"The time was ripe for one to
be born, who in one body would have the brilliant intellect of Sankara and the
wonderfully expansive, infinite heart of Chaitanya; one who would see in every
sect the same spirit working, the same God; one who would see God in every
being, one whose heart would weep for the poor, for the weak, for the outcast,
for the downtrodden, for every one in this world, inside India or outside
India; and at the same time whose grand brilliant intellect would conceive of
such noble thoughts as would harmonize all conflicting sects, not only in
India but outside of India, and bring a marvelous harmony, the universal
religion of head and heart into existence. Such a man was born, and I had the
good fortune to sit at his feet for years. Let me now only mention the great
Sri Ramakrishna, the fulfillment of the Indian sages, the sage for the time...
For the first time I found a man who dared to say that he saw God, that
religion was a reality to be felt, to be sensed in an infinitely more intense
way than we can sense the world. I began to go to that man, day after day, and
I actually saw that religion could be given. One touch, one glance, can change
a whole life. I learnt from my Master that the religions of the world are not
contradictory or antagonistic. They are but various phases of one eternal
religion... The first part of my Master's life was spent in acquiring
spirituality, and the remaining years in distributing it... His life is a
searchlight of infinite power thrown upon the whole mass of Indian religious
thought. He was the living commentary to the Vedas and to their aim. He had
lived in one life the whole cycle of the national religious existence in
India."
- Swami
Vivekananda
"In a recent and
unique example, in the life of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa we see a colossal
spiritual capacity first driving straight to the divine realization, taking,
as it were, the Kingdom of Heaven by violence, and then seizing upon one Yoga
method after another and extracting the substance out of it with an incredible
rapidity, always to return to the heart of the whole matter, the realization
and possession of God by the power of love, by the extension of inborn
spirituality into various experience and by the spontaneous play of an
intuitive knowledge. Such an example cannot be generalized. Its object also
was special and temporal, to exemplify in the great and decisive experience of
a Master-soul the truth, now most necessary to humanity, towards which a world
long divided into jarring sects and schools is with difficulty laboring, that
all sects are forms and fragments of a single integral truth and all
disciplines labor in their different ways towards one supreme experience...
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa is the epitome of the whole. His was the great
super-conscious life which alone can witness to the infinitude of the current
that bears us all oceanwards. He is the proof of the Power behind us, and the
future before us."
-Sri
Aurobindo
"Ramakrishna was
a living embodiment of godliness. His sayings are not those of a mere learned
man but they are pages from the Book of Life. They are revelations of his own
experiences. They therefore leave on the reader an impression which he cannot
resist. In this age of skepticism Ramakrishna presents an example of a bright
and living faith which gives solace to thousands of men and women who would
otherwise have remained without spiritual light. Ramakrishna's life was an
object-lesson in Ahimsa. His love knew no limits, geographical or otherwise.
May his divine love be an inspiration to all."
- Mahatma
Gandhi
"The man whose
image I here evoke was the consummation of two thousand years of the spiritual
life of three hundred million people. Although he has been dead forty years,
his soul animates modern India. He was no hero of action like Gandhi, no
genius in art or thought like Gandhi or Tagore. He was a little village
Brahmin of Bengal whose outer life was set in a limited frame without striking
incident, outside the social and political activity of the time. But his inner
life embraced the whole multiplicity of men and Gods. It was a part of the
very source of Energy, the Divine Shakti, of whom Vidyapati, the old poet of
Mithila, and Ramprasad of Bengal sing."
- Romain
Rolland
To the
Paramahamsa Ramakrishna Deva
"Diverse
courses of worship
from varied springs of fulfillment
have mingled in your meditation.
The manifold revelation of the joy of the Infinite
has given form to a shrine of unity in your life
where from far and near arrive salutations
to which I join my own."
