Romain Rolland's "Ramakrishna"

Romain Rolland's

"Ramakrishna" ¹

The very greatest saints and prophets of all climes have a message which carries beyond their immediate surroundings and exerts, through many devious ways, its formative action on the evolving human spirit. But it is not given to everyone to receive directly and transmit their message. Prejudices, racial and religious, unowned preferences lodged deep down in our organic nature, repugnance to unusual habits or unfamiliar forms of thought, raise a powerful barrier against that sympathetic rapprochement which must lead the way to understanding and fruitful acceptance. It is only the rare representative souls who, nurtured on all that is best and finest in their age, can still think beyond it and reach the Universal in man, that can bridge this chasm and lead down the River of Life into the byeways and valleys.

The spirit of Romain Rolland is of this order. A true modern, and a son of the West which is so much pre-occupied with the fringes of the Realm of Knowledge, he is yet closest kin of India in his intuition of spiritual values, and is the symbol of Europe, shaken by the Great War, turning to ancient fountains for inspiration and guidance. He has been profoundly interested and moved by the phenomenon of the Indian Renaissance in which ancient Indian ideals have appeared again on the stage in modern setting, and proved their perennial vitality. In his work on Mahatma Gandhi he was concerned with the spiritual make-up of the most extraordinary man of action in ancient or modern times. Difficult as this must have been to write, the present study of Ramakrishna (as well as the future one on Vivekananda, which he promises) is incomparably more so to the European mind. For here we are much nearer the core of the divine mystery, the Holy of Holies, and to appraise and understand Ramakrishna and his many-sided divine realisation, one has to shed all littleness of mind, all narrowness and prejudice, to purify one's intellect and become humble, as in a sanctuary. It would have required very little–nothing more, for instance, than a trace of the well-known repugnance of the civilised European to the Kali image, to spoil the book completely. It is a great tribute to the author's discrimination and breadth of sympathy that there is nothing here to hurt the Indian reader; there is displayed, on the other hand, a rare perspective in seizing the personality of Ramakrishna in its central and essential features, and conveying its living impression to the reader.

We fail to get here, it is true, the atmosphere of a close personal devotion to the Master. But we have what more than makes up for it, a certain breadth of view, a synthetic fervour which honours all the great religious personalities as parts of one divine stream, and hails Ramakrishna as a brother of Christ, combined with a detachment and a critical poise which refreshes the reader like a gust of cool air. By dint of careful and painstaking research, not only has the personality of the Master been reconstructed for us in vivid detail, but his whole spiritual ground, the stage in which he acted has been brought into the picture–the contemporary religious streams, and their dominant personalities, the Brahmo Samaj and Ram Mohun Roy, the Tagores and Keshub Chunder Sen, the Arya Samaj and Dayanand. The result is a variegated composite picture, a mosaic of the living religious elements of modern India, surmounted by the Supreme figure of Ramakrishna. From the wide scope of interesting material covered by the book, we must content ourselves with selecting one or two topics for discussion here.

We may notice particularly the careful and scientific attitude with which the author has traced Ramakrishna's spiritual evolution. The author's acquaintance with the mystical experiences of Christian saints lends the book a perspective which is lacking in Indian accounts of Ramakrishna, and renders it instructive to European and Indian readers alike.

The great fact established by Ramakrishna's life in this land of Yogins and Bhaktas, is that the citadel of the higher divine consciousness can be stormed in a single leap of passion, though at great peril to the physical body.² He did not practise any systematic yogic discipline. Illumination came on him in a violent flood after six months agony of passion, prayer and weeping. Romain Rolland quotes the Master's own account of the experience:

"One day I was torn with intolerable anguish. My heart seemed to be wrung as a damp cloth might be wrung . . . . I was racked with pain. A terrible frenzy seized me at the thought that I might never be granted the blessing of this divine vision. I thought if that were so, then enough of this life! A sword was hanging in the sanctuary of Kali. My eyes fell upon it and an idea flashed through my brain like a flash of lightning. ‘The sword! It will help me to end it.’ I rushed up to it and seized it like a mad man. . . . And lo! The whole scene, doors, windows, the temple itself vanished. . . It seemed as if nothing existed anymore. Instead I saw an ocean of the spirit, boundless, dazzling. In whatever direction I turned, great luminous waves were rising. They bore down upon me with a loud roar, as if to swallow me up. In an instant they were upon me. They broke over me, they engulfed me. I was suffocated. I lost all natural consciousness and I fell. . . .

