Sri Ramakrishna

An abridged retelling from Romain Rolland's The Life of Ramakrishna, in E. F. Malcolm-Smith's English translation.

Kamarpukur

Kamarpukur is a village of Bengal among palm trees, ponds and rice fields. An old, poor and pious Brahmin couple lived there, devotees of Rama. The husband, Khudiram, had once lost all he owned because he would not bear false witness for the landowner who was his neighbour. At the age of sixty he went on pilgrimage to Gaya, where the footprint of Vishnu is worshipped. In the night, Vishnu appeared to him and said he was about to be born again for the world's salvation.

At about the same time, in Kamarpukur, his wife Chandramani dreamed that the image of Shiva in the temple opposite her cottage came alive, and a ray of light entered her. She fell fainting, and when she came to herself she knew she had conceived. When her husband came home he found her changed. She heard voices.

The child was born on 18 February 1836. In childhood he was called Gadadhar. He was full of fun, charming and mischievous, with a grace that people compared to a girl's. Rolland says plainly that for this part of the life he is the voice of the legend, and that the facts matter less than the way the story was lived and remembered.

When he was six, on a day in June or July, he was walking through the paddy fields with a little puffed rice in a fold of his cloth. He later told it himself: "I raised my eyes to the sky as I munched my rice. I saw a great black cloud spreading rapidly until it covered the heavens. Suddenly at the edge of the cloud a flight of snow-white cranes passed over my head. The contrast was so beautiful that my spirit wandered far away." He fell to the ground and the rice scattered. Someone carried him home. He said that joy and emotion came over him, and that this was the first time he was seized by ecstasy.

At eight, on the night of a festival of Shiva, he was playing the part of Shiva in a village performance, and in the middle of the play he was possessed by his role. Tears ran down his face and he lost himself, and the people thought he was dead. After that the ecstasies came often. His parents, though used to visitations of the gods, were frightened by them. Otherwise he was in perfect health. He modelled gods from clay, he sang the pastoral songs of Krishna, and he sometimes took part in the talk of the learned and surprised them. He skipped school and lived as free as air. The women and girls of the village adored him. One of his childhood dreams was to be reborn as a little widow who loved Krishna, and to be visited by him in her home.

His father died when he was seven, and the family had very little. The eldest brother, Ramkumar, went to Calcutta and opened a school, and in 1852 he sent for the younger brother. The boy would not study.

The temple of the Mother

A rich woman called Rani Rasmani, of a lower caste, had founded a temple to the Divine Mother, Kali, at Dakshineswar on the Ganges, about four miles from Calcutta. She had trouble finding a Brahmin willing to serve as its priest. Ramkumar accepted the post in 1855, though Gadadhar, who was strict about caste, objected for a long time. When his eldest brother died the following year, Ramakrishna took his place. He was twenty years old.

The temple had five domes, a row of twelve small temples to Shiva along the river, and another temple to Krishna and Radha. A garden of flowers lay behind, with five sacred trees, planted at his wish, that came to be called the Panchavati. Pilgrims, monks, sadhus and fakirs of every kind passed through the gate. Kali herself was a basalt image in Benares silk, standing on the body of Shiva with a sword and a severed head in two of her hands, while the other two offered gifts and beckoned: come, do not fear.

For him the Mother was alive. He dressed her, offered her flowers and food, and attended her morning waking, her noon rest and her evening worship. But she held herself back. He threw himself on the ground in the wild part of the garden and wept like a lost child. He tore off his clothes, even the sacred thread of a Brahmin. He rubbed his face on the earth in front of visitors, and they pitied him, mocked him, or were shocked. He knew only that a thin partition stood between him and happiness, and that he could not break it.

One day his anguish became unbearable. He told it later in his own words: "A sword was hanging in the sanctuary of Kali. My eyes fell upon it and an idea flashed through my brain like a flash of lightning. 'The sword! It will help me to end it.' I rushed up to it, and seized it like a madman. And lo! the whole scene, doors, windows, the temple itself vanished. It seemed as if nothing existed any more. Instead I saw an ocean of the Spirit, boundless, dazzling." Waves of light rose and broke over him. He lost consciousness, and for two days he knew nothing but an ocean of joy and the presence of the Mother in its depths. When he came to himself, the disciples who later asked him whether he had seen her form said only that he murmured: "Mother! Mother!"

