Sri Ramakrishna 1836 – 1886

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was a Bengali Hindu mystic and religious teacher and one of the most influential religious figures of nineteenth-century India. As the principal priest at the Dakshineswar temple to the Goddess Kali outside Calcutta, he experienced a long succession of intense religious states and devoted himself in turn to the practices of several Hindu schools, of Islam, and of Christianity, concluding from each that all genuine religions lead to the same goal. His foremost disciple Vivekananda would carry his teaching into the wider world. His conversations with disciples were recorded in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

Sri Ramakrishna — born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay in 1836 in the village of Kamarpukur in Bengal — was the youngest son of a Brahmin family of modest means and famously intense piety. After his father's death he came at seventeen to Calcutta and was appointed in 1855 as a priest at the new Dakshineswar Kali Temple founded by the wealthy widow Rani Rashmoni on the bank of the Ganges, just north of the city.

From 1856 he underwent a series of intense religious experiences that drew teachers to him from successively the tantric, Vaishnava, Vedantic, and even Sufi and Christian traditions, and that left him convinced of the truth and the practical equivalence of the world's religions for those who plunged into them with sufficient longing. From the late 1860s until his death he was the spiritual center of a small circle of Calcutta intellectuals and reformers, including Vivekananda, Brahmananda, and Mahendranath Gupta, whose record of his conversations was later published as the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

Ramakrishna left no books of his own. His sayings and personal example — his ecstasies, his earthy parables, his radical insistence that 'as many faiths, so many paths' — were carried into the modern world by Vivekananda and the Ramakrishna Mission. He died at Cossipore, near Calcutta, of throat cancer in August 1886, attended by his wife Sarada Devi, his closest disciple.