RAMAKRISHNA PARAMAHAMSA

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-86) was a Bengali mystic.  He was born of a brahmin family in rural Bengal, where his father was 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.  There he began to experience visions of Kali, Sita, and other forms of the Divine Mother, as well as of Rama, Krishna, Muhammad, and Jesus.  He easily fell into samadhi, moved by such prosaic and diverse sights as that of a lion in a zoo or a prostitute on a street.

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.  For instance in 1861 he joined a tantric Vaishnava group under the guidance of a brahmin woman.  

He participated in Vedanta sadhana (spiritual practice) and a melange of bhakti (devotional) practices.  His ecstasies and samadhis subsequently 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, while much devoted to each other, lived in continence.

Three years later Keshab Sen, one of the leaders of the elitist Brahmo Samaj, "discovered" Ramakrishna.  Dakshineswar soon became a center of devotion for Westernized and educated Bengalis.

Among such new followers was the agnostic Narendranath Datta, later known as Vivekananda, who in 1884 placed himself under Ramakrishna’s spiritual guidance. 

Ramakrishna died in 1886.  He was regarded a saint, and today is considered an avatar.  A number of books have been published by his disciples, including biographies and collections of his sayings.  A good biography is Christopher Isherwood's Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965).