Ramakrishna’s Message for the Modern Age

Dr. R. K. DAS GUPTA
Formerly Director, National Library, Calcutta

[Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the great saint, was born on Feb. 18, 1836. His 150th birth anniversary is being celebrated throughout the country and abroad as well. Dr. Das Gupta delivered a lecture on this occasion which is being reproduced here by the kind courtesy of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Calcutta.             –EDITOR]

I thank the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture for its kindly asking me to speak on Ramakrishna at this meeting although I know I do not deserve this singular honour. I do not suppose I can offer you anything new and far less anything profound on a subject like Ramakrishna’s message for the modern age.

Every great civilization presents a measure of conflict between tradition and modernity and in every age modernity is looked upon as a deviation from the norm, from the cherished values of society. Socrates struck the Athenians to be too modern and he had to pay for his modernity with his life. When the apostles of Christ preached their new gospels they were treated as enemies of tradition and St. Paul thought that his message was ‘unto the Jews a stumb­ling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.’ The apostles of the new faith met people who mocking, said, “These men are full of new wine.” There is a modern element in antiquity and in the intellectual history of Europe this modern element creates tension and often leads to doctrinal controversies. But in the history of Indian civilization there is scarcely any sharp polarity between tradition and modernity and seeing this a European historian of our modern culture, James H. Cousins, has spoken with enthusiasm of what he calls our antique modernity in his work The Renaissance in India (1918). The great changes in our intellectual history do not affect the basic unity of our philosophy of life while they give a new dimension and a new depth to it. Successive ages in the history of our thought have created a plenitude of ideas which have only enriched our spiritual sensibility. What the Bengali poet said about the transition from the Rigveda to the Upanishads is true of all major turning-points in our religious history.

If we have moved from one stage of spiritual development to another, from a less to more advanced philosophy, we have always moved towards a larger dawn and have loved to gather our past into our present in a movement towards a future. From this point of view Ramakrishna represents a great renewal of our ancient wisdom, his life being a grand summa vedantica and the Ramakrishnakathaamrita(The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna)a great instauration of an old faith. And as the author of a new revelation of our perennial philosophy he is unmistakably modern in rising above all questions of sect and doctrine, of priestly or scriptural authority, and, above all, in expressing an oecumenicity of spiritual temper which makes him the most universal amongst the Men of God in the world’s religious history. There is a clarity of thought in Ramakrishna’s words which is only an expression of the purity and intensity of his experience and together they give his message the precision of science, the science of the spirit. What we call Ramakrishna’s mysticism has a firm logical foundation and one can therefore work out its metaphysics, its psychology, and its ethics.

What makes Ramakrishna the most modern amongst the great revealers of human faith is that he could make his own life, his words and gestures, his eloquence and his silence, his tears and his jokes, his conviviality and his trance an empirical evidence of the life of the spirit. Ramakrishna does not preach religion: he is religion incarnate: in him we see the spirit in the flesh, the spirit moving in our midst with its hands and feet. When we speak of Ramakrishna’s message we do not remember only his words profoundly significant as they are, we also contemplate his living presence as made vivid to us in the pages of the Kathaamrita.

But the idea of modernity as it applies to the modern age, that is, the twentieth century, stands for an intellectual climate where faith is in retreat, where the life of the spirit is a logical absurdity, and God is but a hypothesis of the intellectually unregenerate. The Modern Age is the Age of Anxiety, of Uncertainty, it is an age which repudiates religion as the opium of the people and looks upon morality as but a convenient instrument of social peace. Spengler saw this age as the age of the Decline of the West as the title of his great work would show. The mood of the age is reflected in the well-known poem of T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”, in these words:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.

We cannot say this sense of spiritual and moral hollowness has not touched our people. It has cast its influence on a large section of our educated classes living in urban centres. And even in our rural areas large masses of people are being taught to rest their faith in some godless doctrine to ensure their economic and social salvation. I have myself met not a few amongst our intellectuals who believe that the Indian people are in this abject plight because of their superstitious faith in some Reality that transcends the empirical world and that we are falling to improve our lot on this earth because of our fatal desire for some unearthly bliss.

Our question, then, is, What is Ramakrishna’s message to an age which has lost its faith in the higher life, which has only a severely utilitarian and politico-economic approach to the problems of our society? Let us consider their arguments in support of their view. They will ask, What has Ramakrishna to say about the most vital question before India in his days – the question of attaining political freedom? Then they will ask, What are Rama­krishna’s views on the most important economic and social questions of the day? Coming to the burning problems of these latter days they will ask, What relevance has Ramakrishna’s message to the question of nuclear disarmament and world peace? You will search the five volumes of the Ramakrislmakathaamritaor the two volumes of Lilaaprasanga (Sri Ramakrishna the great Master) in vain for Ramakrishna’s answers to these questions. You will not find answers to these questions in the New Testament either and the Dhammapada, the sacred book of the Buddhists, is also silent about them.

