Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna was an unlettered temple priest whose disciples turned Hinduism into a world religion. He was born in a Bengali village to a poor Brahmin family, had almost no formal education, and became priest of the Kali temple at Dakshineswar outside Calcutta in his early twenties. What followed was years of religious practice so extreme that his family believed him mad and married him to a five-year-old girl in the hope of settling him. The marriage was never consummated; Sarada Devi joined him at the temple as an adult, and he worshipped her formally as the goddess. He practised in turn as a devotee of Kali, under a wandering nun who trained him in Tantra, under a monk who taught him non-dual Vedanta, and then deliberately as a Muslim and as a Christian - concluding from the inside, he said, that the paths reach the same place. That conclusion is the whole of his teaching, and it was delivered in village parables and Bengali proverbs rather than in Sanskrit argument. He attracted educated Calcutta men who had been through English schooling and Western scepticism, of whom Narendranath Datta - later Vivekananda - resisted him longest. He died of throat cancer in 1886. His young disciples took monastic vows and founded the Ramakrishna Mission, and Vivekananda carried the argument to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, where it was heard as the voice of Hinduism itself. Almost everything recorded of him comes from disciples writing after his death, above all the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, a diary kept by a schoolteacher who wrote down the conversations in Bengali as they happened - which is why a man who published nothing is quoted at length.

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