Ramakrishna

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Ramakrishna (1836–1886) was a Bengali mystic and temple priest, attendant to the goddess Kali at the Dakshineswar shrine on the Ganges north of Calcutta, whose intense devotional life and the disciples it gathered became one of the chief conduits by which Hindu religious thought entered the modern West. Born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay in a poor Brahmin family of rural Bengal — at Kamarpukur, in the Hooghly district — he came to the new Dakshineswar temple as a young man and remained bound to it for the rest of his life, known by the honorific Paramahansa.

The temple itself was a recent foundation. The wealthy Kolkata zamindar Rani Rashmoni, of fisherfolk caste, had it raised on the eastern bank of the Hooghly and consecrated in 1855, dedicating its central shrine to Kali in the form Bhavatarini, the Mother who carries the soul across the ocean of existence. Gadadhar’s elder brother Ramkumar took charge of the worship; when he died, the priesthood of the goddess passed to the younger man, who was then in his early twenties. What followed is the matter from which the whole later edifice was built. The priest of Bhavatarini did not treat the basalt image as a representation. He addressed it as the living Mother, wept before it, refused to eat until she had been fed, and tested in the most literal way whether the presence answered — until, in the account that the tradition preserves, the boundary between worshipper and worshipped gave way and the image disclosed itself as conscious. From that disclosure his life is dated.

The trance life

What set him apart, in the accounts of those around him, was the frequency and force of his trance states. He spoke of the image of Kali as living presence rather than carved stone, and fell into samadhi — absorption so complete that ordinary awareness left him, breath and pulse slowing toward stillness — at the sound of a divine name or a strain of devotional song. Witnesses describe him losing outward consciousness mid-sentence, the body rigid or slack, a half-smile on the face, sometimes for hours. He distinguished states within the condition, naming a lower absorption from which speech could still surface and a deeper one from which nothing returned; the second he likened to a salt doll that walks into the sea to measure its depth and does not come back. This is the same imagery the monist traditions of Vedanta use for the dissolution of the separate self in the one reality, and Ramakrishna used it without scholastic apparatus, as description rather than doctrine.

The phenomenology placed him within an old Indian map of the inner life. The absorption he reported, the luminous encounters, the felt rising of an energy along the spine that the Shaiva and Tantric literatures chart in detail — these belong to a visionary cartography that recurs, in differing vocabularies, far beyond Bengal. What is distinctive in his case is the refusal of system. He left no treatise, no graded curriculum, no claim to have authored a path. The states arrived; he reported them; the reporting was itself the teaching.

The knowledge at issue was not propositional. It was the direct, transforming acquaintance with the divine that the contemplative traditions call by their own names — gnosis in the Hellenistic vocabulary, jnana in the Sanskrit — a seeing that changes the seer rather than a fact added to a store. He drew the contrast himself, distinguishing the man who has read of milk, the man who has seen milk, and the man who has drunk milk and been nourished; only the third, he said, knows. The distinction governs his suspicion of mere learning. He prized longing over erudition, the cry of the heart over the catalog of doctrines, and measured a visitor not by what he could expound but by the depth of his want. To the pundits who came to debate, he was disarmingly indifferent; to the boy who wept for God, he gave everything.

The teaching in parables

His instruction was not systematic. It came in parables, homely images drawn from village life, and short sayings — the elephant in the mud, the milkmaid balancing pots, the moth and the flame, the magnetized needle that turns of itself toward the divine. These were gathered by his householder disciple Mahendranath Gupta, a Calcutta schoolmaster who attended Ramakrishna in his last years and kept a diary of the conversations in Bengali, publishing under the single initial M. The record, Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita — the nectar-words of Ramakrishna — appeared in five volumes between 1902 and 1932; M.’s own English condensation was rendered as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the form in which most of the non-Bengali world has met him. The diary is unusual among devotional sources in its texture: dated entries, named visitors, recorded weather and small domestic detail, the master’s speech caught in its idiom rather than smoothed into scripture. It is closer to a Boswell than to a sutra, and its very concreteness is what later made it contestable, since every reader of the Bengali could weigh the English against it.