After that he lived with her in constant company. One night, when the rites were over and he went to his room above the Ganges, he heard her get up, with the sound of her anklets, and go up to the first-floor balcony. He went into the court and saw her there with unbound hair, looking at the Ganges and the lights of Calcutta. Rani Rasmani's son-in-law, Mathur Babu, who managed the temple, once watched him pacing his balcony and saw him alternately as Shiva and as the Mother. He cried out.

Most people thought the young priest mad. He could not perform the rites. He fell into fits of unconsciousness in the middle of worship, he stiffened like a statue, he did not close his eyes or eat. He saw the gods in the people around him: Sita in a prostitute, Krishna in a young Englishman standing against a tree. Then he became them. He was Kali, he was Rama, he was Sita, he was Hanuman, and for six months he was Radha, Krishna's beloved. Once, when Rani Rasmani was praying with her mind elsewhere, he rebuked her in public. She calmly said it was the Mother who had rebuked her. He submitted to doctors and their useless prescriptions.

His mother wished to see him married, hoping it would bring him back. In 1859 he was twenty-three, and the bride was a girl of five, Saradamani. She went back to her parents' house after the ceremony, and he returned to the temple. They did not meet for eight or nine years. The madness came back, worse. He saw dark figures come out of his own body and a bright monk who killed them. For two years he was at the mercy of visions and despair.

The nun and the naked monk

Then one day he was on his terrace watching the boats go by on the Ganges, and a boat landed at the foot of his steps. A tall, beautiful woman of thirty-five or forty, with unbound hair and the saffron robe of a sannyasini, came up. She burst into tears when she saw him and said: "My son, I have been looking for you for a long time." She was a Brahmin of a good Bengal family, a devotee of Vishnu, learned in the sacred books. She was known only as the Bhairavi Brahmani, the Brahmin nun.

He told her everything, his visions, his sufferings, and he asked humbly whether those who called him mad were right. She comforted him as a mother and told him that what he was going through was a high state described in the books of devotion. For three years she stayed and led him step by step through the paths he had already walked alone and blind, including the severe Tantric ones. He came out of them as he went in. At her insistence the learned men of the neighbourhood met at Dakshineswar, and after debate they accepted him as an avatar. His fame spread, and seekers came from far away.

Towards the end of 1864 a wandering monk named Tota Puri arrived at the temple. He was a tall, powerful man, a Vedantic monk who had been head of a monastery of seven hundred monks in the Punjab and had spent forty years reaching the state in which he saw the world with complete indifference. He saw Ramakrishna sitting on the temple steps, lost in his inner happiness, and said: "My son, I see that you have already travelled far. If you wish, I can help you to the next stage. I will teach you the Vedanta." Ramakrishna replied, with such simplicity that even the stern monk smiled, that he must first ask the Mother's permission. She gave it.

To receive initiation he had to give up the sacred thread and the dignity of a priest, and symbolically perform his own funeral rites. Then he put on the ochre robe of a sannyasin. His teacher taught him to withdraw his mind from every object and plunge it into the Self. But he could not get past one form: the radiant Mother stood before him each time and barred the way. "It is no good," he said. "I shall never succeed." Tota Puri answered sharply: "You say you cannot? You must!" He found a piece of glass, pressed its point between Ramakrishna's eyebrows, and told him to hold his mind on that point. Ramakrishna meditated with all his strength. When the form of the Mother appeared, he said: "I used my discrimination as a sword, and I clove her in two." Then his mind went beyond all form into samadhi, and nothing remained but Existence. In one day he reached what the older monk had needed forty years to reach. Tota Puri had meant to stay three days. He stayed eleven months.

During that time the teacher fell ill with dysentery. For a long while he refused to give way to his body, but the illness grew until he could no longer fix his mind on the Absolute. In anger he walked into the Ganges to drown himself, and found that he had neither the will nor the strength. He came back in dismay and spent the night in meditation. In the morning he told Ramakrishna that the Absolute and the Mother, who is Maya, are one. Tota Puri recovered, said farewell to the pupil who had become his teacher, and left, towards the end of 1865.

