Paramahamsa in Three Ideas
the essentialsYata mat, tata path
As many faiths, so many paths — all religions lead to the same God.
God with and without form
The formless and the formed are like ice and water — the same reality.
Woman and gold
Lust and greed (kāminī-kāñcana) are the great obstacles to God.
Ramakrishna (born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay; 18 February 1836 – 16 August 1886) was a Bengali mystic and priest of the Kālī temple at Dakshineswar, near Calcutta, and one of the most influential saints of modern India. With little formal education, he spent his life in intense religious practice and ecstatic states of absorption in God (samādhi), worshipping Kālī as the Divine Mother, and — according to his followers — practising in turn the paths of Tantra, Vaiṣṇava devotion, Advaita Vedānta (under the naked monk Totāpurī, through whom he attained nirvikalpa samādhi), and even Islam and Christianity, realising God in each. From this experience he taught “yata mat, tata path” — “as many faiths, so many paths” — the conviction that all religions lead to the same God. His conversations, recorded by his disciple Mahendranath Gupta in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, are full of homely parables: God with form and without form are like ice and water; the many religions are like many ghāṭs leading to the same lake, where Hindus call the water jal, Muslims pānī and Christians water. His disciple Swami Vivekananda carried his message to the world and founded the Ramakrishna Mission in his name.
Curiosities
did you know?- His conversations were recorded by his disciple Mahendranath Gupta (‘M’) in the Śrī Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Kathāmṛta — ‘The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna’.
- He married Sarada Devi when she was five; they lived together chastely, and he worshipped her as the Divine Mother. She is revered as the ‘Holy Mother’.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Can one person practise every religion and find them all true?
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsSri Aurobindo
The revolutionary nationalist turned yogi and philosopher of Pondicherry, whose The Life Divine and Integral Yoga teach that evolution is spirit’s ascent through matter, life and mind toward a “supermind” that will divinise earthly life.
Amīr Khusrau
The 13th–14th century poet, musician and Sufi of Delhi — disciple of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, master of Persian verse, pioneer of Hindavi (early Hindi-Urdu), and by tradition the inventor of qawwālī, the khayāl and the sitar.
Jayadeva
The 12th-century Sanskrit poet of Bengal or Odisha whose Gītagovinda — the love, quarrel and reunion of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa — is the most sensuous devotional poem in Sanskrit, sung in temples and danced in Odissi to this day.
Sūrdās
The 16th-century blind poet of Braj whose songs of Kṛṣṇa’s childhood mischief and the gopīs’ longing — the Sūrsāgar, “Ocean of Sūr” — are the heart of Kṛṣṇa devotion in Hindi.
Āṇṭāḷ
The only woman among the twelve Tamil Āḻvār saints (9th century) — a girl who wore the garland meant for Viṣṇu, refused any human husband, and wrote the Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi, poems of longing for God as her bridegroom.
Caitanya Mahāprabhu
The 15th–16th century Bengali saint who led an ecstatic movement of singing the names of Kṛṣṇa, regarded by his followers as Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā in one body — founder of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism and ancestor of the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement.