RAMAKRISHNA PARAMAHAMSA

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-86) was a Bengali mystic, about whom much mythification has accreted, including elements from the life of Jesus. Ramakrishna was born of a brahmin family in rural Bengal, his father being the village priest. Ramakrishna received virtually no education, but from childhood was known for the depths of his spirituality. At the age of seven he experienced his first divine ecstasy. When he was sixteen he joined his brother in Calcutta in doing priestly work for private families. In 1855 Ramakrishna was appointed temple priest at the newly founded Kali shrine at Dakshineswar, on the banks of the Hooghly, a branch of the Ganges. He began to experience visions of Kali, Sita, and other forms of the Divine Mother, as well as of Rama, Krishna, Muhammad, and Jesus, all of whom were God in a variety of manifestations. He easily fell into samadhi, being moved by such prosaic and diverse sights as that of a lion in a zoo or a prostitute on a street. He gained the reputation of being somewhat pagal (mad). At the age of twenty-three his family married him to a six-year-old girl named Sarada, who, however, did not come to live with him for another thirteen years. Meanwhile he experimented with a range of ecstatic and devotional sects; in 1861 he joined a tantric Vaishnava group under the guidance of a brahmin woman; he also joined in Vedanta sadhana (spiritual practice) and a melange of bhakti (devotional) practices, including Sufism. His ecstasies and samadhis became constant: "When I reached the state of continuous ecstasy, I gave up all external forms of worship," he said. Sarada joined him in 1872, the couple, much devoted one to the other, living in continence. Three years later Keshab Sen, one of the leaders of the elitist Brahmo Samaj, "discovered" Ramakrishna, and Dakshineswar became a center of devotion for Westernized and educated Bengalis who joined the numerous village people who crowded around Ramakrishna. Among such new followers was the agnostic Narendranath Datta, later known as Vivekananda, who in 1884 placed himself under the saint's spiritual guidance. Ramakrishna died in 1886, a simple, unsophisticated, deeply religious soul. He was regarded as a saint, and today he is considered an avatar, but, in the opinion of certain disciples, he would sooner or later have rejected the cult, as developed in part by Vivekananda, that grew up around his name. A number of books have been published by his disciples, both biographies of the saint and collections of his sayings; some factual and doctrinal distortion has developed. An acceptable work is Christopher Isherwood's Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965).

Eastern Definitions, Anchor Books 1980, by Edward Rice.