Thereafter he was in a state bordering on delirium. He beheld continually the living radiant form of the Mother. His ideas translated themselves immediately into vivid forms, while he saw people only through a dim mist. This state continued till he was initiated into regular yogic discipline by Bhairavi Brahmani. Later he realised the Formless Brahman of the Vedanta under the guidance of Tota Puri, and taught him in turn the identity of Brahman and Maya. Finally his mission as a spiritual teacher was revealed to him.

These experiences correspond apparently to the higher ‘worlds’ or spiritual levels of which the Sastras speak. The experience of waters in his first illumination is an usual feature as is seen from the parallel cases of St. Theresa and others mentioned by the author. It recalls to us, on the one hand, the mystic doctrine that water is the ultimate constituent of all things, and on the other, the ‘waters’ and ‘Varuna’ of the Veda, as well as the Vedic cosmological order, "From Akasa came Vayu; from Vayu, Agni; from Agni, waters; and from waters, earth," with the reverse order in Pralaya. The levels of experience in which emotions and ideas automatically create their own forms are the Bhuva and Suvarlokas of the Veda, which are the habitations of the Devas, and correspond to the astral and mental planes of the Theosophist. But Ramakrishna not only saw objectively the forms of gods and goddesses, but by an unfailing instinct ended by absorbing them in himself–evidently, a gesture to realise them as himself. This type of experience does not appear to belong to the lower worlds ³ proper, but to point definitely to the higher worlds, in which the characteristic feature of experience is the realisation of the self in everything, and every-thing in the self. A comparative study of the experiences of Ramakrishna and Swedenborg would appear to be instructive in this connection. For a space of twenty years Swedenborg was in constant communion with the Angels of Heaven. From his careful accounts of his experiences, it would appear that they belong to the lower worlds. The difference in spiritual equipment and heritage, as well as in spiritual direction, between the Hindu and European genius is very striking. Swedenborg's mental horizon was filled entirely by the Christian faith; for him, other faiths were not. He could never divest himself of the Christian tradition, and of the Christian theology and cosmology. His experiences therefore never rose above the plane of ethical and philosophic dualism. In his description of Heaven he speaks of a mystic unity between God and the Angels, on account of which they were felt as One-Many ⁴; and this raises the question whether some at least of his experiences did not belong to the higher worlds. I think the answer must be in the negative, since we do not hear of his own self being in everything else, and everything else in his self, as a fact revealed in his immediate experience. That no other answer is possible is confirmed by the fact that the dualism between Angels and Devils, Heaven and Hell, God and the World, Righteousness and Sin, are permanent features of his revelations. The One-Many relation between God and the Angels which he so happily describes, must therefore be an intelligent inference, that is to say, a fact of mediate objective experience. While the spirit of the Hindu, shot by its own inner momentum, goes straight as an arrow to its mark, conquering the highest spiritual realisations one after another, the defective spiritual heritage constitutes in the case of Swedenborg an intangible barrier to his progress beyond a certain point. While the inner guide, the selective and discriminative principle in Swedenborg's evolution was furnished by the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, the norm by which Ramakrishna's course was steered, was the certainty of Advaita–the non-difference between Jeeva and Brahman, and therefore, also between Jeeva and Jeeva; a certainty which was instinctively and obscurely present in him from the very beginning. The moral that can be safely drawn from this comparison is that there is a long stretch between the first entry into the portals of the higher consciousness and the highest conceivable perfection; that only those who have traversed the entire stretch can be world-teachers in the highest sense; that none can traverse the whole way who do not surrender themselves to the talisman of Advaita, who do not will Advaita with all their might and main; that dualism in the form of limitation of the field of love and sympathy to anything short of the universal, or attachment to particular grooves of thought, will bar the aspirant's progress half-way. It, was the knowledge that dualism is at the root of all sin and imperfection that made Ramakrishna throw himself with such passion on the Sadhanas of other faiths, and similar advaitic disciplines. That Evil and Sin are simply dualism, the negation of Advaita, is again the central element in the message of Vivekananda.