But are these really the vital questions of our life, even of our life on this earth? Are these the most fundamental questions about the condition of mankind today? Do these questions go into the very foundation of human action and human motive? They are certainly causes of anxiety, they are certainly very important concerns for the modern man. The West has been putting to itself the most important of political questions and it has also answered those questions in various ways. But has the accumulated political wisdom of the West assured it a political paradise? Very profound answers to man’s economic questions are now more than hundred years old, but have those answers brought about our economic salvation? Differences in political and economic ideas are causing greater dissensions in the modern world than differences in religious ideas. The modern man has at his disposal more knowledge about his material environment, about nature and its behaviour than at any time in human history. He has practically conquered nature and there seems to be nothing that he cannot do to get it serve any of his material ends. And yet man is now stricken with a terrible fear, the fear of a nuclear war that may destroy the human race and wipe out all traces of human civilization.

We must then ask ourselves if our science and technology, our politics and our economics can really save us from this dire fate of universal extinction. Can the most sagacious diplomat bring peace between two countries? Where then must we go to have that peace, a peace not between two countries, but universal peace? Are we not gradually realizing that we cannot have world peace till we have attained peace in our individual soul, that we cannot put an end to evil in the external world till we have dethroned evil within ourselves? The most vital, the most fundamental questions of human life, of the individual and of society, relatives to the condition of the human soul, the ground of all human thought and action, the ultimate source of all our energy and strength. Care for the world’s physical safety is a puerile care even when that safety is needed for the preservation of the great values of human civilization and of its manifestations in art and letters. Such collective concern for peace proceeds from individual fear of loss and of death. It is essentially a selfish desire, rich a man’s a anxiety about the safety of his treasures.

Ramakrishna shows us the way to peace and it is not the way we try to find for ourselves in disarmament conferences. We will not have peace if peace alone is our goal. Peace will come to us only as the consequence of something that is more precious than peace. Ramakrishna’s way to peace is the way of love. You cannot have peace in a loveless world, a world stricken with hatred and suspicion. Ramakrishna’s message to the modern man is the message of this universal love. And the ground of that love is the love of God. Even the ideals of justice and righteousness will seem empty when you enter deep into the mystery of this love.

But the modern man wit his scientific temper will ask, Why should we induce God, something which we have never seen, into this idea of universal love? Ramakrishna never enters into this question in any of his conversations. God was not with him a matter of belief, or the subject of a theological question: God was his very being, the very breath of his life. But it is possible to find out the rationale of his faith in God. If you would ask Ramakrishna whether universal love was the sum of the love of all persons for all persons of the world, he would certainly say that such arithmetic of addition cannot be the foundation of the infinity of love. On the contrary, it confines within space and time what transcends both. God is that Infinite, the Absolute who is capable of descending into the world of the relative as a devotee’s personal Deity. If human love is not a part of this divine love, it is worthless and cannot sustain us for long. Ramakrishna’s love of God is the guarantee of the endlessness of his love. Love that is not love of God, that is, divine love, is an uncertain and ephemeral love. It lacks a foundation which never wears out and therefore can assure you your immortality. This love of God with all its infinitude is the ground of all human virtues, individual and social, and of everything that assures individual and collective happiness. In the course of a conversation that took place on 8 April 1883 Ramakrishna says: “There are certain signs of God-realization. A man who longs for God is not far from attaining Him. What are the outer indications of this longing? They are discrimination, dispassion, compassion for living beings, serving holy men, loving their company, chanting God’s name and glories, telling the truth, and the like.” Virtues like right-minded ness, self-control, compassion, and truthfulness are only the consequence of love of God, they are the necessary adjuncts of that love. When such virtues are pursued as but ethical principles they are tarnished by a loveless ego. One can be proud of such virtues and value them as one values gold. But when these virtues arise out of a boundless love of God, they become a part of one’s being, a natural expression of his soul.

In the fifth chapter of the Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad Prajaapati instructs his pupils, gods, men and demons three virtues–self-­control, charity and compassion. But you can practise these virtues properly only when you have realized the inexhaustibleness of Brahman and have been a partaker of His fullness. The first verse of this chapter of the Upanishad is about this inexhaustibleness of Brahman:
Poornamadah poornamidam poornaat poornamudachyate:
Poornasya poornamaadaaya poornamevaavasishyate.

(That is full, this is full. From fullness, fullness, proceeds. If you take away fullness from fullness, even fullness then remains.) Rama­krishna called us to this sense of fullness to be attained through love of God. The disturbing ego which separates us from others and which obliges us to see everything in fragments is dissolved in this sense of fullness and when it is so dissolved we have the right motive for good action. Or else all our actions are but expression of our abounding egotism; they are so even when they are apparently directed towards some social good. This is the essence of the philosophy of anaasakti-yoga or nishkaama-karma as Lord Krishna presents it in the Bhagavad Gita. Ramakrishna did not work in our social field or political field. But he did work by way of accomplishing a great task. That task was to vivify to his disciples and through them to the posterity the meaning of the philosophy of divine love and of right action in a spirit of non-attachment Non-attachment will be an ethical abstraction and a principle impossible to practise, unless it is brought about by our attachment to something higher and greater than ourselves. Non-attachment is not a negative virtue: we express the idea through a negative prefix by way of explaining how our lower or individual ego is burnt in our love of God. We are happy witnesses of that extinction of the lower self, because it brings us something that we must exalt above everything else. Renuncia­tion then is not self-deprivation: it is a means of self-realization: it is removing the dross from the gold, so that we can preserve the true treasures of our soul which time cannot destroy. In a conversation that took place on 5 August 1882, Ramakrishna asked, “What is the significance of the Gita?”And answering the question in his inimitable simplicity of style, he said: “It is what you find by repeating the word ten times. It is then reversed into Tyagi, which means a person who has renounced everything for God. And the lesson of the Gitais ‘O man, renounce everything and seek God alone’ Whether a man is a monk or a householder, he has to shake off all attachment from his mind.”

