Did Sri Ramakrishna embrace Christianity and Islam?

Koenraad Elst
Posted on August 19, 2013 by IS

The Ramakrishna Missions ambition to outgrow Hinduism and be

universal is a form of hubris. In Greek religion, hubris, or mans will to be equal to the gods, is the cardinal sin. In Christianity too, Adam and Eve committed hereditary sin, not by lust but by hubris: initially innocent creatures, they wanted to be equal to God, who knows good and evil. In this respect, at least, manyit would be hubris to assert allreligions agree, and they happen to be right. So, let us stop this bad habit of making claims about all religions, including those that we know only hazily or not at all. Dr. Koenraad Elst The Ramakrishna debate, continued

The debate on the Ramakrishna Missions claim that Ramakrishna, the 19th-century Kali priest, also practised Christianity and Islam, and that he distanced himself from Hinduism to found a new universal religion called Ramakrishnaism, has taken the form of some hostile reactions from sympathizers of the Mission. They may be members or have some other status, I dont know, so we may just focus on what they have to say.

Ramakrishna Mission is Hindu

One person scolded me for even thinking that the Ramakrishna Mission is non-Hindu. He cites the Hindu atmosphere and the many Hindu rituals and practices at the Mission centres. I might add the fact that the Mission only recruits among Hindus. No Christian or Muslim would join this Pagan outfit. That fact alone refutes the Missions own claim that it has somehow embraced all religions. The Mission is a typically Hindu group, and even its pompous claim of validating all world religions is a claim made by many Hindus. When Mahatma Gandhi said: I am a Hindu, I am a Muslim, I am a Sikh, I am a Christian, Mohammed Ali Jinnah dryly commented: That is a typically Hindu thing to say. But I am surprised to hear that the Ramakrishna Mission has not disclaimed Hinduism. Not only has the organization shouted from the rooftops and on all kinds of public forums that universal Ramakrishnaism is superior to narrow Hinduism, it has even gone to court to be officially recognized as a non-Hindu minority.

Logic

Then there were some who, expectedly, took the opposite position, viz. that the RKM follows its saint Ramakrishna in embracing non-Hindu religions and their founders. One of these deserves a closer and more detailed reply. Not that he had said much beyond several lengthy e-mails full of personal abuse (a poor advertisement for the effects of being a Ramakrishnaite). He belonged to a type I have become sadly familiar with on the internet: born Hindus who muster endless argumentation, often cleverly twisting issues and deploying a sophisticated discourse, all in order to defend a case that is downright silly; and that is, moreover, harmful to Hinduism. For instance, Ive had to face endless argumentations in favour of the belief thatJesus lived and died in India. This belief stems from a book (1887) by the Russian aristocrat Nicolas Notovich, who claimed to have found notes about Jesus stay in India in a monastery in the Himalaya. This manuscript was never found and the monasterys abbot denied ever having had or seen such a text. The contents of the text which Notovich claimed to have seen was also very suspect by its contents: the themes of Jesus alleged controversies with Brahmins are typical for the late-colonial age, not at all for the 1st century. Although the polemic about it involved such worthies as Max Muller and yielded no proof at all, and although Notovich finally admitted to having made it all up, in 1899 Mirza Ghulam Ahmed (founder of the heretic Ahmadiyya sect of Islam) used the story to bolster his claim that prophets could just as well be native to India rather than to the Middle East, so that he could be a legitimate prophet too. And even now, the story has numerous defenders among Hindus. Passionate believers, sometimes even clever and argumentative believers, in a story that is patently false. In the present case too, we have a learned display of rhetoric in the service of an illusion. Of course, he doesnt try to prove his claim. Either this claim has not been proven, as we maintain, or it has been proven. In that case, it would be well worth the extra trouble to spell out this proof clearly, once and for all. But alas, this proof was not forthcoming. To be sure, this proof is not that according to a second person, Ramakrishna had had a vision, t hen according to a third person

