A section from the journey

Ramakrishna of Dakshineswar

Sri Ramakrishna was a priest of the goddess Kali at a temple near Calcutta. He did not argue; he experienced. He walked many spiritual paths in turn, of devotion and of knowledge, and reported reaching the same goal by each. From this came his great teaching: jato mat, tato path, as many faiths, so many paths. He taught in homely parables, and often fell into samadhi, the deep absorption of union. His wife, Sarada Devi, was honoured as the Holy Mother. A circle of young seekers gathered around him.

We have spent some time now with reformers, with their sharp arguments and their hard-won laws. Let us turn, and meet a man who was nothing like them. He left no laws and won no debates. He simply loved God, with his whole being, and that love changed everything around him.

His name was , born in a village in Bengal in 1836. He became the priest of the goddess Kali, the Divine Mother, at a temple called Dakshineswar, on the bank of the Ganga near Calcutta. He was no scholar. He could barely be bothered with book-learning. But before the image of the Mother he wept and pleaded and sang, like a small child crying for the one who bore it, until, he said, she became real to him, more real than the temple walls.

Here is the thing that set him apart. The reformers argued about God. Ramakrishna wanted to taste God. His whole way was not thinking but experiencing, a direct and burning encounter. And when he spoke, very often, in the middle of a word about the Divine, his eyes would still, his breath would slow, and he would pass into a deep, wordless absorption. The tradition calls this , the state of union, where the seeker and the sought melt into one.

Then he did something rarer still, and it is the heart of why we remember him. He did not stay on one path. One after another, he took up the great roads of the spirit and walked each to its end. He followed the path of passionate devotion. He followed the steep path of non-dual knowledge, under a stern wandering teacher, until he touched the formless Absolute. And it is told that he even took up, for a time, the practice of Islam, and later of Christianity.

And by every one of these roads, he reported, he arrived at the same place. The same one God, met under many names and along many ways. This was not a theory he had read. It was something he said he had lived, with his own heart, again and again.

Out of that living came the teaching he is loved for, said in plain Bengali words: . As many faiths, so many paths. The many ways of worship are not rivals warring for the one truth. They are so many roads up the one mountain, so many rivers to the one sea.

He taught it, as he taught everything, through homely little stories that a child could hold. Think of a wide pond, he would say, with bathing-steps on every side. At one step a man draws water and calls it by one name; at another, by a different name; yet it is one water. Or think of a doll made of salt that went down to measure the depth of the ocean. The moment it touched the water, it dissolved, and became the very thing it had gone to measure. So, he said, does the soul that goes to fathom God.

Beside Ramakrishna stood his wife, , married to him as a girl. He came to see in her the living presence of the Divine Mother he worshipped, and once formally honoured her so. After his passing she became the still, steadying heart of all who followed him, revered to this day as the Holy Mother. Her quiet strength was its own kind of teaching.

In his last years a circle of young men began to gather at Dakshineswar, drawn by something they could not name. They came to argue, some of them, and stayed to learn. Ramakrishna died in 1886, of a cruel illness of the throat. But the fire he had lit in those young hearts did not go out. One of them, most of all, would carry it across the seas. We meet him next.

Ramakrishna trusted what he had tasted with his own heart more than what he could prove with words. Think of a time you knew something to be true through living it, not through being told. What did that kind of knowing feel like, compared to knowing a mere fact?