Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa

Life and work

Ramakrishna was born as Gadadhar Chattopadhyay at Kamarpukur in 1836 CE into a poor rural brahmin family. He came to the newly-built Kali temple at Dakshineswar near Kolkata in 1855 as the deity worshipper appointed by Rani Rasmani, and within months entered a state of unbroken longing for the direct vision of the Mother that culminated in a spontaneous samadhi in front of her image. From 1861 he undertook over twelve years of intense sadhana under successive teachers — the Bhairavi Brahmani initiated him into all sixty-four Tantras, the Vaishnava acharyas guided him through the madhura and vatsalya bhavas of Krishna and Rama bhakti, and the wandering paramahamsa Tota Puri gave him formal sannyasa diksha and stationed him in the nirvikalpa samadhi of Advaita Vedanta. He went further and entered the disciplines of Christianity and Islam, having direct visions of Jesus and of the Prophet, and arrived at his lifelong teaching that every sincere religion is a valid path to the one Mother. From around 1879 a circle of young Kolkata educated youth began visiting Dakshineswar; among them was the young Narendranath Datta who would become Swami Vivekananda, the principal disciple who carried the message to the West at the 1893 Chicago Parliament of Religions. The recorded conversations of his last years, taken down verbatim by Mahendranath Gupta and published as the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, became one of the foundational mystical texts of modern Indian religion. He passed away of throat cancer in 1886 at the Cossipore garden house in Kolkata.