years later, this vision was

perhaps of Mohammed, and

according to a fourth person, later again, it is dead certain that he saw Mohammed. For the founding moment of a religion, Ramakrishnaism, one is entitled to expect proof of higher quality than testimony (?) at several removes. Even if this very flaky and very suspect sequence were to convey the truth, such a vision would in no way be what the RKM now claims, viz. the practice of Islam/Christianity. As a Muslim commented, you cannot take a holiday and be a Muslim for a while, then revert to goddessworshipping. Neither Christianity nor Islam consist in having a vision of the founder. Nonetheless, this RKM sympathizers reformulation of the challenge to non -Ramakrishaites is interesting: The scope of my discussion is quite limited and is focused on only one thing: Ramakrishna believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ and he did practice some discipline of Christianity on the results of which his such belief was based. The same can be said of his feeling for some discipline of Islamthat he practiced it and derived divine/spiritual satisfaction from it. I think it is for Koenraad Elst to spell out his clear position on this observation once and for all. As a matter of walking the extra mile, I will spell out my position. However, let it be understood that I am under no obligation to explain anything or give proof for anything, as I am not putting forward any claim. I am merely skeptical of a claim made by the RKM and this fellow. Because it is he who has put forward a claim, it is up to him to prove his point. Even if nobody comes forward to offer any kind of counter-proof or refutation, the mere fact that the claim is put forward, does not annul its need for proof. As long as the claim is not proven, it was right for sterling Hindus like Ram Swarup and Shiva Prasad Ray to express scepticism of it. The burden of proof is for 100% on the maker of this challenge.

Belief in Jesus

Now, my position. If Ramakrishna had found that his own Hinduism was insufficient, if he had founded a new religion which the RKM calls Ramakrishnaism, if Ramakrishna had found Christianity and Islam to be part of this new religion, and if he had personally verified the truth of these religions by means of visions, then this would be such a momentous revolution that he would have spent the rest of his days discussing and elaborating it. Instead, absolute silence, and [the continued worship of] Kali. So, this already pleads against the RKMs claim. Now that we are discussing this, it strikes me that in the 24 years that I have followed this debate, I have not seen the RKM people come up with an actual quote from the master in which he claims Jesus divinity. Surely, such belief would have been big news to his Hindu and non -Christian followers. Our critic too has eloquently beaten around the bush in several replies, but he has spurned the occasion to present to us the only thing that would finish this debate, viz. proof (as opposed to mere claims) that RK worshipped Jesus as a divine being. The best proof would be a statement to this effect by Ramakrishna himself, but this time too it is not forthcoming. But to really evaluate Ramakrishnas beliefs about Jesus, it would be useful (from a scholarly viewpoint, even necessary) to get the facts straight about Jesus himself. I have not brought Jesus into this discussion, it is the RKM that insists Ramakrishna had a vision of Jesus and believed in Jesus divinity. So, lets discuss Jesus. But let me warn you: Hindus by their upbringing may know everything aboutpuja or other Hindu things, but their knowledge of Jesus tends to be very hazy. I, having gone through the whole Catholic education system and moreover having made a purposeful study of the character Jesus, know more about this subject than the RKM sympathizer will ever know in his lifetime. I have studied Jesus, he has not. That is not some colonial utterance, in fact two Hindus sceptical of the RKM claims set me on this path, but it is simply a fact that someone who has assimilated the scholarly findings on Jesus knows the subject better than religious types who have only interiorized some missionary sermons calculated to fool a gullible audience. Conversely, Hindus who have not made a specific study of comparative religion and especially of Christianity are ill-equipped to pontificate about Jesus. So, what I know about Jesus, is that he was no more divine than you or me. He was a wandering healer, with his ears open for the wisdom going around, which he relayed in his own logia, sermons with parables, a few of them goodbut still revered by the people mostly because of his reputation as a healer. To be sure, his friends and relatives who knew him, saw through his act, which is why he performed no miracles in his home town. Elsewhere, he could often pull it off, but still he was less powerful than proper medicine. Thus, he healed someone from epilepsy (ghost-possession), making him rise after his epileptic seizurebut such fits always subside and end in a return to normalcy. And in one case, the Gospel says in so many words that the disease later reappeared. Nothing scandalous, but nothing divine either, about false beliefs in healing powers.

