goddess, and a Shakti practitioner named Kenaram Bhattacharya was invited to initiate him. According to the account, Ramakrishna grew ecstatic the moment a mantra was recited in his ear. To wear down his own pride of caste, he also cleaned the toilets of scavengers with his own hair and hands.

  When Ramkumar grew too frail for the Kali temple, Mathur moved him to the Vishnu temple in the complex and made Ramakrishna the priest. Ramkumar died suddenly in 1856, while preparing to go home on leave.

  At twenty, Ramakrishna had now watched more than one death in his family. He sat before the goddess after each day's worship and sang the songs of Ramprasad and Kamalakanta. His plea was direct: "Thou showed thyself to Ramprasad, Mother, why then shouldst Thou not reveal Thyself to me?" At midday and at night he slipped into the nearby jungle to meditate, setting aside his clothes and his sacred thread. When Hriday confronted him, Ramakrishna listed the eight servitudes of "hatred, fear, shame, aversion, egoism, vanity, noble descent, and good conduct," and said he would put his clothes back on afterwards. Mathurmohan Biswas told the Rani, "We have got an extraordinary worshipper; the Goddess will be awakened very soon."

  Ramakrishna ate and slept less, and he cried at sunset, "Mother, another day is gone and still I have not seen you!" One day despair took him to the temple sword. He recalled, "I decided to end my life with it then and there." Then, in his words, he had "a marvellous vision of the Mother" and collapsed unconscious. He described houses, doors and temples dissolving into a boundless sea of light, with waves sinking him to an unknown bottom. Afterward he was heard repeating "Maa," Mother, in an aching voice. Asked why he called her that, he answered that a child is most free with its mother. He insisted his goddess was no figure of clay and straw but "pure Satchidananda," Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute.

  Back in Kamarpukur, rumours were spreading that the young priest had lost his balance.

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• 4. Marriage to Sarada Devi

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  Ramakrishna's mother and his brother Rameswar decided in 1859 that a wife might steady him. Marriage would give him responsibilities and draw his attention back to ordinary life. Ramakrishna himself said where to look, naming the house of Ramchandra Mukherjee in Jayrambati, three miles north-west of Kamarpukur. The bride was Saradamani Mukhopadhyaya, a girl of five, later known as Sarada Devi. He was twenty-three, a gap the source describes as typical for rural Bengal in that century.

  They did not live as a couple for years. When Sarada Devi was fourteen and Ramakrishna thirty-two, they spent three months together in Kamarpukur. She joined him at Dakshineswar at eighteen, by which time he had already taken up the life of a renouncer. The marriage was never consummated.

  Disciple Mahendranath Gupta recorded Ramakrishna's own account of a spiritual practice called madhura bhava. "I dressed myself in women's clothes, put on ornaments and covered the upper part of my body with a scarf," Ramakrishna said, and he performed the evening worship that way. He explained that this was how a man conquers passion, by taking on the attitude of a woman.

  In his room Ramakrishna also performed the Shodashi Puja, a ritual in which he worshipped Sarada Devi herself as the Divine Mother. He addressed her as the Holy Mother, and the disciples took up the name. Sarada Devi would outlive her husband by thirty-four years, and the young movement came to lean on her.

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• 5. Many Paths

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  In 1860 Ramakrishna returned to Dakshineswar and fell into what he later called a whirlwind. "No sooner had I passed through one spiritual crisis than another took its place," he said. Birds perched on his head to peck at rice left from the worship, and snakes crawled over his motionless body. He claimed, "I had no sleep at all for six long years." At one point he stood in front of a mirror and could not close his eyelids with his finger. He was frightened, but he said Kali comforted him and freed him from his fear.

  Wandering sadhus kept arriving at the temple, and several taught him their own methods. In 1861 a middle-aged female ascetic named Bhairavi Brahmani initiated him into Tantra. By 1863 he had completed sixty-four major tantric sadhanas, and he took only three days over each. The path includes heterodox practices called vamachara, among them eating meat and drinking wine. According to Ramakrishna and his biographers, he did not directly take part in the last two of the listed activities. He called the left-hand path a valid road to God but repeatedly warned his devotees against it. Bhairavi also taught him the kumari-puja, in which a young girl is worshipped as the Virgin Goddess, and Kundalini Yoga.

  In 1864 a Vaishnava guru named Jatadhari taught him vatsalya bhava, the attitude of a parent toward a divine child. Ramakrishna worshipped a small metal image of the child Rama and felt it as a living presence. He later practised madhura bhava, regarding himself as one of the gopis of Vrindavan, and reported a vision of Krishna. At Nadia, the home of the fifteenth-century Bengali Vaishnava founders Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Nityananda Prabhu, he saw two young boys merge into his body while crossing the river by boat. Earlier he had worshipped Rama in the attitude of Hanuman, and he said he saw Sita merge into him.

