The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna: A Complete Review

Overview and Origins

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is one of the most unusual documents in the literature of world religion. It is not scripture in the traditional sense, no claim of divine revelation, no canonical authority, no priestly transmission. It is simply a man's careful diary of conversations he witnessed between 1882 and 1886 with a Bengali priest at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple.

Mahendranath Gupta, known throughout the text simply as "M", was a schoolteacher and a skeptic when he first visited Sri Ramakrishna in February 1882. He had heard about this temple priest who entered states of divine ecstasy and attracted followers from every social class and religious background. He went out of curiosity and was immediately disturbed by what he saw: not an impressive philosopher or a charismatic orator, but a childlike, physically slight man who laughed, wept, sang devotional songs, and periodically became perfectly still in what his followers called samadhi.

M came back. He kept coming back, for four years, bringing his diary and his pencil. He recorded everything: the conversations (often conducted simultaneously with several visitors), the songs Ramakrishna sang, the physical setting of the room, the specific questions that provoked specific answers, the tears, the jokes, the silences. The result was the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, published in Bengali in five volumes between 1897 and 1932.

Swami Nikhilananda translated the full text into English in 1942, with a foreword by Aldous Huxley. HarperCollins later included it on its list of the 100 Most Important Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century. It remains in print and continues to find new readers across the world.

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Who Was Sri Ramakrishna?

Gadadhar Chattopadhyay was born in 1836 in the village of Kamarpukur in Bengal, the son of a poor Brahmin priest. From childhood he had unusual experiences: he would lose consciousness while watching a flight of cranes against a thundercloud, or during a performance of devotional drama, or at the sight of an image of the god Vishnu. These episodes, which alarmed his family, were the first manifestations of what would become a lifelong capacity for samadhi.

At seventeen he went to Calcutta to assist his older brother, a priest, and eventually became a priest himself at the newly built Dakshineswar Kali Temple on the banks of the Ganges, just north of Calcutta. The temple had been built by a wealthy widow, Rani Rashmoni, and was considered by caste-orthodox Brahmins to be ritually problematic because of its founder's low caste. Gadadhar's willingness to serve there reflects something of his character: he was not interested in caste distinctions when it came to the worship of the divine.

At Dakshineswar, his mystical life intensified dramatically. He developed an overpowering longing for the direct vision of the goddess Kali, not as a theological proposition but as an experienced reality. The longing became unbearable; he wept, he could not eat or sleep, he held a sword to his chest and was on the point of ending his life when the vision came. He saw Kali as an ocean of light, experienced a state of bliss beyond description, and fell unconscious.

From this point on, Ramakrishna spent years in the most intense mystical practice, guided by a series of teachers. He learned Tantra from a woman teacher named Bhairavi Brahmani. He learned Advaita Vedanta from the wandering monk Totapuri. He practiced Vaishnavism in its most devotional forms. He practiced Islam, reportedly for three days during which he ate Muslim food, worshipped in the Muslim way, and had a vision of a luminous being who merged into himself. He practiced Christianity and had a vision of a luminous figure that his followers identified as Christ.

At each stage and in each tradition, he arrived at the same result: the direct experience of the divine, expressed in the specific language and imagery of the tradition he was practicing, but recognizably continuous in its quality. This empirical approach to spiritual inquiry, test each tradition by actually practicing it and see where it leads, is what gave his teaching its distinctive authority and its universal appeal.

The Recorder: 'M' and His Diaries

The quality of M's recording is extraordinary. He had the instincts of a novelist combined with the accuracy of a court reporter. He does not merely transcribe dialogue but records the full context: the time of day, the weather, who else was present, what songs were sung before or after the conversation, the physical condition of the Master, the emotional atmosphere of the room.

Aldous Huxley compared the Gospel to Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century biographical record of the English writer and lexicographer that is considered the greatest biography in the English language. The comparison is apt in one respect: both documents preserve the texture of a remarkable mind in conversation, with all the humor, contradiction, and specific detail that systematic philosophical writing inevitably smooths away.

The comparison breaks down in another respect: Boswell was recording an intellectual, a man of the world, someone who moved through the public intellectual life of Georgian London. M was recording a man who had never left a ten-mile radius of Dakshineswar, who was mostly uneducated in the formal sense, who related to fish and birds and flowers as presences charged with divine significance, and who could not finish a hymn to the Divine Mother without losing consciousness.

Samadhi: The Experience of God

The central claim of the Gospel, the claim that distinguishes it from ordinary religious literature, is that God can be directly experienced, not merely believed in or reasoned toward. Ramakrishna's life is the evidence for this claim, and the Gospel is its documentation.