Jesus had a rather big idea about himself, just like Mohammed

and some other religious leaders. Thus, he believed that he was the Messiah. He repeatedly made the prediction that he himself would return within the lifetime of some in his audience. Today we are two thousand years and dozens of generations down the line, yet Jesus has not come back. Now, wrong predictions are human, in fact they are ten a penny. Jehovahs Witnesses put their foot between your front door to predict the end of the world, but it didnt come in 1914, nor in 1975. What makes Jesus wrong prediction an even worse failure is that, while the Witnesses make a prediction about someone else, Jesus did so about himself. Unlike other diviners, Jesus merely had to look in his own agenda to see when he was scheduled to return, and still he failed! So, nothing divine about wrong predictions. But at least Jesus overcame death by his resurrection? This is the core of the Christian belief system. Now, the difference between the living and the dead is that you can run into the living, not the dead. But, like the dead, Jesus is beyond meeting. People have reported seeing Jesus in visions, but no one has met him in person. So his condition is the same as that of other mortals. The wages oforiginal sin are mortality and child-bearing in pain, and it would be somewhat divine if Jesus had overcome mortality to live endlessly and still be among us. But no, hes gone. The New Testament writers have spirited him away through th e trick of the Ascension: though somewhat spectacular, he did the same thing as the rest of us, mortals: he went to heaven. So, nothing particularly divine about mortality. I will of course not go through the numerous findings of Bible scholarship, about which so many books are available. But for now, I have said enough to underpin the conclusion: Jesus was not divine. If Ramakrishna was a Muslim, as the RKM claims, then he was al ready convinced of Jesus non-divine status, which is a basic belief of Islam (and in that respect, Islam is more rational than the personality cult which is Christianity). If, however, as our RKM sympathizer claims, Ramakrishna believed in the divinity of Christ, then he was badly informed, not to say that he was mistaken. In fact, this sympathizer wants you to venerate a silly Ramakrishna who believed the sop stories of the missionaries, to the point of self-hypnotizing and seeing a vision of Jesus. By contrast, I (or rather Ram Swarup and Shiva Prasad Ray) give you a Ramakrishna who was discerning enough to keep the missionaries at a distance. He was not a Christian nor a Ramakrishnaist, but simply a Hindu, worshipping Krishna and Hanuman and most of all Kali. You too can live a happy, healthy, holy life while staying a Hindu and ignoring Jesus.

Being a Christian

The second claim is that Ramakrishna practised a Christian discipline, and that as a result, he found that Christianity is equally true and yields the same results that he had already reached through his Hindu sadhana. Now, being a Christian or being a Muslim has a precise definition, which Ramakrishna did not fulfil. He was not recognized as one of theirs by any known mullah or padre. The missionaries sent bulletins home in which they reported the conversions they wrought; surely they would not have neglected reporting thechristianization of a leading Hindu saint? And the RKM has had more than a century to get and show the document that proved their case, viz. that Ramakrishna turned his back on narrow Hinduism. Even in the different sects of Hinduism, you only become a member by going through a formal ceremony, you are given a yajnopavit (sacred thread) or you getdiksha (initiation) or shaktipat (transmission of energy). Ramakrishna never went through the formal ceremonies making him a Christian or a Muslim. He was notcircumcised and never uttered the Islamic creed. He was not baptised and never uttered the Christian creed. No matter what vision he had, it did not make him either Christian or Muslim. Further, there is no such thing as practising Christianity or Islam. Either you are in or you are out. Imitating the behaviour of a Muslim/Christian all while remaining a Pagan does not make you a Muslim/Christian. In fact, we would like to know what these practices were. Our RKM sympathizer has repeatedly spurned the occasion to spell this out. Did he observe Ramadan, or did he prefer Lent? Did this vegetarian offer sheep sacrifice, as is prescribed for Muslims? Did he eat fish on Friday, as Christians do? Did he condemn caste, which is an intrinsic attitude of Christianity, at least according to contemporary missionaries? And again, was hebaptised? Which Christian worthy accepted him as a Christian? We would like some straight answers to these questions. Not that they would make any tangible difference. Ramakrishna may have been pure gold, but even his acceptance of the quintessential Christian belief in Jesus divinity would not make Jesus divine; at least not more than you and me. If, after all these years, the RKM were at last to prove that Ramakrishna did worship Jesus, we would have to conclude that he was mistaken surely not the conclusion which the RKM would like us to draw. Fortunately, there is no indication that he did.

