Person · mystic & temple priest
Rāmakrishna Paramahamsa
Also known as Ramakrishna, Sri Ramakrishna, Gadadhar Chattopadhyay
Priest of the Kālī temple at Dakshineswar whose practice was to take up one tradition after another — Tantra, Advaita, Vaishnava, Islam, Christianity — and report that each arrived at the same place. His conversations, recorded verbatim in Bengali by a schoolmaster, are the Kathāmrita.
- Date
- 1836 – 1886
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Kathāmrita; Rāmakrishna Mission tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He spoke in village Bengali and in parables about fish, kites and salt dolls rather than in Sanskrit, which is much of why the Kathāmrita reads as it does. Vivekānanda turned the teaching into an order with hospitals and schools; the teacher himself founded nothing.
Connections (4)
- Life routeDakshineswar
Rāmakrishna served as priest of the Kālī temple at Dakshineswar from 1855 until his death, and nearly everything recorded of him happened in that garden — the Tantric practice under Bhairavī Brāhmanī, the Advaita instruction from Totāpurī, the conversations the Kathāmrita preserves verbatim in Bengali. Mahendranath Gupta, a schoolmaster, wrote the conversations down in Bengali the same evening he heard them, which is why the Kathāmrita preserves village idiom and parables about fish and salt dolls.
- Institutional successionBelur Math
Rāmakrishna founded no organisation; Vivekānanda built one from what he had said, and put both their samādhis on the Belur bank. The shift from a temple priest's practice to a monastic order running hospitals and famine relief happened inside one generation and about four kilometres of river. Vivekānanda died at Belur in 1902 at thirty-nine, sixteen years after his teacher, and the two samādhi temples stand a short walk apart on the same bank.
- Teaching lineageSwami Vivekananda
Narendranāth met Rāmakrishna in 1881 asking whether anyone had actually seen God and was told yes, as clearly as I see you. Rāmakrishna founded nothing; the wandering of 1888 to 1893 and the order built afterwards are what his student made of five years' apprenticeship to a temple priest. Rāmakrishna's answer — yes, as clearly as I see you, but who wants to see him — is recorded in the Kathāmrita and is where the Rāmakrishna Mission ultimately begins.
- Court associationSāradā Devī
Sāradā Devī was married to Rāmakrishna at five and lived beside him at Dakshineswar without the marriage ever being consummated — he is recorded as worshipping her as the goddess in 1872. After his death the order's disputes came to her, and her rulings settled them. He is recorded as having formally worshipped her as the goddess in 1872 in the Dakshineswar temple, which is the event the order treats as establishing her standing.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ramakrishna”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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