The pedagogy was relational rather than textual — the bond of teacher and taught that the Indian traditions anchor in initiation and lineage, here loosened from formal paramparā into something more intimate and improvisatory. He read his visitors, fitted the parable to the person, scolded and coaxed and fell silent; the young men who would become monks he formed by presence and example, not by a syllabus. He had himself been formed the same way.

The successive disciplines

The claim most often attached to him is that he tested many paths and found them arriving at one end. The biographical spine of that claim is a sequence of trainings. From about 1861 a wandering ascetic known as the Bhairavi Brahmani, a woman versed in Tantra, guided him through a long course of Tantric disciplines, the left-handed and right-handed rites of the Shakta tradition, completed over some years. Around 1865 a naked itinerant monk, Totapuri, initiated him into sannyasa and into the rigorous non-dualism of Advaita Vedanta — the recognition that the individual self and the absolute, atman and brahman, are without difference. Tradition holds that under Totapuri’s pressure he passed swiftly into the formless absorption Advaita posits as its summit and remained there, immobile, for days. He also undertook devotion after the manner of Muslim practice and, later, contemplated Christ; each discipline, he reported, led to the same realization.

This is the source of the formula long associated with his name, that all religions are so many paths to a single goal — yata mat, tata path, as many faiths so many ways. He gave it in images: the same water drawn from one pond by people who call it by different words; a roof reached by stone steps, a bamboo pole, a rope. The reach of the formula into the bhakti inheritance is direct, for the devotional traditions had long held that the one reality wears many faces for its many lovers, and Ramakrishna had passed through the Vaishnava devotional moods as well as the Shakta and Advaitic ones.

The sequence of disciplines is worth holding in its own logic, for it crosses the two great divisions of Hindu practice. Tantra and the Shakta worship of the goddess are householder paths, working through the body, the image, and ritual; the Advaita that Totapuri carried is renunciate, world-negating, dissolving every form including the goddess herself into the formless absolute. The tradition records that when Totapuri pressed him to pass beyond the last image, Ramakrishna could not let go of the radiant figure of the Mother until, in the telling, he cut through her with the sword of discrimination and entered the imageless state. That he then returned from the heights of Advaita to the foot of the goddess — choosing to remain a devotee who tastes sugar rather than the knower who becomes sugar — is the hinge of his whole position. He had stood at the summit the nondual philosophy names and had walked back down to the temple, and held both as true.

How far the historical man held the formula in that generalized shape, and how far his followers systematized it afterward, is a matter scholars continue to weigh. The harmonization of religions was already in the Bengali air. The reform circle of the Brahmo Samaj — the imageless, rational monotheism founded by Ram Mohan Roy in 1828, a movement related to Ramakrishna’s world but emphatically not identical with it — had been constructing, for two generations, a Vedanta framed as the rational essence of all religion, with a Christ assimilable to Hindu terms and a polemic against caste and priestcraft. Its most luminous figure, Keshab Chandra Sen, came repeatedly to Dakshineswar from the mid-1870s and carried the temple priest’s name into the reform press; through Sen, the Brahmo vocabulary of universality entered the circle around Ramakrishna and, later, the working speech of his most famous disciple. The historian Wilhelm Halbfass treats this whole current as “Neo-Hinduism,” the reinterpretation of indigenous tradition through categories absorbed from Enlightenment and Protestant Christianity; on that reading the generalized all-paths doctrine owes as much to the reform substrate as to the man at Dakshineswar, who spoke in parables and never in propositions. Whether the inclusivism is his or his interpreters’ is a genuine historiographical question, and the documentary record — the dated diary against the later systematic literature — is what the question turns on.