Some further problems with the RKMs claim

Another problem: a Christian cannot be a Muslim, and a Muslim cannot be a Christian. Leaving aside Hinduism and Ramakrishnaism, please focus only on Christianity and Islam. How could Ramakrishna be a Christian while also being a Muslim? No Christian or Muslim authority would accept his being the one while also being the other. Christians believe Jesus was the Son of God, both God and man, while Muslims consider him just a man. Christians believe he was resurrected while Muslims disbelieve that he even died on the cross. How did Ramakrishna combine these mutually exclusive beliefs? Finally, Ramakrishna is known to have died while worshipping Kali. By Christian and Islamic definition, he was a goddess-worshipper, hence an out-and-out Pagan. If he ever was a Muslim or a Christian, his dying as a Pagan meant that he was anapostate. If being an ignorant Pagan is bad enough, being a wilful apostate, who has known but rejected the truth and reverted to the false belief of Paganism, is really demonic and a sure ticket to the fires of hell. So, according to the RKM, Ramakrishna has spent the last century braving the fires of hell. For that is what Islam and Christianity (which the RKM holds to be true) promise to a Pagan like Ramakrishna. The RKM professes a syncretism, combining elements from different religions. Ramakrishnaism is the syncretism par excellence, affirming all religions to be true. As the Church Fathers wrote, syncretism is typical of Paganism. The Roman-Hellenistic milieu in which the first Christians had to function, was full of syncreticism, with Roman matrons worshipping Isis with the babe Horus (an inspiration for the image of Mary holding the babe Jesus), legion soldiers worshipping Persianoriginated Mithras, and imperial politicians worshipping the Syrian-originated Sol Invictus( . Against this syncretism, they preached religious purity: extra ecclesiam nulla salus, outside the Church no salvation. They had no problem admitting that Paganism was naturally pluralistic, but what is the use of choosing between or combining different kinds of falsehood? They as Christians had something better than pluralism, viz. the truth. And once you have the truth, you are no longer interested in any other religion. So, from the Christian viewpoint, the RKMs dissatisfaction with mere Hinduism is an admission that Hinduism doesnt have the truth.

Swami Vivekanandas claim

The best argument in favour of the RKMs claim is a statement apparently made by Swami Vivekananda: The next desire that seized upon the soul of this man [Ramakrishna] was to know the truth about the various religions. Up to that time he had not known any religion but his own. He wanted to understand what other religions were like. So he sought teacher s of other religions. He found a Mohammedan saint and placed himself under him; he underwent the disciplines prescribed by him, and to his astonishment found that when faithfully carried out, these devotional methods led him to the same goal he had already attained. He gathered similar experience from following the true religion of Jesus the Christ.

