A village boy who hated arithmetic became the Bengali mystic behind the Ramakrishna Order
Ramakrishna left school at fourteen, spoke rustic Bengali and never mastered sums. Yet as a priest at a Calcutta Kali temple he tried Tantric, Vedantic, Christian and Sufi practice in turn, and concluded that the world's faiths are many roads to one destination, a message his disciple Vivekananda carried abroad.
He was born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay in 1836 in Kamarpukur, the youngest of four children in a poor Brahmin family devoted to Rama. His father had lost his ancestral land after refusing a landlord's demand to lie in court, and a friend gave the family a small plot to live on. Village school bored him; he preferred painting, image-making and acting, and he absorbed the epics from wandering monks and singers who passed through on the pilgrim road to Puri.
At about ten or eleven, walking through a paddy field, he saw white cranes crossing a dark rain cloud and collapsed, overwhelmed. He and his followers called it samadhi, a state of meditative absorption; more sceptical readers have suggested a trance or seizure. As a teenager he talked his way past a trader's purdah rules by disguising himself as a weaver woman, winning permission for the household's women to hear his recitations.
After his father died in 1843, his much older brother Ramkumar took charge and in 1852 brought him to Calcutta. There the wealthy widow Rani Rasmani was building a nine-spired Kali temple at Dakshineswar but, being of low caste, was barred from offering food to the goddess. Ramkumar suggested she deed the property to a Brahmin, and when the temple opened in May 1855 he became its chief priest. Ramakrishna soon joined him and, around the age of twenty, became a temple priest himself.
His intense devotion brought visions that several teachers accepted as genuine. In 1859 he was married to Sarada Devi, a marriage never consummated, and in 1865 the monk Tota Puri initiated him into renunciation. Reluctant at first to act as a guru, he drew elites and ordinary visitors alike, founded a monastic order and stressed direct experience over scripture. He died of throat cancer in August 1886, and followers regard him as a divine incarnation.
Source: Ramakrishna
