Superphysics
Keshab Chandra Sen
9 minutes • 1784 words
Table of contents
Keshab Chandra Sen and Sri Ramakrishna met for the first time in the garden house of Jaygopāl Sen at Belgharia, a few miles from Dakshineśwar, where the great Brāhmo leader was staying with some of his disciples.
In many respects, the two were poles apart, though an irresistible inner attraction was to make them intimate friends.
| Ramakrishna | Keshab |
|---|---|
| Realized God as Pure Spirit and Consciousness, but believed in the various forms of God as well | Regarded image worship as idolatry and gave allegorical explanations of the Hindu deities |
| Had a horror of lecturing and hardly knew how to write his own name. | an orator and a writer of books and magazine articles. |
| led a secluded life in the village of Dakshineśwar | was famous both locally and in England. |
| God-realization was the only goal of life | emphasized social reforms for India’s regeneration |
| the simple child of Kāli, the Divine Mother, though he too, in a different way, acknowledged Christ’s divinity | a disciple of Christ and accepted in a diluted form the Christian sacraments and Trinity |
| a paramahamsa and completely indifferent to the life of the world | a house-holder and took a real interest in the welfare of his children |
Yet, as their acquaintance ripened into friendship, Sri Ramakrishna and Keshab held each other in great love and respect.
Years later, at the news of Keshab’s death, the Master felt as if half his body had become paralysed. Keshab’s concepts of the harmony of religions and the Motherhood of God were deepened and enriched by his contact with Sri Ramakrishna.
Sri Ramakrishna, dressed in a red-bordered dhoti, one end of which was carelessly thrown over his left shoulder, came to Jaygopal’s garden house accompanied by Hriday.
No one took notice of the unostentatious visitor. Finally the Master said to Keshab, “People tell me you have seen God; so I have come to hear from you about God.”
A magnificent conversation followed. The Master sang a thrilling song about Kāli and forthwith went into Samādhi. When Hriday uttered the sacred “Om” in his ears, he gradually came back to consciousness of the world, his face still radiating a divine brilliance. Keshab and his followers were amazed. The contrast between Sri Ramakrishna and the Brāhmo devotees was very interesting.
There sat this small man, thin and extremely delicate. His eyes were illumined with an inner light. Good humour gleamed in his eyes and lurked in the corners of his mouth. His speech was Bengāli of a homely kind with a slight, delightful stammer, and his words held men enthralled by their wealth of spiritual experience, their inexhaustible store of simile and metaphor, their power of observation, their bright and subtle humour, their wonderful catholicity, their ceaseless flow of wisdom. And around him now were the sophisticated men of Bengāl, the best products of Western education, with Keshab, the idol of young Bengāl, as their leader.
Keshab’s sincerity was enough for Sri Ramakrishna. Henceforth the two saw each other frequently, either at Dakshineśwar or at the temple of the Brāhmo Samāj. Whenever the Master was in the temple at the time of divine service, Keshab would request him to speak to the congregation. And Keshab would visit the saint, in his turn, with offerings of flowers and fruits.
Other Brāhmo Leaders
Gradually other Brāhmo leaders began to feel Sri Ramakrishna’s influence. But they were by no means uncritical admirers of the Master. They particularly disapproved of his ascetic renunciation and condemnation of, “woman and gold”.7 They measured him according to their own ideals of the householder’s life. Some could not understand his Samādhi and described it as a nervous malady. Yet they could not resist his magnetic personality.
Among the Brāhmo leaders who knew the Master closely were Pratāp Chandra Mazumdār, Vijay Krishna Goswāmi, Trailokyanāth Sannyāl and Śivanāth Śastri.
Śivanāth, one day, was greatly impressed by the Master’s utter simplicity and abhorrence of praise. He was seated with Sri Ramakrishna in the latter’s room when several rich men of Calcutta arrived. The Master left the room for a few minutes. In the mean time Hriday, his nephew, began to describe his Samādhi to the visitors.
The last few words caught the Master’s ear as he entered the room. He said to Hriday: “What a mean-spirited fellow you must be to extol me thus before these rich men! You have seen their costly apparel and their gold watches and chains, and your object is to get from them as much money as you can. What do I care about what they think of me? (Turning to the gentlemen) No, my friends, what he has told you about me is not true. It was not love of God that made me absorbed in God and indifferent to external life. I became positively insane for some time. The sādhus who frequented this temple told me to practise many things.
I tried to follow them, and the consequence was that my austerities drove me to insanity.”
This is a quotation from one of Śivanāth’s books. He took the Master’s words literally and failed to see their real import.