Contested readings

Modern study has also read his ecstasies through the lenses of psychology and Tantric symbolism, and these readings remain contested. Narasingha Sil’s Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṁsa: A Psychological Profile (Brill, 1991) advanced a psychoanalytic account of the trances as the working-out of an emotional and sexual crisis rather than the unfolding of a divine vocation. Jeffrey Kripal’s Kali’s Child (University of Chicago Press, 1995) argued for a homoerotic and Tantric-symbolic substratum in the visions, reading the Bengali Kathamrita against its English translation to recover what he held the Gospel had muted. The book won the American Academy of Religion’s prize for a first book and provoked an intense and prolonged dispute. Scholars including the philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and, in book-length form, Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana — whose Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali’s Child Revisited (Motilal Banarsidass, 2010) catalogs the disputed passages — held that the thesis rested on mistranslation of Bengali idiom, misreading of Tantric categories, and misapplied psychoanalysis. The exchange is, among other things, a case study in how a saint’s recorded speech becomes a contested text the moment two languages and two interpretive frames meet over it. The tradition that holds him as an avatara, a descent of the divine, and the scholarship that reads him through clinical or symbolic grammars are not adjudicating the same object; each treats its own Ramakrishna, and the documentary diary sits between them as the common ground neither fully owns.

Transmission to the West

His lasting reach runs through his disciples. The young Narendranath Datta, who took the monastic name Vivekananda, organized the circle around him into a monastic order after his master’s death from throat cancer in 1886 — the Ramakrishna Math, with its later philanthropic arm, settling at Belur on the Hooghly by the end of the 1890s. In September 1893 Vivekananda addressed the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, a gathering held in connection with the Columbian Exposition, and a Vedanta framed in his master’s spirit — and in the universalist idiom the reform movements had already prepared — reached an American audience that the Transcendentalist and Theosophical currents had been priming for half a century. The Theosophical Society, whose president Henry Steel Olcott had relocated its headquarters to Madras in 1882, had built precisely the readership disposed to receive Asian non-dualism as confirmation of an esoteric perennial wisdom; later the French metaphysician René Guénon would give that perennialism its most rigorous European statement. Through these channels Ramakrishna became, for much of the West, the face of a mystical Hinduism — a man who had spoken little of doctrine and much of longing for the divine, and whose followers built from that longing a movement and a philosophy. The institutional history of that movement in America, from the New York Vedanta Society of 1894 onward, has been reconstructed in detail by Carl Jackson, who places the Ramakrishna current as the “middle way” of American Hinduism between its devotional and technical poles.

Texts and scholarship

The primary record stands in two layers. The Bengali Kathamrita of M., issued in five volumes from 1902, is the irreplaceable source; the English Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, in the translation of Swami Nikhilananda (1942), is the standard Anglophone text. Sister Nivedita’s Kāli the Mother (1900) and the hagiographic Sri Ramakrishna, the Great Master by Swami Saradananda belong to the early devotional literature, the latter the fullest insider life. The reception of his Vedanta in the West runs through the public-domain corpus of Vivekananda — the Complete Works and the standalone yoga lectures of 1896–1902 — and behind both lies the classical scriptural ground: the Upanishads on which Advaita rests, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Shakta hymnody addressed to the goddess he served, gathered in Arthur Avalon’s Hymns to the Goddess.

The modern critical literature divides along the fault line the Gospel itself opened. The institutional and reception history is anchored by Carl Jackson’s Vedanta for the West (Indiana, 1994) and framed within Halbfass’s India and Europe (1988). The psychological and symbolic readings — Sil 1991 and Kripal 1995 — and the book-length rebuttal of the latter are the contested core; the rebuttal, Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali’s Child Revisited by Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana, sets the disputed translations side by side and is freely available in its journal form. Read together, these works show a single recorded life held by a living tradition as the descent of the goddess’s own consciousness into a man, and held by the critical disciplines as a text to be construed — two readings that meet over the same dated pages of a schoolmaster’s diary and part again over what those pages mean.

→ In the library: Vivekananda — Complete Works (1924) · The Upanishads (Müller, SBE, 1884) · Avalon — Hymns to the Goddess (1913)

→ Related: Gnosis · Kali · Hinduism · Bhakti Movement · Monism · Bhagavad Gita · Kashmir Shaivism · Gaudiya Vaishnavism · Brahmo Samaj · Swami Vivekananda · Neo Vedanta · Theosophy · Theosophical Society · Henry Steel Olcott · Rene Guenon