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Sri Ramakrishna

Often there is disagreement on whether a spiritual Master has really attained the sublime heights his disciples claim him to have, especially of the recent teachers who have been on earth in the last two hundred years or so. However, the name of Sri Ramakrishna is one that evokes universal esteem as one of the greatest spiritual Masters India has ever produced.

Sri Ramakrishna was born on 1836; his parents had dreams that the Lord himself would incarnate as the child inside the mother's womb. This lead the father to call the child Gangadhar, an ephitet of the Lord Vishnu. From a young age, the boy was having spiritual experiences. As he grew up, he moved from his home village of Kamarkupur to Dakineshwar, four miles northeast of Calcutta, to help his elder brother officiate at the temple there. Around this time, he was consumed with a longing to see God. Ramakrishna came to be in charge of the temple dedicated to Mother Kali, which millions of Indians worship as the dynamic aspect of God, and he was soon immersed in long hours of meditation imploring Mother Kali to reveal Herself to him. At one point the pain of separation was so unbearable that he was about to take his own life with a sword, whereupon he began to see light issuing from the deity in waves.

Around this time there was much discord between the different branches of Indian spirituality, each claiming superiority over the other. Sri Ramakrishna wanted to see whether these different paths lead to the same realisation of truth as he had obtained by meditating on his beloved Mother Kali. First, with the help of a wandeing monk named Totapuri, he practiced meditating on God as formless energy, and realised that indeed the Goal reached by that method was one and the same. Sri Ramakrishna's attention then turned to Islam and Christianity, the two religions that were making inroads into the Indian population at the time. By practising each one of them in turn, he was able to experience how each of them lead o the highest goal.

According to custom, Ramakrishna was bethrothed to be married at an early age. After many years, his young bride, Sarada Devi, hearing that he had caught that especial Indian affliction of 'spiritual madness', made the journey to ascertain the matter for herself. She realised that her husband was a man of true God-awakening, and from then on thrie relationship was more like master and disciple than husband and wife. Sri Ramakrishna saw all women as emanations of the Divine Mother herself, and his wife in particular he treated with this attitude. She spent many long hours in spiritual practise and caring for Sri Ramakrishna, attaining a very high state of awakening which enabled her to play a leading role in guiding the work that Ramakrishna began after his death.

Word soon spread of a man in Dakineshwar in an exalted state of meditation, and he soon attracted people of all social classes to come and see him. He met and influenced such influential members of Bengal society as the Hindu reformists Keshab Chandra Sen and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and the sage Devendranath Tagore, father of the future Nobel-prize winning poet Rabindranath Tagore. What Sri Ramakrishna really longed for, however, was like-minded souls who he could teach and spend time in a spiritual atmosphere with. Soon however, he had quite a few young spiritually-minded souls who became his 'inner circle' of close students. The most famous of them was Narendranath Dutta, soon to be known as the great Swami Vivekananda who almost single-handedly brought Indian spirituality to the West, beginning with his passionate plea for religious tolerance at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893. Other disciples included Rakhal Chandra Ghosh, whom Sri Ramakrishna regarded as his 'spiritual son'; he took the name Swami Brahmananda and led the Ramakrishna Mission for many years after Vivekananda's death.

He also had great householder disciples who combined their spiritual life with raising a family and working; among these was Mahendranath Gupta, who under the pseudonym M. wrote an account of his experiences with Sri Ramakrishna which later was published as the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. This book is one of the most thorough first-hand account of the life of a spiritual Master which exists. Another famous disciple of Sri Ramakrishna was Girish Chandra Ghosh, perhaps the foremost playwright in Bengal at the time; to this day many theatre groups in Bengal meditate on Sri Ramakrishna before taking the stage.

Whilst he advocated that each person would make the fastest progres by meditating ontheir own chosen Ideal, his personal approach was that approaching God through love was the qickest and easiest way to reach him. He often compared the mental approach and the approach of love to the comparison between someone trying to find out about a person by comiling lots of facts and figures about that person and simply going to meet that person, saying the latter is clearly much simpler. He frequently warned his students to stay away from worldly temptations, stating that until one had realised the Highest, one simply did not have the strength to stand up against these snares.

In 1885 Sri Ramakrishna develped the beginnings of what turned out to be throat cancer. However, he still insisted on serving the large volumes of people who came to him looking for blessings. Even as the pain increased, he was spending all day tending to everyone that came to see him, and in particular ensuring that his closest students were developed enough to carry on after he passed away. On 16 August 1886, he entered into mahasamadhi, that state attained by true spiritual masters where the soul consciously exits the body.

Sri Ramakrishna's enduring legacy is undoubtedly that of harmony between all religions and creeds; on the strength of his own realisation, many people came to see that all the different religions are just different paths up the one mountain towards the same goal. Due to the work of his disciples such as Swami Vivekananda, this philosophy of universal brotherhood came to be carried to the four corners of the globe and had a profound influence on how many people came to view Eastern religion. At the same time his influence helped to revive traditional Hindu spirituality that had been waning due to the influence of Islam and Christianity, and inspired many people who would go on to fight for India's ultimate independence.