Our RKM sympathizer wants to point [out] to KE that the burden of proof is on him to disprove the observations of RKs chief disciple (and official spokesman?), as otherwise, by default, they should be assumed to be true. Would KE care to share his compelling reasons to believe that SV lied? Once again, he has got things backwards. It is he who makes a claim, and the burden of proof is thus for 100% on him. Swami Vivekananda was not an eye-witness and made this statement, which I will for now assume to be true (Ram Swarup was a great reader of Swami Vivekanandas Complete Works and doesnt mention it), many years after the fact. Nothing of the above loses any of its force by this early version of a claim later made into the official line of the RKM, but for which any proof is missing. It is no surprise that somebody ignorant of the rules of logic should use an argument from authority as his trump card. He plays upon the expected ind ignation of the Indian-born majority of the readership if I dare to say that Swami Vivekananda lied. But in fact, I dont need to put it down as a lie. In the world of religion and the occult, I have rarely seen anyone who deliberately said something that he knew to be untrue. But I have met or witnessed or read thousands of people who spread falsehoods which they believed to be true. Even Swami Vivekananda was just a fallible human being a statement which may scandalize his followers but which he himself would wholeheartedly accept. The processes which have led the RKM to believe and propagate the falsehood about Ramakrishnas visions, may have taken him in, too. Or he may simply mean that Ramakrishna had that commendable Hindu attitude of curiosity and respect for whatever other religions draw his attention. At any rate, while we dont know which processes were at work in Vivekanandas case, we have his naked statement and this, at least, we can evaluate. And we find it, if taken literally, to be simply false. Liberation, the goal of the Upanishadic seers and of most Hindu schools since, is not the goal of Christianity. No Christian ever claimed to have achieved it, nor was he claimed by other Christians to have done so. The case applies even more bluntly to Islam: the goal of the five pillars of Islam is simply to obey Gods commandments as given in the Quran, not any Liberation. The goal of a Hindusadhana will not be achieved by a Muslim or a Christian sadhana, and vice versa. If someone said that a Christian discipline led him to the same goal he had already attained, he was most certainly wrong. However, it is possible that the state of consciousness which Ramakrishna had already attained in his Hindusadhana remained with him when he practised whatever this sheikh gave him to do. But would that state still be so easily achieved if he had practised only these Islamic cq Christian exercises?

Conclusion
Sita Ram Goel once said that Hindus think they know everything about everything. Thus, while it is hard enough to study a handful of religions, numerous Hindus routinely make claims about the equal truth of all religions, as if they had studied them all. In this respect, at least, the RKM monks are certainly Hindus. The RKMs ambition to outgrow Hinduism and be universal is a form of hubris. In Greek religion, hubris, or mans will to be equal to the gods, is the cardinal sin. In Christianity too, Adam and Eve committed hereditary sin, not by lust (as many superficial people think) but by hubris: initially innocent creatures, they wanted to be equal to God, who knows good and evil. In this respect, at least, manyit would be hubris to assert allreligions agree, and they happen to be right. So, let us stop this bad habit of making claims about all religions, including those that we know only hazily or not at all. One thing that initially attracted me to the Hindu cause was the humbleness and simplicity of the ordinary Hindus I met. It would be nice if all megalomaniacs climbed down from their high horses and rediscovered this simplicity. Secondly, I find it sad and not spelling anything good, that Hindus who are so laid back about the enemies of and challenges before Hinduism, get so worked up when their own little sect is challenged. Arya Samaj spokesmen dont have 1% oftheir forebears concern with the Christian

and Islamic threats, but they really get into the act when defending against other Hindus their pet beliefs about Vedic monotheism and non-idolatry. The ISKCON people never confront Christianity or Islam, but they get really nasty against fellow Hindus who are not as Krishna-centred (such as the pre-Krishna Vedic Rishis) as they themselves are. And here too, the RKM is alarmed when some Hindus disbelieve its pet doctrine of Ramakrishnas visio ns of Jesus and Mohammed. It would be good if they shed this obsession with their sectarian unique selling proposition and return to a broader consciousness, one that would be recognizable to all Hindus. Hinduism existed before Jesus and Mohammed. It was good enough for the Vedic seers and nonVedic sadhus, and it didnt need those two. I think Hinduism will only survive if it forgets about this false incarnation and this false prophet. The RKM ultimately has no choice but to admit that for the past so many decades, it has been spreading an erroneous and harmful belief. It should announce out loud that all struggles over its exact identity are over, because it owns up to its natural Hindu identity. Indeed, it should rediscover and second its founder, Swami Vivekanada, who declared: Say with pride, we are Hindus! Dr. Koenraad Elst is a Belgian writer and orientalist (without institutional affiliation). He was an editor of the New Right Flemish nationalist journal Teksten: Kommentaren en Studies from 1992 to 1995, focusing on criticism of Islam. He has authored fifteen English language books on topics related to Indian politics and communalism, and is one of the few western writers (along with Franois Gautier) to actively defend the Hindutva ideology.

