BIRTHDAY SPECIAL
D K Pandita
Swami Sri Ramakrishna was born on 18 February 1836, in the village of Kamarpukur, in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, India, into a very poor and pious Bengali Brahmin family. He was the fourth and the youngest child of his parents. His parents, Sri Khudiram Chattopadhyaya and Mata Chandramani Devi are said to have experienced supernatural incidents and visions regarding his birth. Swami Ramakrishna was skilled with words and had an extraordinary style of preaching and instructing, which may have helped convey his ideas to even the most skeptical temple visitors. His speeches reportedly revealed a sense of joy and fun, but he was not at a loss when debating with intellectual philosophers. Philosopher Arindam Chakrabarti contrasted Ramakrishna’s talkativeness with the Buddha’s legendary reticence, and compared his teaching style to that of Socrates.
In Gaya, Swamiji’s father had a dream in which Bhagwan Gadadhara (a form of lord Vishnu) told him that he would be born as his son. Mata Chandramani Devi is said to have had a vision of light entering her womb from the lingam in Yogidhar Shiv Mandir. In another vision following Swamiji’s birth, his mother saw a strange tall person lying in the bed instead of the baby Ramakrishna. The family of Swami ji was devoted to the Hindu deity Rama (the family deity was Sri Raghubir, an epithet of Rama). Around the age of six or seven, Swami experienced his first moment of spiritual trance. One morning, while walking along the narrow ridges of a paddy field, eating some puffed rice from a small basket, he came across the sight of a flock of milky white cranes, flying against the background of heavy rain laden black clouds, which soon covered the entire sky. The ensuing sight was so beautiful that he got absorbed into it and lost all his outer consciousness, before falling down with the rice scattered all over. People nearby who saw this, came to his rescue and carried him home.
Swami Ramakrishna was sent to the village school where he learned to read and write, but he had an aversion to arithmetic, and didn’t progress beyond simple addition, multiplication and division. He read the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and other religious books with devotion. He became proficient in making images, acting and painting. When he was fourteen years old, he started a drama group with some of his friends and left school to pursue it. Swami Ramakrishna had practically no formal education and spoke ungrammatical imperfect Bengali with a rustic accent. Swami ji became well-versed in the Puranas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavata Purana, hearing them from the wandering monks and the Kathaks a class of men in ancient India who preached and sang the Puraans.
When Swamiji was in his teens, as the family’s financial position worsened, he moved to Calcutta in 1852 along with his brother to assist him in the priestly work. On Thursday, May 31, 1855 Swami Ramakrishna, was appointed by Rani Rasmani as the priest of the Dakshineswar Kali Temple and later assigned him with the task of dressing the deity of Kali. Swami Ramakrishna had amazing ways of meditating. He would put down his clothes and the sacred thread aside, and meditate completely naked, according to Swamiji when one thinks about God, one should be free from all attachments and the eight servitudes of “hatred, fear, shame, aversion, egoism, vanity, noble descent, and good conduct.” He viewed his sacred thread as a display of the ego, of his Brahmin descent, and thus kept it aside, saying when calling upon the Mother, one should discard all such bondages and call on Her with a focused mind. He used to put them on after the end of his meditation.
Swamiji was married to five-year-old bride, Saradamani Mukhopadhyaya (later known as Sarada Devi) was found, and the marriage was duly solemnised in 1859. He was twenty-three at this point, but this age difference for marriage was typical for nineteenth century rural Bengal. When Sarada Devi was fourteen, and Ramakrishna thirty two he became a very influential figure in Sarada’s life, and she became a strong follower of his teachings. After the marriage, Sarada stayed at Jayrambati and joined Swami Ramakrishna in Dakshineswar at the age of eighteen. By the time his bride joined him, Ramakrishna had already embraced the monastic life of a sannyasi, the marriage was never consummated. Ramakrishna regarded Sarada Devi as the Divine Mother in person, addressing her as the Holy Mother, and it was by this name that she was known to Ramakrishna’s disciples. Sarada Devi outlived Ramakrishna by thirty-four years and played an important role in the nascent religious movement.
Swami Ramakrishna grew up practicing Bhakti towards Lord Rama and his duties as a priest at the Dakshineswar temple led him to practice worship of Mother Kali. While serving as a temple priest at Dakshineswar, Ramakrishna would encounter various itinerant sadhus who would visit his place and stay there for a while. Practicing their own modes of worship, several of them initiated Ramakrishna into various schools of Hinduism.
He would meditate in the Panchavati (a wooded and secluded area of the Dakshineswar Temple grounds), go to the Kali temple to offer flowers to the Mother, and wave incense to the assorted deities and religious figures, whose pictures hung in his room.
During his last days, he was looked after by his monastic disciples and Sarada Devi. Ramakrishna was advised by the doctors to keep the strictest silence, but ignoring their advice, he incessantly conversed with visitors. According to traditional accounts, before his death, Ramakrishna transferred his spiritual powers to Vivekananda, and assured him of his avataric status. Requesting other monastic disciples to look upon Vivekananda as their leader, Ramakrishna asked Vivekananda to look after the welfare of the disciples, saying, “keep my boys together”, and asked him to “teach them”. Ramakrishna’s condition gradually worsened, and he died in the early morning hours of 16 August 1886 at the Cossipore garden house. His last word, on one account was “ma”, while another states he uttered thrice, the word “Kali”, before passing away. After the death of their master, the monastic disciples led by Vivekananda formed a fellowship at a half-ruined house at Baranagar near the river Ganges, with the financial assistance of the householder disciples. This became the first Math or monastery of the disciples who constituted the first Ramakrishna Order.
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