  In 1866 he turned to Islam. Govinda Roy, a Hindu man who had been initiated into Islam and practised Sufism, taught him. Ramakrishna repeated the name of Allah, prayed five times a day and wore a cloth like Arab Muslims. He said he felt disinclined even to look at images of Hindu gods. After three days he saw a radiant, white-bearded figure resembling the Prophet merge into him. The scholar Kripal writes that most Muslims would have found this experience heretical.

  Christianity came at the end of 1873. A devotee named Sambhu Chandra Mallick read the Bible to him, and Ramakrishna cut the reading short when it kept returning to sin. He compared it to snakebite: a patient convinced there is no poison will recover. Thinking oneself weak and sinful, he said, was the greatest sin. In 1874, at the garden house of Jadu Mallik, he gazed at a picture of the Madonna and Child until rays seemed to pour from it into his heart. Days later in the Panchavati, he reportedly saw Jesus walk up and embrace him. He then burned incense before a picture of Christ in his room each morning and evening.

  The teacher who tested him hardest was Tota Puri, a tall naked monk who reached Dakshineswar at the end of 1864.

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• 6. Tota Puri and Samadhi

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  Tota Puri was a Naga sadhu of the Mahanirvani Akhara, probably born in Punjab, who headed a monastery and claimed leadership over seven hundred sannyasis. By his own custom he never stayed anywhere more than three days. Seeing Ramakrishna's devout face at the temple ghat, he wondered whether this man could learn Vedanta in a province crowded with Tantra. Ramakrishna answered that his Mother knew what he should do. He went into the temple and returned to say she had told him to go and learn. Tota, who gave the goddess no belief at all, found the answer childlike and decided initiation would cure it.

  At dawn in the Panchavati, with the sacred fire lit, Ramakrishna offered the rites of renunciation. He gave up the wish for spouse, children, wealth and admiration. He also offered his sacred thread and the tuft of hair on his head. Tota gave him a loincloth and an ochre cloth, and instructed him that Brahman alone is real and that name and form are Maya.

  Then came the hard part. Each time Ramakrishna emptied his mind, the form of the Divine Mother rose before him as a living, moving being. After repeated failures he told his guru it could not be done. Tota found a broken piece of glass and pressed its point into the space between Ramakrishna's eyebrows. He demanded that Ramakrishna gather his mind there. When the Mother appeared again, Ramakrishna cut her in two with what he called the sword of knowledge. Nothing remained in his mind, and he passed into samadhi.

  Tota locked the hut and waited under the Panchavati. After three days with no call, he opened the door and found Ramakrishna in the same posture, without any trace of breath and with a calm, radiant face. Tota examined the body carefully. He wondered whether this man had reached in a day what he himself had reached only after forty years of austerity. Then he chanted "Hari Aum" to call Ramakrishna back.

  The experience changed how Ramakrishna understood Maya. He concluded that Kali herself weaves it, as a spider spins its web from its own body. He named two forms of it, Avidya Maya, the pull of cruelty and greed, and Vidya Maya, the pull of kindness and devotion. In his view the personal and the impersonal were one. "The Divine Mother and Brahman are one," he said.

  Tota's own certainty was tested too. A temple servant took a coal from the sacred fire to light tobacco, and Tota flew into a rage. Ramakrishna rolled on the ground laughing at how Maya could sweep up a man who taught that everyone is Brahman. Tota vowed never to be angry again. Later, dysentery struck him, and one night he waded into the Ganges to drown himself. The water never deepened, and in a dazzling vision he saw the Divine Mother filling all the space around him. He turned back, free of his illness. He and Ramakrishna bowed together before the idol. He left after eleven months and never returned.

  After Tota departed, Ramakrishna tried to remain in nirvikalpa samadhi. The Mother's form appeared again, and again he cut it away with knowledge. He stayed in that state for six months, motionless, with flies moving over his mouth and nostrils. The body of an ordinary person in this state is said to die within twenty-one days. A passing monk recognised his condition and kept him alive, beating him with a stick and feeding him in rare moments of awareness. The state ended when the Mother commanded him to remain in bhava mukha, a state between the absolute and the relative world. Dysentery followed, and he suffered intense intestinal pain for about six months.

  Samadhi stayed with him. A government official once found him in ecstasy for three days and three nights. His devotees would rub cow ghee along his spine and legs to bring him back. Ramakrishna explained it with an image. "Suppose there is a basin of water on the seashore and a fish is confined in it," he said, and when the basin breaks, the fish finds the ocean. To return to ordinary life he filled his mind with small wishes, saying things like "I will smoke tobacco." He told devotees to "tie the Knowledge of non-duality in the corner of your cloth and then do whatever you want."

