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Sri Ramakrishna
(A
Biographical Introduction)
Religion declines when people talk about religion but do
not practice it, or when people use it for their own
selfish motives. Religion becomes polluted when
hypocrisy and dishonesty, lust and greed, jealousy and
hatred, ego and fanaticism are rampant in people’s
minds. Krishna declared in the Bhagavad Gita: “When
religion declines and irreligion prevails, I incarnate
myself in every age to establish religion.” As the same
moon rises in the sky again and again, so the same God
descends to the earth as a human being in different
places and in different times to fulfill the need of the
age and to point out the goal of human life. This is not
a myth: the lives of Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Moses,
Christ, Muhammad, Chaitanya, and Ramakrishna attest to
the Gita’s statement.
Sri Ramakrishna was born on Wednesday, 18 February 1836,
in Kamarpukur, a small village sixty miles northwest of
Calcutta. In the spring of 1835 his father, Khudiram
Chattopadhyay, had gone to visit the holy city of Gaya
to perform a rite for his ancestors in the Vishnu
Temple. One night in his sleep, Khudiram had a vision. A
luminous being gazed at him affectionately and then said
in a sweet voice: “Khudiram, your great devotion has
made me very happy. The time has come for me to be born
once again on earth. I shall be born as your son.”
Khudiram was filled with joy until he realized that he
did not have means to carry out such a great
responsibility. So he said: “No, my Lord, I am not fit
for this favour. I am too poor to serve you properly.”
“Do not be afraid, Khudiram,” said the Lord. “Whatever
you give me to eat, I shall enjoy.” Khudiram awoke,
convinced that the Lord of the universe was going to be
born into his household. He then left Gaya and returned
to Kamarpukur before end of April.
On Khudiram’s return, his wife, Chandra, told him of an
experience she had had in front of the Yogi Shiva Temple
next to their house. Chandra said: “I saw that the holy
image of Lord Shiva inside the shrine was alive! It It
began to send forth waves of the most beautiful light ─
slowly at first, then quicker and quicker. They filled
the inside of the temple, then they came pouring out ─
it was like one of those huge flood waves in the river ─
right towards me! I was going to tell Dhani [a neighbour
woman], but then the waves washed over me and swallowed
me up, and I felt that marvelous light enter into my
body. I fell down on the ground, unconscious. When I
came to myself, I told Dhani what had happened, but she
did not believe me. She said that I’d had an epileptic
fit. That cannot be so, because since then I have been
full of joy and my health is better than ever. Only ─ I
feel that light is still inside me, and I believe that I
am with child.”
Khudiram then told Chandra about his vision, and they
rejoiced together. The pious couple waited patently for
the divine child’s birth the following spring. Because
of Khudiram’ experience at Gaya, Sri Ramakrishna was
named “Gadadhar,” meaning “Bearer-of-the-Mace,” an
epithet of Vishnu. Ramakrishna grew up in Kamarpukur. He
was sent to school where he learned to read and write,
but he soon lost interest in this “bread-earning
education” and quit school altogether. However, he
continued to constantly learn by watching people in his
rural village. He was shrutidhar, which means
that whatever he heard once, he never forgot.
When he was six or seven years old, he had his first
experience of cosmic consciousness. “One morning,” he
recalled in later life, “I took some parched rice in a
small basket and was eating it while walking along the
narrow ridges of the rice fields. In one part of the
sky, a beautiful black cloud appeared, heavy with rain.
I was watching it and eating the rice. Very soon the
cloud covered almost the entire sky. And then a flock of
cranes came flying by. They were as white as milk
against that black cloud. It was so beautiful that I
became absorbed in the sight. Then I lost consciousness
of everything outward. I fell down and the rice was
scattered over the earth. Some people saw this and came
and carried me home.”
Khudiram died in 1843. Ramakrishna keenly felt the loss
of his father and became more indrawn and meditative. He
began to visit the small village inn where pilgrims and
especially monks would stop on their way to Puri. While
serving these holy people he learned their songs and
prayers. Following the brahminical tradition,
Ramakrishna was invested with the sacred thread when he
was nine years old; this allowed him to perform the
ritualistic worship for the family deities. He had some
friend with whom he would play, sing and act out
religious dreams. Once during Shivaratri (a
spring festival of Lord Shiva) he lost outer
consciousness while enacting the role of Shiva. On
another occasion, while going to worship the Divine
Mother in a neighbouring village, he again went into
Samadhi.
In 1850 Ramkumar, Khudiram's eldest son, opened a school
in Calcutta. As a secondary profession, he performed
religious rituals in private homes. It soon became
difficult for him to manage both responsibilities, so in
1852 he brought Ramakrishna to assist him in performing
the rituals. On 31 May 1855 Ramkumar accepted the
responsibility of officiating at the dedication ceremony
of the Kali Temple of Dakshineswar that had been founded
by Rani Rasmani, a wealthy woman of Calcutta.
Ramakrishna was present on that occasion. Soon
afterwards he moved to Dakshineswar and in time became a
priest in the temple. Ramkumar died in 1856.
Ramakrishna now began his spiritual journey in earnest.