Apparently it is an ambiguous or even absurd philosophy. We have our innocent attachments to our near and dear ones, to this beautiful world, to our important work. Let us love God and let us make him supreme in our life. But why should we take ourselves from the grand feast of life which God him­self has offered us? For those of us who enjoy this life on earth as God’s grand feast, there is no need for renunciation, for he can so look upon life only when he has renounced his ego. But for most of us life is not God’s play or lila: it is a play of our own ego where we strut and fret our brief hour and then we are heard no more. Even our apparently good actions are marred by this irrepressible ego.

Amongst European poets it is T. S. Eliot who, obviously under the influence of the Bhagavad Gita, has shown the working of the ego even in what is intended to be an act of sacrifice on the part of a man of religion. In his drama Murder in the Cathedral, Becket realizes to his dismay that he is about to give his life for the sake of the church out of a desire, desire for the glory of a martyr. Becket’s words at this hour of spiritual crisis in his life are an excellent gloss on the doctrine of nishkaama-karma (desire­less action) of the Bhagavad Gita as explained by Ramakrishna in his dialogues.

To do the right deed for the wrong reason

Ambition comes behind and unobservable
Sin grows with doing good …….

For those who serve the greater cause
may make the cause serve them,
Still doing right: and striving with
political men
May make that cause political, not by
what they do
But by what they are

The modern age is an age where sin grows with doing good. Perhaps this has been so throughout human history But in our age humanity has a choice between a heroic survival and the most shameful universal doom. It is a pity that we are steadily proceed­ing towards the latter. And yet the international political scene presents a spectacle of competitive benefaction, of self regarding gestures of peace which is only belligerence in disguise Ramakrishna has a definite message for a cursed age such as this and it is a message of divine love which alone can be the basis of a universal fellowship and universal peace. This was his message to the India of his own times too. He was concerned more ­with what people were than with what they were doing. While it is true that he did not involve himself directly in the social and political affairs of the day, he knew what was happening in the country and what was being done by what kind of people and with what motive. He suspected that a good deal of the reformist activity of those days was tarnished by egotism and we can have no doubt that, when he talked about the strong element of the tamasin human conduct, he had in mind the self-seeking men of affairs who were perhaps themselves unaware of their doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

If the cry of the modern age is a cry for universal peace and human fellowship Ramakrishna’s voice is a voice of hope for all who are raising that cry. In his brief essay on “The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna” Christopher Wood says, “the more I think about Ramakrishna and his disciples, the more I am aware of a growing conviction that sooner or later, by some route or other, this is the way we all must go.” I do not suppose Wood is here speaking of man’s spiritual salvation. I think he is speaking of some change in the affairs of the world which, according to him, can be brought about by Ramakrishna’s gospel of divine love as the only instrument of human good.

Ramakrishna had a profound sense of human history and of human fate, although in his talks be never directly mentioned anything relating to either. All his remarks on the ethics of human action have relevance to a world where enterprises of great pitch and moment are wrecked by clash of egos. And today all violence within a nation and on the international scene may be attributed to individual or collective ego. In this country our egos are inflating faster than our currency and yet we do not realize how we are being ruined by competing plans for our survival. How deeply was Ramakrishna concerned about this fatality in human affairs and how he wanted to save us from it we can see from his idea about Swami Vivekananda. And this would also show how Ramakrishna’s mysticism did not negate life or the world for the sake of some private heaven.

In the course of a conversation that took place on 9 August 1885, Ramakrishna describes his vision of Narendra: “Seeing him absorbed in meditation, I called aloud, ‘Oh, Narendra!” He opened his eyes a little….At once I said to the Divine Mother, ‘Mother, entangle him in Maya; otherwise he will give up his body in Samadhi.” This is indeed Ramakrishna’s testament for his dear disciple, for his age and for humanity. He had a profound solicitude for the human fate in the world and it was his conviction that the world could be saved only by world-losers and world-forsakers who can fulfil themselves only through renunciation.

Arnold Toynbee somewhere says that Ramakrishna’s teaching is right “because it flows from a true vision of spiritual reality.” We will begin to understand the meaning of this vision for the modern age, only when we discover the emptiness of the grossly utilitarian humanistic approach to the human condition and regain our faith in the life of the spirit.