Ramakrishna remained in the same state, without moving or eating, for about six months, like a body left empty by its spirit. A nephew who looked after him fed him, and a passing monk is said to have beaten him to bring him back. Rolland says he would have died without them. At last the Mother called him back: stay on the threshold, for the love of humanity. A bout of dysentery that lasted six months brought him down to earth. He later said that in those days he cried out in pain at the sight of two boatmen quarrelling.

Other roads

After that he wanted to try other paths. At the end of 1866 he was hardly recovered when he met Govinda Rai, a Muslim who was praying at the temple. He asked to be initiated, and for several days he forgot his own gods. He lived outside the temple precincts, repeated the name of Allah, wore a Muslim's clothes, and was ready to eat what the Hindus forbid. Mathur Babu was shocked. Ramakrishna saw a radiant figure with a grave face and white beard, and lost himself in him.

Years later, in November 1874, a friend named Mallik read him the Bible. One day in the house of a rich Hindu he saw a picture of the Madonna and Child on the wall, and the figures came alive. For several days he thought of nothing but Christ and did not go to the temple. Then one afternoon in the grove at Dakshineswar he saw a man with large eyes and a fair skin coming towards him, and a voice in him said: "Behold the Christ, who shed his heart's blood for the redemption of the world." The figure embraced him and was absorbed in him. After that he kept a picture of Christ in his room and burned incense before it morning and evening.

He said of these years: "I have practised all religions, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and I have also followed the paths of the different Hindu sects. I have found that it is the same God towards whom all are directing their steps, though along different paths." He used to compare it to a tank with several ghats: Hindus draw water at one and call it jal, Muslims at another and call it pani, Christians at a third and call it water.

Among people

In May 1867, still weak, he went home to Kamarpukur for six or seven months, after eight years away. The villagers were glad to see their little Gadadhar. His wife Sarada, now fourteen, came from her parents' house to meet him. Rolland writes that she understood her husband's mission at once. He told her: "I have learnt to look upon every woman as Mother. That is the only idea I can have about you. But if you wish to draw me into the world, as I have been married to you, I am at your service." She did not ask it. Over those months he taught her how to run a household, as he had a practical side and kept his own rooms in good order. The Bhairavi Brahmani, who came with him, found it hard to see him absorbed again by the village and by his wife. After painful scenes she asked his pardon and left him for good.

In 1868 he travelled with Mathur Babu to Benares, Allahabad and Brindaban. He saw Benares from the river as a heavenly city, and on the burning ground he saw Shiva and the Mother bending over the dead. At twilight on the Jumna he saw the herdsmen bring their cattle home and ran shouting: "Krishna! Where is Krishna?"

At Deoghar he met something else. The people there, the Santhals, were almost naked and starving in a famine. He told Mathur Babu to feed them. Mathur Babu said he was not rich enough to feed all the world's misery, and Ramakrishna sat down among them and wept, saying he would not leave. Mathur Babu gave in. In the summer of 1870, on a visit to Mathur's estates during two years of failed harvests, he told Mathur to forgive the tenants' dues, give them help and a feast. "You are only the steward of the Mother," he said. "They are the Mother's tenants." Swami Shivananda, who was there, later told Rolland of a day at Dakshineswar when Ramakrishna, in a high state, said: "Jiva is Shiva. Who then dare talk of showing mercy to them? Not mercy, but service, service, for man must be regarded as God!" Vivekananda was present, and said afterwards that he had heard a great saying and would proclaim it to the world.

The disciples

Young men began to come to him. One of them, called Naren, was proud of his reason and sceptical of visions. He later became Vivekananda. Ramakrishna regarded him as his heir. Ramakrishna used to joke with him. Once an old woman devotee told the others she had been playing with the Infant Krishna for days. Ramakrishna asked her to tell her story to Naren. "I am only a poor ignorant woman," she said. "You are learned. Tell me, do you think it is true?" Naren was moved and said: "Yes, mother, it is quite true."

Naren once begged Ramakrishna to let him enter the highest samadhi. Ramakrishna, who almost never lost his temper, refused with anger: "Shame on you! I thought you were to be the great banyan tree giving shelter to thousands of tired souls. Instead you are selfishly seeking your own well-being." Naren wept.