While worshipping the Divine Mother, he questioned: “Are
you true, Mother, or is it all a fiction of the mind ─
mere poetry without any reality? If you do exist, why
can’t I see you? Is religion, then, a fantasy, a mere
castle in the air?” His yearning for God-realization
became more and more intense day by day. He prayed and
meditated almost twenty-four hours a day. Then he had a
remarkable experience:
There was an unbearable pain in my heart because I could
not see the Mother. Just as a man wrings a towel with
all his strength to get the water out of it, so I felt
as if my heart and mind were being wrung out. I began to
think I should never see Mother. I was dying of despair.
In my agony, I said to myself: “What’s the use of living
this life?” Suddenly my eyes fell on the sword that
hangs in the temple. I decided to end my life with it,
then and there. Like a madman, I ran to it and seized
it. And then ─ I had a marvelous vision of the Mother,
and fell down unconscious…. It was as if houses, doors,
temples, and everything else vanished altogether; as if
there was nothing anywhere! And what I saw was an
infinite, shoreless sea of light; a sea that was
consciousness. However far and in whatever direction I
looked, I saw shining waves, on after another, coming
towards me. They were raging and storming upon me with
great speed. Very soon they were upon me; they made me
sink down into unknown depths. I panted and struggled
and lost consciousness.
After this vision it was not possible for Ramakrishna to
continue performing the worship in the temple. He
entrusted this responsibility to his nephew Hriday, and
spent more than two years in a God-intoxicated state. In
1859 he returned to Kamarpukur and lived with his mother
for a year and seven months. During this time,
Ramakrishna’s mother arranged his marriage to Sarada
Mukhopadhyay, a very young girl from Jayrambati, a few
miles west of Kamarpukur. After the marriage Ramakrishna
returned alone to Dakshineswar in 1860.
Once at Dakshineswar Ramakrishna was caught up again in
a spiritual tempest. He forgot his home, wife, family,
body, and surroundings. He described his experiences
during that period:
No
sooner had I passed through one spiritual crisis than
another took its place. It was like being in the midst
of a whirlwind ─ even my sacred thread was blown away,
and I could seldom keep hold of my dhoti [cloth].
Sometimes I’d open my mouth, and it would be as if my
jaws reached from heaven to the underworld. “Mothe!” I’d
cry desperately. I felt I had to pull her in, as a
fisherman pulls in fish with his dragnet. A prostitute
walking the street would appear to me to be Sita going
to meet her victorious husband. An English boy standing
cross-legged against a tree reminded me of th eboy
Krishna, and I lost consciousness. Sometimes I would
share my food with a doy. My hair became matted. Birds
would perch on my head and peck at the grains of rice
that had lodged ther during the worship. Snakes would
crawl over my motionless body.
An ordinary man couldn’t have borne a
quarter of that tremendous fervour, it would have burnt
him up. I had no sleep at all for six long years. My
eyes lost the power of winking. I stood in front of a
mirror and tried to close my eyelids with my finger ─
but then,
suddenly, I’d be filled with ecstasy. I saw that my body
didn’t matter ─ it was of no importance, a mere trifle.
Mother appeared to me and comforted me and freed me from
my fear.
In 1861 a nun called Bhairavi Brahmani came to
Dakshineswar to initiage Ramakrishna into tantric
disciplines. The Master practiced sixty-four methods of
Tantra and attained perfection through all of them. He
then practiced other methods of the Vaishnava tradition,
such as vatsalya bhava (the affectionate attitude
towards God) and madhura bhave (the lover’s
attitude towards the beloved). In 1864 Ramakrishna was
initiated into sannyasa by Tota Puri, a Vedanta month,
and attained nirvikalpa Samadhi, the highest
nondualistic experience, in only three days.
In 1866 Ramakrishna practiced Islam und the guidance of
a Sufi named Govinda Roy. The Master later mentioned to
his disciples: “I devoutly repeated the name of Allah,
and I said their prayers five times daily. I spent three
days in that mood, and I had the full realization of the
sadhana of their faith.”
In 1873 Ramakrishna met Shambhu Charan Mallik, who read
the Bible to him and spoke to him of Jesus. One day
Ramakrishna visited Jadu Mallik’s garden house, which
was adjacent to the Dakshineswar temple. In his living
room there was a picture of the Madonna with the child
Jesus sitting on her lap. While Ramakrishna was gazing
at this picture, he saw that the figures of the mother
and child were shining and rays of light were coming
forth from them and entering his heart.
For the next three days he was absorbed in the thought
of Jesus, and at the end of the third day, while walking
in the Panchavati, he had a vision of foreign-looking
person with a beautiful face and large eyes of uncommon
brilliance. As he pondered who this stranger could be, a
voice from within said: “This is Jesus Christ, the great
yogi, the loving Son of God, who was one with his Father
and who shed his heart’s blood and suffered tortures for
the salvation of mankind!” Jesus then embraced
Ramakrishna and merged into his body.
