Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna was a village Brahmin with almost no formal education who took a job as priest at a new Kali temple on the Ganges outside Calcutta, built by a wealthy widow whose caste made the appointment controversial. What followed was not a career.

He could not treat the image as an image. He wept, refused food, argued with the goddess, and by his own account reached a point of such desperation at her silence that he seized a sword from the wall intending to kill himself, at which the vision came. Afterwards he was for years in a condition his family and employers found alarming and which he described as god-madness: unable to keep to the ritual timetable, weeping and laughing without cause, losing external consciousness for long periods.

Two teachers came to him at Dakshineswar and both were unusual. A woman ascetic known as the Bhairavi Brahmani took him through a course of tantric disciplines and pronounced his condition to be a recognised spiritual state rather than illness. Later a naked wandering Advaitin called Totapuri taught him the non-dual path and, according to the accounts, was startled at how quickly he attained the formless absorption it aims at. His marriage, arranged when his wife Sarada Devi was a child, was never consummated; when she came to him as an adult he formally worshipped her as the Divine Mother, and she became a teacher in her own right after his death.

The claim that made Ramakrishna a figure of more than local significance is that he did not stay inside one tradition. The accounts describe him taking up in turn Vaishnava devotion in several of its classical moods, tantric practice, Advaita, and then, deliberately, disciplines outside Hinduism altogether: a period of Islamic practice under a Sufi, and a period following Christ after hearing the Bible read. In each case, on his own report, the same goal was reached. His formulation of the conclusion, that there are as many paths as there are faiths, became one of the most quoted sentences in modern Indian religion.

Everything known about him comes through others, and the sources are unusually good for a nineteenth century holy man. Mahendranath Gupta, a schoolteacher, kept a detailed diary of his conversations over several years and published it as the Kathamrita, which records ordinary sessions with dates and names and includes material a hagiographer would have removed.

Interpretation of him has been contested from the beginning, and the atlas records that rather than choosing. He has been read as a Bengali devotee of Kali whose universalism was overstated by his English speaking followers, as the Vedantic teacher his order presents, and, in some late twentieth century Western scholarship, through psychoanalytic frames that provoked considerable anger in India. The disagreement is real and is about how to read the same evidence.