The

Secretarys

letter is disingenuous to say the least. He says the great rishis and acharyas of Hinduism were not Hindus but that the Ramakrishna Mission is not non-Hindu. Yet the RKM had approached to the court to argue that they were a non-Hindu minority religion called Ramakrishnaism. Eventually the court decided that the Ramakrishna Math and Mission were indeed Hindu and that there was no such religious sect called Ramakrishnaism. IS Rate this:

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Filed under: christianity, hinduism, india, indian politics, islam, legitimizing power,mohammed, neovedanta, pagan, psychological warfare, theology, universalismTagged: | christianity, hindu universalism, hinduism, islam, ramakrishna mission,ramakrishnaism, religion, sri ramakrishna, swami vivekananda

With Pakistan, India must act as an adversary. Tufail Ahmad The Vamadeva Sastry Interview Rajiv Mehrotra

20 Responses
1.

Chirag, on August 20, 2013 at 2:44 AM said:

RK and SV both re-fueled hinduism with improved ideas. In that sense, they have done a great job indeed! SV was influential on many freedom-fighters and his words led them to fight for freedom. Their contributions in these two regards are definitely immeasurable. The rest is not important and must be removed if RKM is propagating that! Reply

IS, on August 20, 2013 at 7:24 AM said:

No doubt SV was a great nationalist and motivator and he is to be honoured for that. His darker sidehe was something of an enigmawould never have come up for review if the big wigs in Belur Math had not decided to renounce Hinduism and project Sri Ramakrishna as a non-discriminating universalist who had embraced Christianity and Islam. Reply

Chirag, on August 21, 2013 at 7:37 PM said:

In travelling from Naples to Port Said, on SVs way back to India, in January 1897, the Swami had a dream of an old and bearded man, he appeared before him, saying This is th island of Crete, and showing him a place in the island, that he might afterwards identify. The vision

went to say that the religion of Christianity had originated in the island of Crete and in connection with this gave him two European words, one of which was Therapeutae which it declared, were derived from Sanskrit. Therapeutae meant sons (from the Sanskrit putra) of the Theras, or Buddhist monks. From this the Swami was to understand that Christianity had originated in a Buddhist mission. The old man added The proofs are all here, pointing to the ground. Dig and you will see! As he awoke, feeling that this was no common dream, the Swami rose, and tumbled out on deck. Here he met an officer, turning in from his watch. What o clock is it?, said the Swami. Mid-night! was the answer. Where are we? he then said; when, to his astonishment, the answer came back fifty miles off Crete! Our Master used to laugh at himself for the strength of the impression that this dream had made en him. But he could never shake it off. The fact that the second of the two etymologies has been lost is deeply to be regretted. The Swami had to say that before he had had this dream, it had never occurred to him to doubt that the personality of Christ was strictly historic. We must remember, however, that according to Hindu philosophy, it is the completeness of an idea that is important, and not the question of its historical authenticity. The Swami once asked Sri Ramakrishna, when he was a boy, about this very matter. Dont you think! answered his Guru, that those who could invent such things were themselves that? original text from RKM book itself:http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/ Volume_5/Conversations_and_Dialogues/II_-_V_Shri_Surendra_Nath_Sen Reply

IS, on August 21, 2013 at 8:49 PM said:

What exactly is your point? It is a well known fact that Christianity was influenced by Buddhism and that there were both Hindu pundits and Buddhist monks in Alexandria and the surrounding area by the 3rd century bce. How does this justify the claim made by some of Sri Ramakrishnas devoteesand later the RKM gurusthat he saw Jesus and Mohammed in visions and thereafter embraced both the religions? Reply

Chirag, on August 21, 2013 at 9:36 PM said:

I am saying that SV was of the opinion that christianity/Jesus are based on some falsehood truth. So, how would RKM claim to have Jesus/christianity acquisition/vision?

Reply
2.