-
Rabindranath Tagore
"The fervent love of God,
nay, the sense of complete absorption in Godhead, has nowhere found a stronger
and more eloquent expression than in the utterances of Ramakrishna. They show
the exalted nature of his faith. How deep he has seen into the mysteries of
knowledge and love of God we see from his sayings... These utterances of
Ramakrishna reveal to us not only his own thoughts, but the faith and hope of
millions of human beings.. .This constant sense of the presence of God is
indeed the common ground on which we may hope that in time not too distant,
the great temple of the future will be erected, in which the Hindus and
non-Hindus may join hands and hearts in worshipping the same Supreme Spirit --
who is not far from every one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our
being."
- Max Muller
"Sri Ramakrishna made his
appearance and delivered his message at the time and the place at which he and
his message were needed. This message could hardly have been delivered by
anyone who had not been brought up in the Hindu religious tradition. Sri
Ramakrishna was born in Bengal in 1836. He was born into a world that in his
lifetime was, for the first time, being united on a literally worldwide scale.
Today we are still living in this transitional chapter of the world's history,
but it is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning
will have to have an Indian ending, if it is not to end in the
self-destruction of the human race. In the present age, the world has been
united on the material plane by Western technology. But this Western skill has
not only 'annihilated distance'; it has armed the peoples of the world with
weapons of devastating power at a time when they have been brought to point
blank range of each other without yet having learnt to know and love each
other. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of
salvation for mankind is an Indian way. Sri Ramakrishna's message was unique
in being expressed in action. Religion is not just a matter for study, it is
something that has to be experienced and to be lived, and this is the field in
which Sri Ramakrishna manifested his uniqueness... His religious activity and
experience were, in fact, comprehensive to a degree that had perhaps never
before been attained by any other religious genius, in India or elsewhere."
- Arnold
Toynbee
"Sri Ramakrishna was
completely beyond the average run of men. He appears rather to belong to the
tradition of the great rishis of India, who have come from time to time to
turn our attention to the higher things of life and of the spirit."
- Jawaharlal
Nehru
(About The Gospel of Sri
Ramakrishna) "Never have the casual and unstudied utterances of a great
religious teacher been set down with so minute a fidelity. To Western readers,
it is true, this fidelity and this wealth of detail are sometimes a trifle
disconcerting; for the social, religious and intellectual frames of reference
within which Sri Ramakrishna did his thinking and expressed his feelings were
entirely Indian. But after the first few surprises and bewilderments, we begin
to find something peculiarly stimulating and instructive about the very
strangeness and, to our eyes, the eccentricity of the man revealed to us in
"M's" narrative. What a scholastic philosopher would call the "accidents" of
Ramakrishna's life were intensely Hindu and therefore, so far as we in the
West are concerned, unfamiliar and hard to understand -- its "essence,"
however, was intensely mystical and therefore universal. To read through these
conversations in which mystical doctrine alternates with an unfamiliar kind of
humour, and where discussions of the oddest aspects of Hindu mythology give
place to the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of Ultimate
Reality is in itself a liberal education in humility, tolerance and suspense
of judgement. We must be grateful to the translator for his excellent version
of a book so curious and delightful as a biographical document, so precious,
at the same time, for what it teaches us of the life of the spirit."
- Aldous
Huxley
"This is the story of a
phenomenon. I will begin by calling him simply that rather than 'holy man,'
'mystic,' 'saint,' or 'avatar;' all emotive words with mixed associations
which may attract some readers, repel others. A phenomenon is often something
extraordinary and mysterious. Ramakrishna was extraordinary and mysterious;
most of all to those who were best fitted to understand him. A phenomenon is
always a fact, an object of experience. That is how I shall try to approach
Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna's life, being comparatively recent history, is well
documented. In this respect, it has the advantage over the lives of other
earlier phenomena of a like nature. I believe, or am at least strongly
inclined to believe, that he was what his disciples declared that he was: an
incarnation of God upon earth."
- Christopher
Isherwood