The second great feature of Ramakrishna which strikes one is his utter balance and sanity, his supreme comprehensiveness and catholicity of outlook and sympathetic understanding, making up a full-petalled roundedness of spiritual personality, such as we know of in no historic saint, past or present. This indeed was a corollary of his practical Advaita. As one who had seen all the gods face to face, who had realised the Divine both as Saguna and Nirguna, he was never puzzled by any intellectual riddles about the Ultimate, but resolved them at one stroke by a pithy saying or a happy parable. He saw through all exaggerated attitudes which lead away from the living Divine, and cut them with the sword of his mother-wit and practical commonsense. He is the first person known to history who definitely proved to himself by actual experience that all religions lead to the same goal. He was very careful not to preach fixed dogmas, and warned his disciples–not very successfully in the light of the subsequent history–against developing a cult. The only wariness that one can discover in him is his insistence on celibacy⁵. His original resolve of celibacy appears to have been dictated by a sense of sin⁶. In his offer to his wife to live with her as grihasta if she chose, even though that would draw him into the world of Maya, the association between sin and sex is still present. He insisted on a vow of life-long Brahmacharya from his disciples, to protect them from the twin-demons of Maya, Kamini and Kanchanam. Romain Rolland prefers to look upon this choice of Ramakrishna merely as an instinctive conservation of physical energies for the purpose of ecstasy. Probably it became this, and was dissociated from any sense of sin in the later period when ecstasy was firmly established.

As a teacher Ramakrishna appears to be essentially, modern, in his full acceptance of spiritual democracy. The democratic element in modern thought connotes a great development of Ahankara, and a refusal to yield to externally imposed regulations of thought or conduct. Where the ancient Indian would submit as a matter of course, the modern would stiffen his and refuse to yield. The traditional spiritual gurus of India are not free as a class from the subtlest and most dangerous species of Ahankara, the Sattvic, and have not been able to adapt themselves to the spirit of the times, in this respect. In the case of Ramakrishna, however, his egoism was so little, his love was so great, and his instinct accorded so well with the demand for spiritual freedom. With his protean personality he made the most extraordinary guru known to the annals of Indian spiritual history; he was at once the child, the lover, the elder brother, the comrade, the preacher, the spiritual and Yogic guide, and the Divine incarnation, or rather all of these rolled into an ineffable combination. By no feat of imagination is it possible to think of a Guru of the old school mimicking a Kirtani for the edification of his disciples, as related by Romain Rolland. Nor is it possible to imagine the proud and fiery Vivekananda as a disciple of any other than Ramakrishna. The secret of his vast range is again the advaitic ardour, the power, perfected by incessant Sadhana, of seeing God in man, of entering into, and fusing himself with every human being.

