Life
Born on 18 February 1836 in Kamarpukur, a village in the Hooghly district of Bengal, into a poor Brahmin family of Vaiṣṇava persuasion. His father died when he was seven; the boy showed early signs of what later devotional biography would gloss as bhāva — states of absorption — and what nineteenth-century medicine would have called fits. His elder brother Ramkumar was appointed priest at the newly built Dakshineswar Kālī temple north of Calcutta in 1855; Gadadhar followed and inherited the priestly office on his brother's death in 1856. The next twelve years at Dakshineswar are the formative period of the figure. He served the image of Kālī with an intensity that scandalised the temple's wealthy founder Rani Rashmoni's family — feeding the goddess flowers and rice as if she were a living mother, reciting hymns through the night, lying on the temple floor weeping for her darśan — and the family eventually relented as the boy's reputation for unforced sanctity spread. He married Sāradā Devī in 1859 (she was five, he twenty-three; the marriage was customary in the period and the relationship became formally devotional rather than physical when she joined him as an adult at Dakshineswar in 1872). Vivekananda and the other disciples gathered around him through the 1870s and early 1880s. He died of throat cancer on 16 August 1886.
The experiments with religions
What distinguished Ramakrishna from other nineteenth-century Bengali devotional figures was a sequence — undertaken between 1861 and 1872 — in which he submitted himself to instruction in the major contemplative paths available within and outside his own Hindu inheritance and reported reaching, in each, what the lineage in question described as its goal. Bhairavi Brahmani, an itinerant Tantric, instructed him for several years in the disciplines of Tantra; the Vedāntic renunciate Tota Puri spent nearly a year with him at Dakshineswar and gave him the sannyāsa initiation that opened the recognition the Advaita tradition calls nirvikalpa samādhi — the absorption in Brahman without distinction. Under a Muslim teacher he called Govinda Roy he undertook the practice of Islam — wearing the dress, reciting the namāz, abstaining from temple offerings — for several days; in 1874 he had a vision of Christ and reported the same direct recognition through that doorway. The body of teaching transmitted to his disciples after these experiments was that the contemplative traditions, however differently their doctrines describe the goal, point at one reality through different grammars. The doctrine became the foundation for what the twentieth century would call perennialism; the perennial philosophy entry maps the wider reception of the same claim.
The transmission
Ramakrishna gathered around himself a circle of educated young Bengalis through the 1880s — Narendranath Datta, later Swāmī Vivekānanda; Rakhal Chandra Ghosh, later Swāmī Brahmananda; Tarak Nath Ghoshal, later Swāmī Shivananda — many of whom had passed through the Brahmo Samaj's rationalising reform of Hinduism and were dissatisfied with what it had drained from the tradition. After his death the disciples took formal renunciation and founded the Ramakrishna Math, then in 1897 the Ramakrishna Mission as the missionary and service arm. Vivekananda's address to the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago on 11 September 1893 — the Sisters and brothers of America opening, the dispassionate exposition of Advaita Vedānta to an American audience that had not encountered it as a living teaching before — is the upstream event of the modern English-language reception of Indian non-dual thought, and lands on every later figure whose lineage descends from that reception, including Paramahansa Yogananda, Sri Yukteswar (whose teacher Lahiri Mahasaya was operating in the same Bengal milieu) and through them the long arc into the contemporary Western non-duality scene the index documents. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna — Mahendranath Gupta's verbatim record of conversations with the master between 1882 and 1886, written down nightly and published in five Bengali volumes from 1902 — remains the foundational text.
What he is not
Ramakrishna is not, on his own self-description, a guru in the public-teaching sense the nineteenth and twentieth centuries developed around him. He held no institutional office beyond the priesthood at Dakshineswar, gave no organised discourses, and left no written corpus of his own; the teaching was transmitted in the conversational form The Gospel preserves and was inseparable in the master's own practice from the personal relationship with the disciple. The institutional and missionary apparatus that grew up after his death — Belur Math, the Mission's hospitals and schools, the spread of Vedānta Societies in the West — is Vivekānanda's structural inheritance applied to the teaching, not the teaching itself. The popular conflation with the syncretic all religions are one slogan also flattens what the master actually reported: not that the doctrinal claims of the traditions converge (he was careful that they often do not), but that the recognition at which each contemplative path arrives is one. The distinction is small in summary and consequential in practice. The contemporary reader interested in the figure rather than the inherited slogan goes to The Gospel and reads slowly.
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