Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna was born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay in 1836 in the village of Kamarpukur in Bengal. In his late teens he became a priest at the newly built temple of the goddess Kālī at Dakshineswar, north of Calcutta, where he lived for the rest of his life. His intense longing for a direct vision of the goddess, and the states of ecstasy that followed, made him first a concern and then a centre of attention for those around him.

Over the following years he undertook a series of disciplines under different teachers: Tantric practice under a woman teacher, the Bhairavī Brāhmaṇī, and Advaita under the wandering monk Totāpurī, in whose presence he is said to have entered nirvikalpa samādhi. The accounts of his life also describe periods in which he followed Islamic and Christian forms of devotion. He was married to Sarada Devi, who became a revered teacher in her own right.

From the late 1870s he was visited by educated young men from Calcutta, among them Narendranath Datta, the future Swami Vivekananda. One disciple, Mahendranath Gupta, known as “M”, kept a record of his conversations from 1882, published in Bengali as the Kathāmṛta and in English as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He died of throat cancer at Cossipore in 1886.