Dear Fellow Divine Soul,
Commencing this week, selected extracts from the book “The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna” will be posted.
This book is primarily in the form of
recorded (memorised) conversations between Sri Ramakrishna and his disciples /
devotees. It has been authored by Mahendranath Gupta (also referred to as “M”),
who had memorised these conversations and subsequently (after the passing on of
Sri Ramakrishna) re-produced these in a Bengali book called “Sri
Sri Ramakrisha Kathamrita”. The book was subsequently translated into English
language by Swāmi Nikhilānanda in 1942 and is called “The Gospel of
Sri Ramakrishna”.
The book is extremely unique in its spiritual
firmament. In the words of Dada J P Vaswani, “Among other books which I have
found very helpful in my struggles and strivings, I would like to recommend to
you ‘The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna’ by ‘M’. It is not a book, it is a
storehouse of spiritual treasures. You should always have it by your side”.
Following is the Foreword written by Aldous
Huxley for the book.
“IN THE HISTORY of the arts, genius is a thing of
very rare occurrence. Rarer still, however, are the competent reporters and
recorders of that genius. The world has had many hundreds of admirable poets
and philosophers; but of these hundreds only a very few have had the fortune to
attract a Boswell or an Eckermann.
When we
leave the field of art for that of spiritual religion, the scarcity of
competent reporters becomes even more strongly marked. Of the day-to-day life
of the great theocentric saints and contemplatives we know, in the great
majority of cases, nothing whatever. Many, it is true, have recorded their
doctrines in writing, and a few, such as St. Augustine, Suso and St. Teresa,
have left us autobiographies of the greatest value. But, all doctrinal writing
is in some measure formal and impersonal, while the autobiographer tends to
omit what he regards as trifling matters and suffers from the further
disadvantage of being unable to say how he strikes other people and in what way
he affects their lives. Moreover, most saints have left neither writings nor
self-portraits, and for knowledge of their lives, their characters and their
teachings, we are forced to rely upon the records made by their disciples who,
in most cases, have proved themselves singularly incompetent as reporters and
biographers. Hence the special interest attaching to this enormously detailed
account of the daily life and conversations of Sri Ramakrishna.
"M",
as the author modestly styles himself, was peculiarly qualified for his task.
To a reverent love for his master, to a deep and experiential knowledge of that
master's teaching, he added a prodigious memory for the small happenings of
each day and a happy gift for recording them in an interesting and realistic
way. Making good use of his natural gifts and of the circumstances in which he
found himself, "M" produced a book unique, so far as my knowledge
goes, in the literature of hagiography. No other saint has had so able and
indefatigable a Boswell. Never have the small events of a contemplative's daily
life been described with such a wealth of intimate detail. Never have the
casual and unstudied utterances of a great religious teacher been set down with
so minute a fidelity. To Western readers, it is true, this fidelity and this
wealth of detail are sometimes a trifle disconcerting; for the social,
religious and intellectual frames of reference within which Sri Ramakrishna did
his thinking and expressed his feelings were entirely Indian. But after the
first few surprises and bewilderments, we begin to find something peculiarly
stimulating and instructive about the very strangeness and, to our eyes, the
eccentricity of the man revealed to us in "M's" narrative. What a
scholastic philosopher would call the "accidents" of Ramakrishna's
life were intensely Hindu and therefore, so far as we in the West are concerned,
unfamiliar and hard to understand; its "essence", however, was
intensely mystical and therefore universal. To read through these conversations
in which mystical doctrine alternates with an unfamiliar kind of humour, and
where discussions of the oddest aspects of Hindu mythology give place to the
most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of Ultimate Reality, is in
itself a liberal, education in humility, tolerance and suspense of judgment. We
must be grateful to the translator for his excellent version of a book so
curious and delightful as a biographical document, so precious, at the same
time, for what it teaches us of the life of the spirit.”
