What is Sri Ramakrishna?
Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) was a Bengali Hindu mystic who served as temple priest at the Dakshineswar Kālī temple outside Calcutta. He practiced the disciplines of multiple traditions in sequence and reported reaching the goal each described. Through his disciple Narendranath Datta, who took the name Swāmī Vivekānanda, his teaching shaped the modern English-language reception of Advaita Vedānta and the broader Western encounter with Indian spirituality.
Life
Sri Ramakrishna was born on 18 February 1836 in Kamarpukur, a village in Bengal's Hooghly district, into a poor Brahmin family with Vaiṣṇava roots. His father died when he was seven. From an early age he entered states of absorption that devotional biographers called bhāva and contemporary doctors called fits. His elder brother Ramkumar became priest at the newly built Dakshineswar Kālī temple north of Calcutta in 1855, and Gadadhar followed, inheriting the priestly post on his brother's death in 1856. The next twelve years at Dakshineswar shaped the figure. He served the image of Kālī with an intensity that alarmed the temple's wealthy founder Rani Rashmoni's family. He fed the goddess flowers and rice as if she were a living mother, recited hymns through the night, and lay on the temple floor weeping for her darśan. The family relented as his reputation for sanctity spread. He married Sāradā Devī in 1859, when she was five and he twenty-three. The marriage was customary in the period. The relationship became formally devotional rather than physical when she joined him at Dakshineswar as an adult in 1872. His disciples gathered around him through the 1870s and early 1880s. He died of throat cancer on 16 August 1886.
The experiments with religions
What set Ramakrishna apart from other Bengali devotional figures was a series of experiments he conducted between 1861 and 1872. He submitted himself to instruction in the major contemplative paths available to him, within and outside his Hindu inheritance, and reported reaching the goal each described. Bhairavi Brahmani, an itinerant Tantric teacher, guided him in the disciplines of Tantra for several years. The Vedāntic renunciate Tota Puri stayed nearly a year at Dakshineswar and gave him the sannyāsa initiation, opening what the Advaita tradition calls nirvikalpa samādhi, absorption in Brahman without any distinction. Under a Muslim teacher he called Govinda Roy, he took up the practice of Islam for several days, wearing the dress and reciting the namāz, abstaining from temple offerings. In 1874 he had a vision of Christ and reported the same direct recognition through that path. The teaching he then gave his disciples was that the contemplative traditions, however different in doctrine, point at one reality through different grammars. This became the foundation for what the twentieth century would call perennialism. The perennial philosophy entry traces that wider reception.
The transmission
Through the 1880s Ramakrishna gathered a circle of educated young Bengalis around him. Among them were Narendranath Datta, who took the renunciate name Swāmī Vivekānanda; Rakhal Chandra Ghosh, later Swāmī Brahmananda; and Tarak Nath Ghoshal, later Swāmī Shivananda. Many had passed through the Brahmo Samaj's rationalising reform of Hinduism and were dissatisfied with what it had stripped from the tradition. After Ramakrishna's death, the disciples took formal renunciation and founded the Ramakrishna Math, then in 1897 the Ramakrishna Mission as its missionary and service arm. Vivekananda's address at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago on 11 September 1893 opened with Sisters and brothers of America and gave a dispassionate account of Advaita Vedānta to an audience that had not met it as a living teaching. That address is the starting point of the modern English-language reception of Indian non-dual thought. Its influence reaches every later figure whose lineage descends from that reception, including Paramahansa Yogananda and Sri Yukteswar, whose teacher Lahiri Mahasaya was operating in the same Bengal milieu, and from them into the contemporary Western non-duality scene. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Mahendranath Gupta's verbatim record of conversations 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 built 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 that The Gospel preserves, inseparable from the personal relationship with the disciple. The institutional apparatus that grew up after his death, including Belur Math, the Mission's hospitals and schools, and the Vedānta Societies in the West, is Vivekananda's structural inheritance applied to the teaching, not the teaching itself. The popular conflation with the all religions are one slogan also flattens what Ramakrishna actually reported. He did not claim that the doctrinal positions of the traditions converge. He was careful that they often do not. His claim was that the recognition at which each contemplative path arrives is one. That distinction is small in summary and large in practice. The reader who wants the figure rather than the inherited slogan goes to The Gospel and reads slowly.