IS, on August 19, 2013 at 6:57 PM said:

In the article above, Dr. Elsts interrogator asks if Swami Vivekananda was a liar. Well yes, indeed, he was when it served his interest. For example there is the scandalous matter of Totapuri who according to Vivekananda was the Dashanami sannyasi who initiated Sri Ramakrishna into Advaita Vedanta. Vivekananda required a direct link to the Dashanami Sampradaya in order to claim that his own sannyasis were also Dashanamis. So he invented Totapuri. RKM sannyasis could then carry the title of Puri attached to their names, indicating that they were Dashanami sannyasis through Totapuri and Sri Ramakrishna. My information on good authority of old devotees attached to the Mission in Kolkata, is that there never was a Dashanami sannyasi called Totapuri, allegedly from Harayana, associated with Sri Ramakrishna. Totapuri was a fictional character whom Vivekananda invented to serve the purpose of creating a bogus parampara link to the Dashanami Sampradaya and its great gurus Adi Shankara and Rishi Vyasa. Oh, there is more of these RKM deceptions in the queue that could be related here, but I will leave the recounting of them for the time being. Reply

Chirag, on August 21, 2013 at 7:45 PM said:

Totapuri was not a fake personality. Check this source:http://www.prajnanamission.org/bioGurudev.shtml Reply

IS, on August 21, 2013 at 9:08 PM said:

I have stayed some time in Nanga Babas ashram in Puri and have questioned the ashram managers and devotees closely about Nanga Baba and Tota Puri. All deny that Nanga Baba was ever known by the name Totapuri, or, indeed, by any other name than Nanga Baba. All the evidence points to the strong probability that Totapuri was a fictitious person invented by SV in order to claim Dashanami linage. But all this redundant. The religion of Ramakrishnaism and its adherents do not have a Dashanami connection as they have renounced that possibility along with their Hindu identity. Reply

Chirag, on August 21, 2013 at 9:39 PM said:

I am disciple of shri Anandi Ma thru her shaktipat initiation (dyc.org) and many of her lectures confirm that Totapuri is of the same lineage and initiated shri Ramakrushna. Anandi Mas guru Madhusudan Dasji is contemporary of shri Ramakrushna and shri Totapuri. Reply

IS, on August 21, 2013 at 9:47 PM said:

So it is still all hearsay evidence from authority (which as Dr KE points out above is not a valid argument). Sadhus and saints will repeat the most blatant falsehoods firmly believing the stories to be true. But this doesnt change the fact that the stories are untrue or at least highly suspect. Reply

Chirag, on August 21, 2013 at 10:44 PMsaid:

I am sorry to say IS that your information too is based on from authority. So, I cannot deny and you cannot accept with the same strong evidence available now, I think! Reply

IS, on August 22, 2013 at 5:02 AMsaid:

Yes, my information is also from authority. The difference is that my information comes from an authority close to Nanga Baba and not some second or third hand source. There is no reason for you to be sorry about it! Reply

3.

Dr. Vijaya Rajiva, on August 19, 2013 at 5:43 PM said:

A timely intervention by Dr. Elst. Who BTW is this idiotic Hindu who goes out of his way to bring in Islam and Christianity by the backdoor? My opinion: it could be Romain Rollands books on Ramakrishna and Vivekandanda which have led Hindus of a certain generation to speak such utter nonsense. Meanwhile the small town and village RK Missions in India continue to hold prayer meetings with Hindu gods and goddesses prominent. Reply

IS, on August 19, 2013 at 6:39 PM said:

Yes, the small town missions with their dedicated swamis do do good work. Except at Christmas and Easter when they are obliged to do the Missions Christian pujas. Tiruvannamalai and other sadhu haunts like Haridwar, Rishikesh and Kashi have a fair number of RKM sannyasis who have left the Mission because they identify as Hindus and do not at all approve of the goings-on in Belur Math. Reply
4.