It is claimed that Ramakrishna was an Avatar. Romain Rolland is careful to say in the Introduction that he loves Ramakrishna as a man, and does not believe that he is a Divine incarnation. At the same time, referring to the admission of Ramakrishna that he was an Avatar, he remarks in a foot-note⁷: "His conviction (of Avatarhood) lay in an inward act, a secret light, which he never paraded. I would ask my Western readers a question that may shock them–whether the passionate conviction of a mission imposing thought and action on our great men is not vaguely akin to exactly some such intuition, some fullness of Being, transcending the limits of personality? What does it matter by what name it is called?" This would appear to be a popular dilution of the Avatar-concept, which is used in a very precise sense in Hindu religion. According to the admissible usage of the term, we may distinguish two types of Avatar.⁸ The Avatar proper is the one personal God who is born of his own choice as a human being, without the loss of his Divine Self-knowledge. We are taught that in the case of such Avatars, the Self-knowledge is never clouded even for an instant, but shines like a steady light from the moment of their first birth within the human womb, throughout all their subsequent activity, waking or sleeping. The Ramayana does not make it self-evident that Rama conformed to this test, and tradition has compromised by reckoning Rama as a fractional Avatar. There is no doubt that the Avatar theory and its elaboration are the grandest flight of the Hindu spirit, and the very pinnacle of its achievement in its long search after the Divine. It was probably suggested by the figure of Lord Krishna who is also its unique exemplar. Modern Rationalistic opinion does not favour the theory of the descent of God in all His integrality into the human form; on the other hand, belief in such descent is a logical implication of any Advaita which does not content itself with the Formless and Indefinable Brahman as the last word in realisation. To understand the Avatara theory, one must have surrendered one's self to Krishna, become permeated by Him; and to understand and receive Krishna is to penetrate to the core of Indian thought, for is not Krishna India's challenge to the world?

The other type of Avatar (which is the one relevant in the case of Ramakrishna) refers to a forcing of the descent of Godhead by a preliminary Yogic ascent of the human consciousness. In the beginning the realisation of one's self as the Supreme Divine comes only occasionally in moments of ecstasy. But gradually it comes to be well-established, and it becomes possible to convert, at a moment's notice, the logical conjunction ‘I am the Lord’ into a realised fact of sense-perception. The sense of identity with th"e ! One Divine becomes the constant ground and the governing certainty of the mind, and the whole human personality is taken up and transformed into an instrument of Divine perfection in Knowledge, Action and Love. In any case of this kind it is ultra vires on our part to demand if such and such an individual can be God. The only authority for identity with Godhead lies in inner self-certainty, with its associated expression in vastly increased powers of Knowledge, Action and Love; where such certainty exists, it will be idle on our part to attempt to resolve our doubts by argument. It is only a like experience which can ever resolve the doubt, if it has not already been resolved by faith. What however we can insist on, is an objective standard to determine whether a particular individual is or is not an Avatar. And the objective standard is the presence of a continuous, assured, and unclouded self-knowledge (i.e., knowledge of one's self as the Supreme Divine). Where all available evidence points to this state of consciousness, the Avatar-hood must be accepted. Chaitanya is the classical example of this type of Avatar, and Buddha and Sankara probably also belong to the same class. In the case of Ramakrishna, we have his own admission, which he made on more than one occasion, of being an Avatar; and knowing him as we do, we cannot but accept the statement. One is, however, curious to have more evidence bearing on this point (for instance, about the nature of his sleep-consciousness).

1 Published by the Advaita Ashram, 182-A, Muktaram Babu Street, Calcutta.

2 A saying is attributed to Ramakrishna to the effect that in Kali Yuga, the passions ought not to be destroyed, but turned on God; thus anger should be directed on God for not manifesting himself, and so on. This has evident reference to his own personal history. Ramakrishna's entrance into higher consciousness is thus in violent contrast to that of Chaitanya, who, if we may believe tradition, simply flowered into illumination, by a process of gradual unfoldment, through reading about and meditating on the Lord.

3 Bhuloka, Bhuvarloka, Suvarloka are the three lower worlds; Janoloka, Thapoloka, Satyaloka, the three higher worlds; and Maharloka, the intermediate or transitional world, according to the Veda.

4 Swedenborg's accounts of his experiences are not all in the first person; they have often to be inferred from his description of Heaven.

5 The present reviewer is against insistence on celibacy as a fixed rule of conduct, though of course its adoption as a temporary element in Sadhana may be quite justified and necessary.

6 Compare the vision recounted in page 47.

7 Page 196.

8 For a discussion of the Avatar theory, see Sri Aurobindo's "Introduction to the Gita," Vol. I.