Ramakrishna

Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was a Hindu religious teacher and an influential figure in the Bengal Renaissance of the Nineteenth century. His teachings emphasised God-realisation as the highest goal of life, love and devotion for God, the oneness of existence, and the harmony of religions.

The key concepts in Ramakrishna's teachings were the oneness of existence; the divinity of all living beings; the unity of God and the harmony of religions; that the primal bondage in human life is lust and greed (kamini and kanchana in Bengali).

Ramakrishna emphasised that God-realisation is the supreme goal of all living beings. Religion, for him, was merely a means for the achievement of this goal. Ramakrishna's mystical realisation, classified by Hindu tradition as nirvikalpa samadhi (literally, "involuntary meditation", thought to be absorption in the all-encompassing Consciousness), led him to know that the various religions are different ways to reach The Absolute, and that the Ultimate Reality could never be expressed in human terms. This is in agreement with the proclamation in the Rig Veda that "Truth is one but sages call it by many names." As a consequence of this view, Ramakrishna actually spent periods of his life practicing his own understandings of Islam, Christianity and various Yogic and Tantric sects within Hinduism.