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The summum bonum of all faiths
He was no born-saint. He was a saint evolved throgh life's several physical, psychical and spiritual vicissitudes, trials and experimentations. The way of evolution was distinctly his own. Gadhadhar, an illiterate Vaishnava Brahmin boy with no spectacular background or ancestry, scaling greater heights than the other great contemporaries of his, grew up to be revered as Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
Gadhadhar used to play the role of Krishna or Siva in village dramas. The youthful maidens of the same sect at Bengal's sequestered village, Kamarpukur, used to form into a ring around him in those plays as Gopikas were known to gather around Krishna. With his charm and the inherent transparent divinity, the lad could acquit himself as Krishna, the celebate inviolate.
Gadadhar was born in Kamarpukur on February 18, 1836 - just two years before the advent of Shirdi Sai Baba. By the time the lad came of age, circumstances had so shaped that the family perforce migrated to Calcutta, the then imperial capital of India. Destiny was awaiting him in suburban Dakshineswar, a few kilometres away, to shape him into Sri Ramakrishna, 'the son of God'. Following the expiry of his elder brother, Gadadhar was initiated into priesthood and installed as the archaka of Kali Temple there. As the priest, Ramakrishna's ways of worship were so odd and unconventional that they enraged the temple's founders, but they never toyed with the idea of removing him. The invisible hand of the Divine was working within and soon the elders and others, too, started enjoying the crazy manners of the priest.
The family elders thought it fit to get him married as a curative measure of his supposed madness. Gadhadhar himself chose as his bride a five-year-old girl who was to blossom into Mother Sarada Devi later, and he remained a celebate inviolate.
The extraordinary souls that wrought change in the unusual life of Ramakrishna were a beautiful Brahmin woman and Totapuri. His intellectual brilliance was prodigious. He was able to become an adept in any kind of knowledge in an amazingly short time.
All was natural and spontaneous about him. In his philosophy man was the central figure. Around him the gamut of his thought was vigorously composed.
The century was the mother of many a pronounced reformative and rationalistic movement. The rugged wind of the well-disciplined movements clamouring for radical change had silently made inroads into the mind of the saint in the making. His intellect was ever alert and never slumbering. It was unbroken 'Kaali consciouslness'. He keenly observed the winds of change and the personalities under whom the movements were smarting. His religion was human and at the same time spiritual to the core and enlightened like that of the Buddha, like whom he was for founding of the kingdom of Earth of Kali, the Supreme primordial principle of Prakriti within it the unmoved mover reposes. Prakriti reveals the face of Purusha in boundless and countless forms. That is Kaali the Mother, ''all beauty and all bliss''. The mystic touch of Hers in all that is thrills and amazes and enhances the ageless urge of man to delve deep into the abysmal mystery of Reality.
Ramakrishna's sayings possess a flair and beauty of their own like that of the Buddhist Dammapada which the Chinese savant Lin Yutang believes is more impressive than the Bhagavadgita. Ramakrishna's abhorrence of woman and gold smacks of Christian asceticism. Mother Kaali saw him mellowed and strikingly reasonable in his attitude towards the woman as the virtual stumbling block on the road to Beatitude. He came to conclude in the dazzling dusk of his marvellous life that woman was the mother and honest women were the noblest gifts in the world. Though Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, besides Hinduism, maintain more or less equal share in his outlook as epitomised in the eloquent form of his sayings, it will be blasphemous if we call his philosophy eclectic. They are universal Divine Mother's spontaneous overflow of unvarnished feelings, the immanent spirit's superb outpourings.
His mission was to establish the worship of the Divine Mother quite contrary to the mystic adoration of the impersonal. To erase the stigma of the 'products of sin' from the face of woman he elevated the ideal of womanhood into Divine Motherhood. Ramakrishna possessed the yogic powers but seldom he exercised them. He vividly proved in his life and thought that he was a novel avatar who was the summum bonum of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism and all other religions of the world. The catholicity of certain Christian men of wisdom tended to draw comparisons between Jesus the Christ and Ramakrishna the Paramahamsa. Unless one is an ascetic, one is a sannyasin, one cannot convince oneself to sweep and clean the dingy tenements of the outcaste. That Ramakrishna did the job was the logical conclusion of his sublime awareness that all is Chaitanya who is One. This world is the manifestation of Kaali the Divine Mother in whose lap the saint and the scoundrel, the savant and the sinner, the vicious and the virtuous took rest. The Divine Mother held olive branch to one and all to live in calm serenity of consummate reconciliation.
Hardly a decade after the absorption of the Paramahamsa in the Brahman (August 16, 1886), there appeared an article in a British periodical, the Imperial and Quarterly Review of 1896. The title of the article was 'A Modern Hindu Saint'. It was the able penwork of C.H. Tawny. The distinguished professor's dispassionate article aroused wildfire interest in the European learned circles, of whom the scholar-extraordinary and the legnendary indologist, Max Mueller, was one. He contributed a brilliant short sketch of Sri Ramakrishna entitled, 'A Real Mahatman'. The celebrated sketch aroused antagonistic criticism in the diehard Christian and Theosophical world.
Sri Ramakrishna transferred his life-long savings of esoteric and ethical attainments to the virile Vivekananda who, in turn, by his fiery enterprise roused the soul of the world. Thus Sri Ramakrishna turned the 'Trivikrama' of limitless expansion.
The serene icon of this celebate inviolate adorns the dhyana mandiram of the Ramakrishna Ashrama on Beach Road.
CHALLA SIVASANKARAM
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