Samadhi (from the Sanskrit: sam = complete, adhi = absorption) refers to states of meditative absorption in which the ordinary dual structure of experience, a subject perceiving an object, is dissolved. There are multiple degrees of samadhi in the Hindu philosophical tradition, ranging from states of deep absorption in which thought ceases but some sense of individual identity remains, to nirvikalpa samadhi in which all sense of individuality temporarily vanishes into undifferentiated being.

Ramakrishna's samadhi was characteristically triggered not by prolonged meditation practice but by contact with anything that evoked the divine: a devotional song, the name of God, the sight of a beautiful sunset, the vision of a devotee prostrating in prayer. He would become perfectly still, his eyes would take on a particular unfocused gaze, and he would remain in this state for minutes or hours. Observers noted that his body was warm but completely relaxed, that he could not be recalled by ordinary means, and that when he returned he would often weep or sing with an intensity of emotion that suggested recent contact with something overwhelming.

These states were witnessed by hundreds of people over the course of his life, including educated skeptics, physicians, and journalists who came specifically to investigate and debunk. Most left as something other than skeptics. The physician Mahendralal Sarkar, initially a severe critic of Ramakrishna's followers, came to examine him and spent many hours in conversation. He could not explain the samadhi states medically and eventually became a regular visitor.

Jato Mat Tato Path: As Many Paths

The phrase jato mat tato path, "as many faiths, so many paths", is the condensed form of Ramakrishna's most important teaching. It is not a statement of theological relativism (the idea that all religious claims are equally true regardless of their content). It is a statement of experiential pluralism: that many different methods of practice, sincerely followed, lead to the same direct experience of the divine.

This distinction matters. Ramakrishna did not say that all religions are the same, that their theologies, their ethics, their social practices are interchangeable. He said that their deepest practices, when pursued to their conclusion with genuine sincerity and intensity, arrive at the same place: the direct experience of the divine reality that the tradition is pointing toward.

His own experiments were the evidence. When he practiced Tantra (including the left-hand path with its use of the five forbidden things: wine, meat, fish, parched grain, and sexual union as ritual elements), he attained visions and experiences of the same quality as those he attained through his devotional bhakti practice. When he practiced Advaita Vedanta, the rigorous non-dualistic philosophy that dissolves the distinction between the individual self and Brahman, the state of nirvikalpa samadhi he reached was indistinguishable in quality from the states he reached through intense devotion to Kali.

The philosopher of religion Huston Smith, in his study of the world's major religious traditions, identified Ramakrishna as one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the perennialist claim that mystical experience across traditions shares a common core. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), had made a similar argument based on textual evidence; Ramakrishna's life is, in a sense, the lived experiment that James's analysis implies.

The Divine Mother: Kali and Bhakti

Ramakrishna's primary relationship with the divine was through Kali, the Dark Mother, the goddess associated in popular Hinduism with destruction, time, and death, depicted with a garland of severed heads and a tongue outstretched, dancing on the prone body of Shiva. This image, alarming to Western sensibilities, held for Ramakrishna an overwhelming intimacy: Kali was the Mother, and he was her child.

His relationship with Kali was not theological but intensely personal. He spoke to the goddess as he would speak to his own mother, with love, with complaint, with demands, with the complete trust that a young child has in the one who feeds and holds it. He would refuse to eat unless the goddess "ate" first, that is, unless he felt in his own body a sense of the goddess receiving the offering. He would weep for hours when he felt separated from her presence.

This mode of spiritual relationship, what Hinduism calls bhakti, devotional love, is the path that Ramakrishna most often recommended to visitors who came seeking guidance. Not because he thought it superior to the path of knowledge (jnana) or the path of selfless action (karma), but because it was the most direct path for most people: it required only genuine longing, genuine love, and genuine sincerity, rather than years of philosophical study or the capacity for the intense concentration that meditation requires.

The Four Paths to God

One of Ramakrishna's most practically useful contributions is his synthesis of the four major paths of Hindu spiritual practice, which Swami Vivekananda later systematized in his lectures on the four yogas.

Bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, is the path through which Ramakrishna himself primarily moved. It cultivates love, surrender, and relationship with the divine in personal form. The practices include prayer, chanting (kirtan), contemplation of the divine qualities, and the cultivation of specific emotional relationships with God (as child to parent, as lover to beloved, as servant to master).

Jnana yoga, the path of knowledge, is the path of philosophical discrimination. The practitioner distinguishes what is real (Brahman, the Absolute) from what is appearance (the world of names and forms), and gradually recognizes the identity of the individual self with the Absolute. This is the path associated with Advaita Vedanta and with teachers like Adi Shankaracharya and, much later, Nisargadatta Maharaj.

Karma yoga, the path of action, is the performance of all actions as an offering to the divine, without attachment to their results. The Bhagavad Gita's central teaching is the karma yoga: act from duty and devotion rather than from desire for reward. Ramakrishna taught that true karma yoga requires the recognition that one is an instrument of the divine rather than an independent doer.