R.Nanjappa, on August 19, 2013 at 11:30 AM said:

Such a hard-hitting response is long over due. I have been a student of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda literature for 50 years and appalled by the many falsehoods which RKM is dishing out about RK. They claimed RK was not a Hindu in a submission to the court, just for running some educational institutions. They even say that Vedanta is not specifically Hindu but that there can be Western Vedanta! RKM is a creation of Vivekananda modelled after the RC Church and has nothing to do with RK. For that matter Vivekananda did not represent RK fully. Nor was he completely true to the genuine Hindu outlook, due to his Western education, as pointed out by Marco Pallis. I have long learned to separate my respect for RK from any attachment to RKM. That I love you doesnt mean I love your dog too. Reply
5.

IS, on August 19, 2013 at 11:02 AM said:

Christianity did indeed have an undue influence on Swami Vivekananda. He cross-dressed as a Christian priest with Roman collar, cassock-like coat, and trousersthe photo of him in sannyasis robes is a one-time only eventand modelled the Ramakrishna Math on the Benedictine monastic

order and its religious houses right down to the non-veg kitchens. He may therefore be identified as an early Hindu inculturationist (though it is very likely that he did not realised the grievous harm that would ensue when he rhetorically invited Christian missionaries to occupy every village in India). He believed that his universalistic interpretation of Vedanta, called Neo-Vedanta today, would be accepted by the Christian and Muslim religious authorities of the time. He was very naive. He did not understand the exclusive and imperialistic nature of the Christian and Islamic ideologies at all and was simply projecting his own gratuitous interpretation of Jesus and Mohammed onto the religions. Hindus are always deceived by their own fanciful, ill-informed views of Jesus and Mohammed. Sri Ramakrishna was an ecstatic saint who often had visions. He was surrounded by christianised Brahmo devotees who were ever eager to interpret these visions for him. It is these devotees who have projected the view that Sri Ramakishna saw Jesus and Mohammed in visions and embraced Christianity and Islam on equal terms with his own Hinduism. They got their views recorded in some of the accounts of Sri Ramakrishnas life, and so the false story has come down to us today. Neither Sita Ram Goel nor Ram Swarup, both of whom had made a close study of Sri Ramakrishna, accepted that he had seen Jesus and Mohammed in visions or embraced Christianity and Islam in any legitimate way. Sri Ramakrishna was a jivan mukta, a realised saint of paramhamsa stature. Having attained the ultimate state by Hindu disciplines and devotion to a Hindu deity, it does not follow that he can then embrace Christian or Muslim disciplines and obtain the same objective. It is an absurd contention that ignores the particular objectives of the Christian and Muslim religions which are not the same as those of the Hindu religion. The realised state of the jivan mukta would by its very nature override all disciplines practised after moksha was obtained and make them redundant. The Ramakrishna Math and Mission, once believed to be Hinduisms premier religious organisation, is in fact a disgrace to Hindu Dharma and should be censored for telling lies, demeaning Sri Ramakrishna with their lies, and misleading his faithful devotees and the Hindu Samaj at large. For too long the RKM has been negatively influenced by its American Christian members who, it is reported, put them up to declaring themselves a minority religion in the first place. Reply

shaastra sevaka, on August 20, 2013 at 11:44 AM said:

Finally the math has become like any other commercial organization. In their school at mysore for instance, the seats are auctioned to the highest bidders This being the case, their hairsplitting about religious matters is silly to say the least. Reply

IS, on August 20, 2013 at 4:40 PM said:

The RKM is very much a central government department run by wooden-headed babus in kavi cloth. They receive huge funds from the government to run their schools and medical dispensaries. The government favours them because their

all-religions-are-the-same universalism corresponds to Delhis official religion of Nehruvian secularism. Reply

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cnm, on August 19, 2013 at 10:21 AM said:

Shri Ravishankar is someone who has shamelessly endorsed this nonsense that Jesus lived and died in India. I have read his booklet on Hinduism and Christianity where he has retailed such crap. He says in that booklet that from akashic records it has been proved that Jesu was in India. What nonsense.God spare us from such Hindu Gurus if they can at all be called Gurus. Reply

shaastra sevaka, on August 20, 2013 at 11:47 AM said:

akashic records, do those records also say that shri shri shri shrii is de stined to go to hell because of the curse of barbers around his ashram for having brought about a cult of ugly flowing hair and ugly flowing beards?