Profile of Sri Ramakrishna on Famous Like Me

Sri Thakur Gadadhar Chattopadhyaya Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (Bangla: শ্রীরামকৄষ্ঞ পরমহংস) (February 18, 1836 - August 16, 1886) was a Bengali saint. A devotee of the goddess Kali and a teacher of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, he preached that "all religions lead to the same goal." He placed "spiritual religion" above "blind ritualism."

Biography

Historically, in India, emphasis is given to the teachings of saints and insufficient attention is paid to dates and details. In the case of Ramakrishna though, we have authentic accounts of his life and times. This was possible because many of his disciples were well educated and had a strong desire to present only facts that could be verified from multiple sources. The main credit for collecting and recording such facts goes to Swami Saradananda, a disciple of the Master. He wrote an authoritative biography to sift the facts from the legends and stories which were growing around Ramakrishna. A new English translation of this by Swami Chetanananda is available. However, the best known record of Sri Ramakrishna's teachings is the Kathamrita (in Bengali), written by Sri Mahendranath Gupta (Sri M.). Swami Nikhilananda's translation of this into the English language, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, is the most widely read.

Childhood

Gadadhar was born in the village of Kamarpukur, in what is now the Hoogly district of West Bengal. Gadadhar’s parents, Khudiram and Chandramani, were poor and made ends meet with great difficulty. Gadadhar was known to be the pet of the whole village. He was considered handsome and had a natural gift for the fine arts. He, however, disliked going to school, not interested in the pursuit of money. He loved nature and spent his time in fields and fruit gardens outside the village with his friends. He was seen visiting monks who stopped at his village on their way to Puri. He would serve them and listen with rapt attention to the religious debates they often had.

When arrangements for Gadadhar to be invested with the sacred thread (Upanayana) were nearly complete, he declared that he would have his first alms as a Brahmin from a certain Sudra woman of the village. This was a shock in the days when tradition required that the first alms be from a brahmin, but he was adamant. He said he had given his word to the lady and if he did not keep his word, what sort of brahmin would he be? No argument, no appeal, no amount of tears are said to have budged him from his position. Finally, Ramkumar, his eldest brother and the head of the family after the passing away of their father, gave in.

Meanwhile, the family's financial position worsened every day. Ramkumar ran a Sanskrit school in Calcutta and also served as purohit priest in some families. About this time, a rich woman of Calcutta, Rani Rashmoni, founded a temple at Dakshineswar. She approached Ramkumar to serve as priest at the temple of Kali and Ramkumar agreed. After some persuasion, Gadadhar agreed to decorate the deity. When Ramkumar retired, Gadadhar took his place as priest.

Career as priest

When Gadadhar started worshipping the deity Bhavatarini, he began to question if he was worshipping a piece of stone or a living Goddess. If he was worshipping a living Goddess, why should she not respond to his worship? This question nagged him day and night. Then, he began to pray to Kali: "Mother, you've been gracious to many devotees in the past and have revealed yourself to them. Why would you not reveal yourself to me, also? Am I not also your son?"

He is known to have wept bitterly and sometimes even cry out loudly while worshipping. At night, he would go into a nearby jungle and spend the whole night praying. One day, the famous account goes, he was so impatient to see Mother Kali that he decided to end his life. He seized a sword hanging on the wall and was about to strike himself with it, when he is reported to have seen light issuing from the deity in waves. He is said to have been soon overwhelmed by the waves and fell unconscious on the floor.

Gadadhar, however, unsatiated, prayed to Mother Kali for more religious experiences. He especially wanted to know the truths that other religions taught. Strangely, these teachers came to him when necessary and he is said to have reached the ultimate goals of those religions with ease. Soon word spread about this remarkable man and people of all denominations and all stations of life began to come to him.

Married life

Rumours spread to Kamarpukur that Ramakrishna had gone mad as a result of over-taxing spiritual exercises at Dakshineswar. Alarmed, neighbours advised Ramakrishna’s mother that he be persuaded to marry, so that he might be more conscious of his responsibilities to the family. Far from objecting to the marriage, he, in fact, mentioned Jayrambati, three miles to the north-west of Kamarpukur, as being the village where the bride could be found at the house of one Ramchandra Mukherjee. The bride of six-years, Sarada, was found and the marriage was duly solemnised. Sarada Devi was Ramakrishna's first disciple. He attempted to teach her everything he learnt from his various Gurus. She is believed to have mastered every religious secret as quickly as Ramakrishna had. Impressed by her religious potential, he began to treat her as the Universal Mother Herself and performed a Puja considering Sarada as veritable Tripura Sundari Devi. He said, 'I look upon you as my own mother and the Mother who is in the temple'. Ramakrishna impressed upon Sarada Devi that she was not only the mother of his young disciples, but also of the entire humanity. Initially, Sarada Devi was shy about playing this role, but slowly, she filled it with courage.

Her renunciation is believed by devotees to be a striking quality that she shared with her husband in a measure equal to, if not beyond, his. The true nature of their relationship and kinship was believed to be beyond the grasp of ordinary minds. Sri Ramakrishna concluded, after close and constant association with her, that her relationship and attitude toward him were firmly based on a divine spiritual plane. Devotees believe that as they shared their lives, day and night, no other thought, other than that of the divine presence, arose in their minds. An account of such continued divine relationship between two souls of opposite gender is unique in religious records, not known in any of the past hagiographies. After the passing away of Ramakrishna, Sharada Devi became a religious teacher in her own rights.