After realizing God in different religions as well as in
different sects of Hinduism, Ramakrishna proclaimed: “As
many faiths, so many paths.” In this present age,
Ramakrishna’s teachings are the antidote to narrowness,
bigotry, fanaticism, and intolerance towards different
religions. He said: “It is not good to feel that one’s
own religion alone is true and all others are false. God
is one only, and not two. Different people call on him
by different names: some as Allah, some as God, and
other as Krishna, Shiva, and Brahman. It is like the
water in a lake. The Hindus call it ‘jal’ the Christians
‘water,’ and the Muslims ‘pani.’”
The precious jewels of spirituality that he had gathered
through hard struggle during the first three-quarters of
his life were now ready to be given to humanity. In 1875
Ramakrishna met Keshab Chandra Sen, a popular Brahmo
leader who was considered a spiritual luminary. Keshab
and his followers began publishing the life and
teachings of Ramakrishna in their journals, and as a
result many people, especially young Bengalis, came to
know about the saint of Dakshineswar.
Through direct experience Ramakrishna realized that the
form of the Divine Mother was one with the formless
Supreme Brahman, like fire and its burning power, like
milk and its whiteness. The Divine Mother once said to
the Master: “You and I are one. Let your life in this
world be deep in devotion to me, and pass your days for
the good of mankind. The devotees will come.”
As a loving father is anxious to leave his accumulated
wealth to his children, so a true guru wants to give his
spiritual treasures to his disciples. After his first
vision Ramakrishna had to wait nearly twenty-five years
for his disciples and devotees. We can read in the
scriptures or in the lives of the mystics about the
aspirant’s longing for God but never about God’s longing
for the aspirants. Here is a testimony in Ramakrishna’s
own words:
There was no limit to the longing I felt at that time.
During the daytime I somehow managed to control it. The
secular talk of the worldly-minded was galling to me,
and I would look wistfully to the day when my own
beloved companions would come. I hoped to find solace in
conversing with them and relating to them my own
realizations. Every little incident would remind me of
them, and thoughts of them wholly engrossed me. I was
already arranging in my mind what I should say to one
and give to another, and so on. But when the day would
come to a close I would not be able to curb my feelings.
The thought that another day had gone by, and they had
not come, oppressed me. When during the evening service
the temples rang with the sound of bells and
conch-shells, I would climb to the roof of the kuthi
[bungalow] in the garden and writhing ain anguish of
heart, cry at the top of my voice: “Come, my children!
Oh, where are you? I cannot bear to live without you.” A
mother never longed so intensely for the sight of her
child, nor a friend for his companions, nor a lover for
his sweetheart, as I longed for them. Oh, it was
indescribable! Shortly after this period of yearning the
devotees began to come.
Ramakrishna’s Disciples and devotees arrived between
1879 and 1885, and he became busy training them to carry
out his mission. He was an extraordinary teacher. He
stirred his disciples’ hearts more by his subtle
influence than by actions or words. Ramakrishna trained
each disciple according to his own natural aptitude, as
he knew everyone’s past, present, and future. He never
thrust his ideas upon anyone. To those young men who
were destined to be monks he pointed out the steep path
of both external and internal renunciation. When
teaching the would-be monastic disciples the path of
renunciation and discrimination, he would not allow
householder devotees to be near them.
When the flower blooms, bees come of their own accord.
People from all over flocked to Ramakrishna and he would
sometimes talk about God as much as twenty hours a day.
This continued for years. His intense love for humanity
would not allow him to refuse help to anyone. In the
middle of 1885, this physical strain resulted in throat
cancer. When his disciples tried to stop him from
teaching, he said: “I do not care. I will give up twenty
thousand such bodies to help one man.” Ramakrishna was
moved from Dakshineswar to Calcutta and later to
Cossipore for medical treatment.
Towards the end of his life, Ramakrishna distributed
ochre cloths (the symbol of monasticism) to some of his
young disciples, thus forming his own Order. He made
Narendra (later, Swami Vivekananda) their leader, who
later came to America to represent Hinduism, or Vedanta,
at the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He
summarized Ramakrishna’s message to the modern world in
his lecture “My Master”:
Do
not care for doctrines, do not care for dogmas or sects
or churches or temples. They count for little compared
with the essence of existence in each man, which is
spirituality; and the more a man develops it, the more
power he has for good. Earn that first, acquire that,
and criticize no one; for all the doctrines and creeds
have some good in them. Show by your lives that religion
does not mean words or name or sects, but that it means
spiritual realization.
Sri Ramakrishna passed away on 16 August 1886 at th
Cossipore garden house; his body was cremated on the
bank of the Ganges. Sri Ramakrishna revealed his divine
nature many times to his disciples. A couple of days
before the Master’s passing, while he was suffering from
excruciating pain from cancer, Vivekananda was seated
near his bed. Seeing Ramakrishna’s emaciated body
Vivekananda thought to himself: “Well, now if you can
declare that you are God, then only will I believe you
are really God Himself.” Immediately Sri Ramakrishna
looked up towards Vivekananda and said: “He who was Rama
and he who was Krishna is now Ramakrishna in this body.”
...from “God Lived with Them” by Swami
Chetanananda, Vedanta Society of St. Louis.
Teachings
of Sri Ramakrishna
Sri
Ramakrishna Advaita Ashrama Temple Shrine
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