Śivanāth vehemently criticized the Master for his other-worldly attitude toward his wife.
He writes:
Ramakrishna was practically separated from his wife, who lived in her village home.
One day I complained to some friends about the virtual widowhood of his wife. He then whispered in my ear: ‘Why do you complain? It is no longer possible. It is all dead and gone.’
Another day as I was inveighing against this part of his teaching, and also declaring that our program of work in the Brāhmo Samāj includes women, that ours is a social and domestic religion, and that we want to give education and social liberty to women, the saint became very much excited, as was his way when anything against his settled conviction was asserted - a trait we so much liked in him - and exclaimed,
‘Go, thou fool, go and perish in the pit that your women will dig for you.’
Then he glared at me and said: ‘What does a gardener do with a young plant? Does he not surround it with a fence, to protect it from goats and cattle? And when the young plant has grown up into a tree and it can no longer be injured by cattle, does he not remove the fence and let the tree grow freely?’
I replied, ‘Yes, that is the custom with gardeners.’
Then he remarked, ‘Do the same in your spiritual life; become strong, be full-grown; then you may seek them.’ To which I replied, ‘I don’t agree with you in thinking that women’s work is like that of cattle, destructive; they are our associates and helpers in our spiritual struggles and social progress’ - a view with which he could not agree, and he marked his dissent by shaking his head.
Then referring to the lateness of the hour he jocularly remarked, ‘It is time for you to depart; take care, do not be late; otherwise your woman will not admit you into her room.’ This evoked hearty laughter."
Pratāp Chandra Mazumdār, the right-hand man of Keshab and an accomplished Brāhmo preacher in Europe and America, bitterly criticized Sri Ramakrishna’s use of uncultured language and also his austere attitude toward his wife. But he could not escape the spell of the Master’s personality.
In the course of an article about Sri Ramakrishna, Pratāp wrote in the “Theistic Quarterly Review”:
What is there in common between him and me? I, a Europeanized, civilized, self-centered, semi-sceptical, so-called educated reasoner, and he, a poor, illiterate, unpolished, half-idolatrous, friendless Hindu devotee?
Why should I sit long hours to attend to him, I, who have listened to Disraeli and Fawcett, Stanley and Max Muller, and a whole host of European scholars and divines? … And it is not I only, but dozens like me, who do the same. … He worships Śiva, he worships Kāli, he worships Rāmā, he worships Krishna, and is a confirmed advocate of Vedāntic doctrines. … He is an idolater, yet is a faithful and most devoted Meditator on the perfections of the One Formless, Absolute, Infinite Deity. … His religion is ecstasy, his worship means transcendental insight, his whole nature burns day and night with a permanent fire and fever of a strange faith and feeling. … So long as he is spared to us, gladly shall we sit at his feet to learn from him the sublime precepts of purity, unworldliness, spirituality, and inebriation in the love of God. … He, by his childlike bhakti, by his strong conceptions of an ever-ready Motherhood, helped to unfold it [God as our Mother] in our minds wonderfully. … By associating with him we learnt to realize better the divine attributes as scattered over the 330 millions of deities of mythological India, the gods of the Purānās.
The Brāhmo leaders received much inspiration from their contact with Sri Ramakrishna.
It broadened their religious views and kindled in their hearts the yearning for God-realization; it made them understand and appreciate the rituals and symbols of Hindu religion, convinced them of the manifestation of God in diverse forms, and deepened their thoughts about the harmony of religions.
The Master, too, was impressed by the sincerity of many of the, Brāhmo devotees. He told them about his own realizations and explained to them the essence of his teachings, such as the necessity of renunciation, sincerity in the pursuit of one’s own course of discipline, faith in God, the performance of one’s duties without thought of results, and discrimination between the Real and the unreal.
This contact with the educated and progressive Bengālis opened Sri Ramakrishna’s eyes to a new realm of thought. Born and brought up in a simple village, without any formal education, and taught by the orthodox holy men of India in religious life, he had had no opportunity to study the influence of modernism on the thoughts and lives of the Hindus.
He could not properly estimate the result of the impact of Western education on Indian culture. He was a Hindu of the Hindus, renunciation being to him the only means to the realization of God in life. From the Brahmos he learnt that the new generation of India made a compromise between God and the world. Educated young men were influenced more by the Western philosophers than by their own prophets.
But Sri Ramakrishna was not dismayed, for he saw in this, too, the hand of God. And though he expounded to the Brahmos all his ideas about God and austere religious disciplines, yet he bade them accept from his teachings only as much as suited their tastes and temperaments.
