Ramakrishna and His Disciples

A review by Ben Evans

Before getting this book, the only information I had encountered about Ramakrishna was several exceptionally reverent passages from a work by Swami Vivekananda.?The Swami praises Ramakrishna as a manifestation of God such as India had never seen in modern times.

That was a level of praise I had never heard Vivekananda use except when he spoke of God the unmanifested.?At the time, I didn’t know that Vivekananda was one of Ramakrishna’s disciples, but that fact—the outward relationship of teacher and student seen by the world—doesn’t really account for the love between the two, as this book shows.?If there is any message in this unique and powerful biographical work offered by Sister Devamata, it is that God is alive, radiant, whole, and--let us not forget--beyond prediction.?Vivekananda’s love for the Master preceded his becoming Ramakrishna’s devotee, just as our own love for God is already within us, so that when we become aware of it, everything is not just brand new, but somehow inexplicably familiar too.?This aliveness outshining all convention and expectation is the feeling and the “message” of Sri Ramakrishna and His Disciples.?

Sister Devamata takes us from Ramakrishna’s childhood through his earthly passing, mixing quotations and paraphrasing from various firsthand sources to give us an inspiring vision of a boy uncommonly drawn to God and eventually getting so absorbed as to become known as the ‘illumined soul’ of Dakshineswar.?Sister Devamata gathered her material from many sources, but her main source was ‘Sasi,’ otherwise known as Ramakrishnananda, another of Ramakrishna’s close circle of devotees.

No book can give us a complete picture of God, but this book, in its uniqueness and humbleness, gives us a strong suggestion.?The effect of reading it proves Ramakrishnananda’s statement in the book’s forward true: “We might talk of Ramakrishna for days and days together and still he would rise up before us as absolutely new. So unfathomable is he!”?Attempting to “review” this book has that effect as well.?While it is loosely chronological, the book’s spirit renders the “facts” of Ramakrishna’s life and associations hard to remember.

Prominent, however, is the Master’s intense, seemingly insane quest to know God.?We have scenes of his staying alone for days and nights with nothing to eat or drink, and we have his crying out loud, his bodily sacrifice to the Eternal.?He carries on conversations with “nothing” and appears to the orthodox Hindus as mad.?Only because a select few noticed the divinity was he able to be housed and sheltered while the fullness of God within him unfolded.?