The last illness

In 1884 Ramakrishna dislocated his arm in a trance. After that he began to speak of himself as "this" and not "I". In April 1885 his throat became inflamed. The doctors forbade speaking and ecstasy, and he ignored them. At a Vaishnava festival he spent himself without measure. He could hardly eat. One night the throat bled. The diagnosis was cancer. In September 1885 a small house was rented in Calcutta where his wife could look after his diet and the disciples take turns by night. Most were poor and pawned what they had to pay the costs. The doctor, Mahendra Lal Sarkar, did not share his faith and said so frankly. The longer he knew his patient the more he respected him, and in the end he treated him free.

In December 1885 he was moved to a house in the gardens of Cossipore, where he spent the last eight months. Twelve young disciples never left him. They begged him to pray for his own cure. A pandit told him that holy men can heal themselves by will. He answered: "My mind has been given to God once and for all. Would you have me ask it back?" Naren pleaded: "For our sake!" He said he would try, and they left him alone for several hours. When they returned, he said: "I said to Her: 'Mother, I can eat nothing because of my suffering. Make it possible for me to eat a little!' She pointed you all out to me and said: 'What! Thou canst eat through all these mouths!' I was ashamed and could not utter another word."

On 1 January 1886 he felt better and walked a few steps in the garden, and he blessed the disciples who were there. Each of them felt a sudden power and joy. Two of the young men, Latu and Sarat, were cleaning his room and making his bed upstairs. They heard the calls and saw the scene from above, and went on with their work.

Naren alone was left out. His father had died, and he was tormented with worry for his family. He ran through the fields of Calcutta, covered with dust and straw, wanting the Infinite and finding no rest. The Master watched him from afar. Some days later, while meditating, Naren saw a light behind his head and lost himself in the Absolute. When he came back he cried out: "Where is my body?" The others were terrified and ran to the Master, who said calmly: "Very well, let him stay like that for a time! He has worried me long enough." When Naren returned to himself and came to him, Ramakrishna said: "Now the Mother has shown you everything. But this revelation will remain under lock and key, and I shall keep the key. When you have accomplished the Mother's work you will find this treasure again."

Towards the end of March Ramakrishna gave the young men the saffron robe and told them to beg their food from door to door without regard to caste. Naren was the first to go out. Ramakrishna said to him: "I leave these young people in your charge."

Some of the disciples argued about why he was suffering. Some said he had chosen the illness himself to bring them together. Naren said his body was like anyone else's. Once, when he saw the young men weeping and laughing in imagined ecstasies, Naren told them sharply that the Master's ecstasies had been bought with a life of hard austerity, and that they should eat more. Many admitted that their ecstasies had been pretended.

To those who could not bear his leaving he said: "Radha said to Krishna, 'O Beloved, dwell in my heart and do not come again in your human form!' But soon she languished for the sight of the human form of her Beloved." Rakhal cried out: "Do not go away until we do!" He smiled and said that a troupe of Bauls enters a house, sings the name of God and dances, then leaves as suddenly as it came, and the owners never know who they were. Three or four days before the end he called Naren alone, looked at him, and went into ecstasy. When he came out of it he was in tears. "Today I have given you my all," he said, "and am now only a poor fakir, possessing nothing."

Those who saw the cancer marvelled at the smile that never left him. He said: "Only the body suffers. When the mind is united to God, it can feel no pain." Two days before his death, when Naren wanted to hear him say who he was, Ramakrishna said: "He who was Rama and who was Krishna is now Ramakrishna in this body lying here." And then: "Not in your Vedantic sense."

The last day

On Sunday, 15 August 1886, he still had the strength in the afternoon to talk with the disciples for two hours. At nightfall he became unconscious, and they thought he was dead. Towards midnight he revived. Leaning against five or six pillows, held up by the body of the disciple Ramakrishnananda, he talked to Naren to the last, in a low voice, again and again: take care of these boys. Then he cried out three times, in a ringing voice, the name of Kali, the Divine Mother, and lay back. The last ecstasy began, and he did not come back from it. In his own words, he had passed from one room to another. The disciples cried: "Victory!" His body was burned that evening.

After

The disciples, who had no means, found it impossible to return to their homes. Four married followers helped them, among them Surendranath Mitra, who paid the rent for a half-ruined house at Baranagore on the Ganges, which became the first monastery. Naren took the lead among them. At Christmas of 1886 they gathered at the house of the mother of one of them, at Antpur, and kept a fire burning in the dark under the Indian sky, and Naren told them the story of Jesus.