Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna (born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay, 18 February 1836 – 16 August 1886) was a Bengali mystic and one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth-century Hindu renaissance. Born into a poor Brahmin family in rural Bengal with little formal schooling, he became around 1855 a priest at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple outside Calcutta, where his all-consuming devotion to the goddess Kali ripened into recurring states of ecstatic absorption (samadhi).

Under a succession of teachers he then practised the disciplines of several traditions in turn — Tantric Shaktism, Vaishnava bhakti, and, under the wandering monk Tota Puri, the nondual realisation of Advaita Vedanta — and reported reaching the same ultimate reality through each.

He also undertook practices inspired by Christianity and Islam, concluding that the world’s religions are, in his famous image, “so many paths to reach one and the same goal.” His wife, Sarada Devi, whom he married young and revered as a living embodiment of the Divine Mother, became a spiritual figure in her own right and a cornerstone of the later movement.

Ramakrishna taught not through systematic philosophy but through vivid parables and the contagious force of his own realisation; his conversations were recorded by the disciple Mahendranath Gupta as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

His foremost disciple, Narendranath Dutta, became Swami Vivekananda, who systematised and carried his master’s message to the West at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions and founded the Ramakrishna Mission.

For the Atlas, Ramakrishna is the experiential fountainhead behind the modern global spread of Vedanta and yoga: the living demonstration that consciousness is one ground reachable by many roads. His ecstatic states are reported religious experience, and the Atlas presents them as such rather than as established physiology.