Raja yoga, the path of meditation, is the systematic cultivation of concentration, leading through progressively deeper states of absorption to samadhi. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras are the classical text of this path. Vivekananda's Raja Yoga (1896) brought these teachings to a Western audience for the first time.

Ramakrishna did not insist that any particular path was superior. He adjusted his guidance to the nature of the person asking. To intellectuals he spoke of jnana; to the emotionally inclined, of bhakti; to the action-oriented, of karma yoga. He was, in this respect, a model of what the Tibetan Buddhist tradition calls "skillful means", the capacity to meet each student exactly where they are.

Ramakrishna and Vivekananda

The relationship between Ramakrishna and Narendranath Datta (later Swami Vivekananda) is one of the great teacher-student encounters in spiritual history. When Narendra first came to Dakshineswar at around eighteen years old, he was a rationalist and an agnostic, a brilliant young man who had studied Western philosophy and was skeptical of everything he could not verify empirically.

His first question to Ramakrishna was direct: "Have you seen God?" Ramakrishna answered without hesitation: "Yes, I see God more clearly than I see you." This was not the answer Narendra had expected, and it unsettled him completely.

Their relationship over the following years was intense and complex. Ramakrishna recognized in Narendra the vehicle through which his message would reach the world, and gradually transmitted to him the deepest aspects of his realization, including the experience of nirvikalpa samadhi (which Narendra initially found terrifying). Narendra recognized in Ramakrishna something that his rationalism could not explain away, and his philosophy was permanently transformed by the contact.

Vivekananda's 1893 address to the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago was the opening shot of Vedanta's entry into Western consciousness. His subsequent lectures and writings brought Ramakrishna's core teaching, that all religions are valid paths to the same divine reality, that the purpose of religion is the direct experience of the divine rather than belief or ritual, and that the divine is identical with the human soul, to audiences from San Francisco to London.

Aldous Huxley and the Perennial Philosophy

Aldous Huxley's foreword to Nikhilananda's translation is not merely a recommendation but a philosophical argument. Huxley had spent years studying the world's mystical traditions, eventually publishing The Perennial Philosophy in 1945, which argued that beneath the surface diversity of religion lay a single mystical truth accessible through direct experience. He saw Ramakrishna as the most complete human demonstration of this claim.

What impressed Huxley was not the bhakti elements of Ramakrishna's life, the weeping, the ecstasies, the devotion to Kali, which seemed culturally specific. It was the fact that the same quality of mystical experience appeared regardless of which tradition Ramakrishna was practicing. When he practiced Islam, he had Muslim visions. When he practiced Christianity, he had Christian visions. But beneath the specific imagery, the quality of experience, the dissolution of the boundary between self and God, the overwhelming sense of love and presence, the transformation of character, was consistent across all of them.

This consistency, Huxley argued, was evidence for the perennialist claim that mystical experience is not a culturally constructed phenomenon but a direct encounter with a reality that all genuine traditions are, at their deepest level, pointing toward. Ramakrishna's life was the experiment; the Gospel was the laboratory notebook.

Why This Book Matters

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna matters for several reasons that go beyond its historical importance or its place in the Hindu tradition.

First, it is the most complete documented record of what a fully awakened human life actually looks like from the outside. Most spiritual literature, scripture, commentary, autobiography, either describes the awakened state from the inside (as Nisargadatta does in I Am That) or theorizes about it from the outside (as philosophers and theologians do). M's diaries give us both: the Master's own words about his experience and the detailed external record of a man who, by any observable measure, was living in a fundamentally different relationship to reality than ordinary human beings.

Second, the teaching on the unity of religious paths is not more relevant now than when Ramakrishna lived; it is rather that the consequences of ignoring this teaching have become more visible. Religious conflict continues to cause enormous suffering. Ramakrishna does not address this politically or theologically; he addresses it empirically, by demonstrating that direct experience rather than doctrinal dispute is the measure of a spiritual tradition's validity.

Third, the figure of the Divine Mother, Kali as cosmic love rather than simply cosmic destruction, offers something that the masculine God of the Western traditions does not always provide: an image of the divine as mother, as the one who is most intimately present, most unconditionally accepting, most willing to receive even the most chaotic and broken expressions of longing. This image has proved deeply nourishing for practitioners across religious backgrounds.

For those drawn to the Hermetic tradition, the Gospel offers a rich parallel. The Hermetic teaching, that the divine is both transcendent and immanent, that the human soul participates in the divine nature, that all genuine wisdom traditions are expressions of the same primordial truth, is the Western esoteric tradition's version of jato mat tato path. Ramakrishna's life is its most compelling modern demonstration.