Later life

He soon came to be known as Ramakrishna Paramahansa, and like a magnet, is said to have begun to attract genuine seekers of God. He taught ceaselessly for fifteen years or so through parables, metaphors, songs and above all by his own life, the basic truths of religion. He had developed throat cancer and attained Mahasamadhi at a Garden House in Cossipore on 18 August, 1886, leaving behind a devoted band of 16 young disciples headed by the well-known saint-philosopher and orator, Swami Vivekananda and host of householder disciples. Among his contemporaries, Keshab Chandra Sen and Pandit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, who were known to be against Hindu idol-worship, were his admirers.

Teachings

Ramakrishna's mystical realization, classified by Hindu tradition as nirvikalpa samadhi (literally, "constant meditation", thought to be absorption in the all-encompassing Consciousness), led him to believe that the gods of the various religions are merely so many interpretations of the Absolute, and that the Ultimate Reality could never be expressed in human terms. This is in agreement with the Rigvedic proclamation that "Truth is one but sages call it by many a name." As a result of this opinion, Ramakrishna actually spent periods of his life practising his own understandings of Islam, Christianity and various other Yogic and Tantric sects within Hinduism.

Devotees believe that Ramakrishna's realization of nirvikalpa samadhi also led him to an understanding of the two sides of maya (illusion), to which he referred as avidyamaya and vidyamaya: He explained that avidyamaya represents the dark forces of creation (eg sensual desire, evil passions, greed, lust and cruelty), which keep the world system on lower planes of consciousness. These forces are responsible for human entrapment in the cycle of birth and death, and they must be fought and vanquished. Vidyamaya, on the other hand, represents the higher forces of creation (e.g. spiritual virtues, enlightening qualities, kindness, purity, love, and devotion), which elevate human beings to the higher planes of consciousness. With the help of vidyamaya,he said that devotees could rid themselves of avidyamaya and achieve the ultimate goal of becoming mayatita - that is, free from maya.

The key concepts in Ramakrishna's teachings were:

• the oneness of existence
• the divinity of human beings
• the unity of God & the harmony of religions
• that the main mental bondage in human life is lust and greed.(kamini and kanchana in Bengali)

A personal account of his life and teachings, is recorded by his disciple, Mahendranath Gupta, simply known as "M", in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Like Adi Sankara had done more than a thousand years earlier, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa revitalized Hinduism which had been fraught with excessive ritualism and superstition in the nineteenth century and helped it better respond to challenges from Islam, Christianity and the dawn of the modern era.

Reception

The Hindu Renaissance that India experienced in the 19th century may be said to have been spurred by his life and work. Although the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj preceded the Ramakrishna Mission, their influence was limited on a broader level. With the emergence of the Mission, however, the situation changed dramatically. The Ramakrishna Mission was founded by Ramakrishna himself when he had distributed the gerua cloth of renunciation to his direct disciples. This is corroborated by Swami Vivekananda himself when he says that without Thakur's grace all this would not have been possible. Sri Ramakrisha was working through Swami Vivekananda to spread his message for the good of humanity.

It could be argued that Ramakrishna's vision of Hinduism, and its popularisation by western converts like Christopher Isherwood, have largely coloured western notions of what Hinduism is. Ramakrishna's beliefs, along with his followers, were all Smarta in belief. Others, like Andrew Harvey and Ken Wilber, see the beginning of a new universal consciousness with Ramakrishna's life.

Recent controversy

In 1995, Rice University Professor of Religious Studies Jeffrey Kripal's book Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna was released, a highly controversial psychoanalytic study of Ramakrishna.

It won the American Academy of Religion's Best First Book in the History of Religions Prize in 1996. It alleges that Ramakrishna is driven by homoerotic, pedophiliac passions. Kripal argues that "Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences...were in actual fact profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic." Kripal's claims have offended and enraged Hindu laymen, scholars, and religious leaders. Censoring the book was even debated in the Parliament of India. Kripal maintains, however, that less than 100 copies have been sold in India, and that few of its opponents have actually read the book.

Swami Tyagananda, minister of the Ramakrishna-Vedanta Society in Boston, wrote an 173 page rebuttal, entitled "Kali’s Child Revisited, or Didn’t Anyone Check the Documentation?". Tyagananda severely criticized Kripal's translation of Bengali phrases and said that Kripal tended to quote selectively and deceptively from the Kathamrita in order to create evidence for his interpretation. In the essay, Tyagananda alleged no less than 191 translation mistakes or deceptions by Kripal. Additionally, Tyagananda accuses Kripal of having only an elementary knowledge of the Bengali language, and no understanding of Tantra. Since both Tantra and the translation of Bengali terms play an important role in Kripal's argument, this is a strong critique.

Kripal's response was to apologize for his translation errors, but to maintain that they are not serious enough to damage the book's overall interpretation. Kripal also responded that because Tyagananda questioned Kripal's personal motives for writing the book, Tyagananda's critique amounts to an ad hominem — a type of logical fallacy. Additionally, Kripal points out that all interpretations are the product of the interaction of the reader's horizon of understanding with that of the author's. Critics will point out that the same can be said of his interpretations of the original Bengali texts.

One response to Kripal included an as-yet-unaccepted invitation to an open debate with Bengali scholars. The response also says that translating should not be done literally or through European pathologies, but must be based on the cultural insider's perspective on the connotations that words have in various native contexts. It also elaborates on the many faults of, the power strucutures that play a role in, and the lack of Indians in U.S. Hinduism studies. It also challenges the legitimacy of Freudian psychoanalysis of Eastern spirituality.

Quotations

• "Knowledge leads to unity. Ignorance, to disunity."
• "As a man thinks, so he becomes."

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