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Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa
One of the most religious persons who only wanted his identity as the outright devotee of Goddess Kali. Swami Vivekananda was the disciple of Sri Rama Krishna.
Born to a devout couple, Khudiram Chatterji and Chandra
Devi, in the pre-dawn hours of February 18, 1836 in an obscure village of West Bengal,
Kamarpukur, he became a bright luminary of the modern Indian Renaissance of which Raja Ram Mohan Roy was the morning star.
Christened Gadadhar, he had an artistic temperament, musical voice and histrionic talent but hardly any inclination for formal schooling. The sight of a flock of snow-white cranes flying in formation under a canopy of dense, dark clouds sent him into his first recorded ecstasy in 1843 and another came when he enacted the role of Siva in a village drama. Ramakrishna lost his father at seven.
Penury drove Ramakrishna’s elder brother Ramkumar to Calcutta where in 1850 he opened a Sanskrit tol (school) and worked as a temple priest, trying to interest Ramakrishna in both.
Ramakrishna’s turning point came at 20 when he was appointed chief priest, following the death of his brother, at he Dakshineshwar Kali Temple built by Rani
Rasmani. Sri Ramakrishna longed for actual communication with the Divine Mother whose image he was worshipping every day.
His prayers and entreaties were so persistent and unusual that to cure him of his ‘obsession’, he was taken to Kamarpukur by his mother and younger brother where they got him married to Sarada Devi in 1859. She was five and he was 23.
Back at Dakshineshwar, Ramakrishna’s hunger for God-vision became even more intense, and after six long years of relentless Sadhana he was blessed with the vision of
Bhavatarini. Then on, he would often slip into Bhava
Samadhi.
Then came for him a series of formal Gurus, first Bhairavi Brahmini in 1861 who initiated him intoTantric
Sadhana, followed by Jatadhari, a Vaishnava ascetic devoted to Sri
Rama, and Totapuri, an adept in Advait a Vedanta, in 1863.
The transition from Savikalpa to Nirvikalpa Samadhi - the realization of the Personal God and the experience of the Impersonal Reality - was amazingly swift for Ramakrishna. He also later practiced Sadhanas prescribed in Islam and Christianity and came to the practical realization that "there are as many ways as there are religions". Sarada
Devi, now a girl of 18, and anxious about the health and wellbeing of her husband went to Dakshineshwar in 1872, with her husband had risen and did not want to drag him down to the mart of worldly life. Ramakrishna saw the Divine Mother in her. He became a legend in his own lifetime.
It was a Professor of English Mr. Hastie, who sent to Sri. Ramakrishna a youth called Narendra Nath
Datta. This youth became Swami Vivekananda who carried his Master’s message of universal religion to the West and took the lead in founding the Ramakrishna Math (1886) and Mission (1887).
Sri Ramakrishna passed into Maha Samadhi on August 16, 1886.
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