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• 7. Disciples and Final Days

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  In 1875 Ramakrishna met Keshab Chandra Sen, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj who had embraced Christianity and rejected idol worship. Under Ramakrishna's influence, Keshab came to accept Hindu polytheism and founded the New Dispensation, or Nava Vidhan. Its principles included worship of God as Mother and the truth of all religions. Keshab printed Ramakrishna's teachings in the movement's journals for several years. Through them Ramakrishna reached the English-educated Bhadralok of Bengal and Europeans living in India.

  Pratap Chandra Mazumdar wrote the first English biography, The Hindu Saint, which appeared in the Theistic Quarterly Review in 1879. It helped introduce him to Westerners such as the German scholar Max Müller. Newspapers reported that Ramakrishna was spreading love and devotion among educated Calcutta and had reformed the character of some corrupt youths. Visitors included Debendranath Tagore, father of Rabindranath, and the social worker Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. Many historians count him among the contributors to the Bengali Renaissance.

  An unlikely nudge sent his most important follower. Principal William Hastie of the Scottish Church College in Calcutta was explaining the word trance in Wordsworth's poem The Excursion. He told his students that for its real meaning they should go to Ramakrishna of Dakshineswar. Narendranath Dutta, later Swami Vivekananda, was among those who went. Despite early reservations, he became the most influential disciple and popularised a modern reading of Indian traditions that joined Tantra, Yoga and Advaita Vedanta.

  Most prominent disciples arrived between 1879 and 1885. The early monks included Rakhal Chandra Ghosh, who became Swami Brahmananda, Kaliprasad Chandra, who became Swami Abhedananda, and Saratchandra Chakravarty, who became Swami Saradananda. Householders included Mahendranath Gupta, Girish Chandra Ghosh and Durga Charan Nag. Among women disciples, Gauri Ma later founded the Saradesvari Ashrama at Barrackpur for women's education. Ramakrishna told his monks to beg for food from door to door without regard to caste, and he gave them the saffron robe.

  At the start of 1885 Ramakrishna developed a throat ailment that became throat cancer. Physicians including Dr. Mahendralal Sarkar treated him at Shyampukur, and on the 11th of December 1885 he was moved to a large garden house at Cossipore. Doctors ordered strict silence. He ignored them and kept talking with visitors. Traditional accounts say he passed his spiritual powers to Vivekananda and asked him to lead the others. "Keep my boys together," he said, and told him to "teach them."

  Ramakrishna died in the early hours of the 16th of August 1886. His disciples call it mahasamadhi. One account gives his last word as "ma." Another says he spoke the name Kali three times. Afterwards the monastic disciples, led by Vivekananda, gathered at a half-ruined house at Baranagar near the Ganges. Householder disciples helped pay for it, and it became the first monastery of the Ramakrishna Order.

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• 8. A Contested Portrait

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  The Gospel of Ramakrishna shows him speaking differently to different listeners. To monks he spoke of non-dual Vedanta. To householders he advised against the attitude of "I am He," and said they should "look on God as their master and themselves as His servant." Max Müller read him as a bhakta, a lover of the deity, more than a jnanin, a knower. The theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak likewise called him a Bengali bhakta visionary who turned chiefly toward Kali.

  Heinrich Zimmer was the first Western scholar to see specifically Tantric elements in his worship of the Divine Mother, and Neeval also argued that Tantra shaped his development. Vivekananda, by contrast, presented him as an Advaita Vedantin. Neevel observed that his admirers' writings steadily remade a "religious madman" into a calm teacher of Advaita Vedanta. Narasingha Sil argued that Vivekananda revised and mythologised the image after the master's death. McDaniel says the Ramakrishna Mission leans toward Advaita and plays down Shaktism, and Malcolm McLean describes its explanation of him as neo-Vedantist.

  Other commentators propose a middle reading. Satis Chandra Chatterjee and Jeffery Long call his thought a harmonising Vedanta, using terms like Samanvayi Vedanta and Integral Vedanta. Ayon Maharaj, also known as Swami Medhananda, goes further and calls it Vijnana Vedanta, a nonsectarian framework.

  The fiercest dispute concerns what Vivekananda left out. Carl Olson argued that Vivekananda hid much of his master's embarrassing sexual oddities from the public, fearing he would be misunderstood. Tyagananda and Vrajaprana answered that Olson's claim rests on speculations in Kripal's Kali's Child, which they say none of the source texts support.

  Sumit Sarkar noticed something quieter in the Kathamrita. He found traces of a contrast between unlearned oral wisdom and learned literate knowledge. It is a tension that fits a teacher with almost no formal schooling who drew Calcutta's English-educated classes to Dakshineswar.

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