Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa: Feast, Jayanti, and What to Read

Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was a priest of the Kali temple at Dakshineswar, on the banks of the Ganges near Calcutta, who gave his whole life to the direct experience of God and found, path after path, that the experience was the same. He is claimed by no single sect, though he came from a poor Brahmin family in the village of Kamarpukur and lived out his days a Hindu of the Shakta and Vedantic streams. He is read today by Vaishnavas, by Christians, by Muslims who have never set foot in a temple, because he did the strange and rare thing of practicing their disciplines himself and reporting back, with the plain astonishment of a man who has seen something, that the summit was one summit.

He left no books. He left conversations, recorded by a devoted disciple, and a household of monks and lay followers who built, on the strength of what he showed them, one of the great missionary and humanitarian orders of the modern world. His chief monastic disciple, Swami Vivekananda, carried his name to Chicago in 1893 and startled a parliament of religions still uncertain whether a Hindu ecstatic from a village temple had anything to say to it. He did.

When Is Ramakrishna Jayanti Kept, and Why the Date Moves

Ramakrishna Jayanti, the celebration of Sri Ramakrishna's birth, is fixed each year not to a Gregorian calendar date but to a lunar tithi: the second day (Dwitiya) of the bright fortnight (Shukla Paksha) of the Hindu month of Phalguna. Because the lunar month drifts against the solar year, this tithi lands on a different Gregorian date annually, typically falling in February or March, and readers checking a Ramakrishna Math or Mission calendar will find the exact date recalculated year to year rather than fixed.

Sri Ramakrishna's birth in solar, historical terms is usually given as February 18, 1836, in Kamarpukur in Bengal. The Jayanti observance does not follow that fixed date. It follows the tithi under which he was born, in keeping with the older Indian practice of marking sacred anniversaries by the moon's position rather than by the count of days on a Western calendar. This is why a search for the date will turn up a new answer each year and why devotees consult the Bengali panjika, or almanac, rather than a fixed page in a diary.

A second, fixed-date observance belongs to his story as well. Kalpataru Day falls each year on the first of January, marking the day in 1886, at the garden house in Cossipore, when the dying Master touched several devotees and declared them, in that touch, already possessed of what they sought. Devotees keep it as a day of quiet remembrance and prayer, distinct from the movable Jayanti but drawn from the same well of feeling: that the boon was given once, and is still being given.

How the Day Is Kept at Ramakrishna Math and Mission Centers

Ramakrishna Jayanti is kept with special worship, devotional singing, and public readings from the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the record of his table talk at Dakshineswar and in Calcutta, at every Ramakrishna Math and Mission center around the world. The day typically opens before dawn with mangalarati, festive worship of the shrine, followed through the day by homa, chanting of his name, bhajans and kirtans sung by monks and devotees together, and a havan or fire offering at many centers.

Discourses on his life and teaching are given by senior monks, often centered on a single saying or episode from the Kathamrita, the Bengali original from which the Gospel is translated. Prasad, food first offered in worship, is distributed to all who come, without distinction of caste, sect, or nationality, a small practical enactment of the very universalism he taught. At Belur Math, the headquarters of the order on the west bank of the Hooghly, the celebration draws thousands, but the same order of service, on a smaller scale, is kept at Ramakrishna centers from London to Los Angeles to Fiji, because the order he founded understood from the beginning that his welcome was not meant to stop at Bengal's border.

Why His Message Is Kept as Universal, Not Sectarian

Sri Ramakrishna's teaching is kept as universal because he did not argue for the harmony of religions, he lived it, disciplining himself in turn under Vaishnava, Tantric, Vedantic, Islamic, and Christian practice and reporting the same ecstatic union at the end of each. His most quoted saying, that as many faiths, so many paths, is not a claim that all religions are identical in form. He was exact about the differences in ritual and doctrine between them. His claim was narrower and more startling: that sincere practice within any one of them, followed all the way, opens onto the same God. This is why his life is read past the boundary of Hinduism, by people who could never be asked to become Hindu, and why non-Hindu and Western devotees keep his Jayanti in their own way, through quiet reading of the Gospel, a lit lamp, a returned attention to whatever discipline is already their own.

What to Read for Ramakrishna Jayanti

The fullest telling of his life for a feast-day reading is The Great Master: A Life of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a three-volume portrait that opens with a free Invitation volume, available here, for anyone coming to him for the first time.

The volumes can also be read on their own. The Child Who Could Not Stop Weeping for God follows the boy Gadadhar through Kamarpukur to the temple steps at Dakshineswar. Every Path Was His Path carries him through the disciplines that made him, and toward the disciples who gathered around what he had become. As Many Paths as There Are Faiths sets down the living teaching itself, the harmony of religions as he actually spoke it, tears on his face, to the people who sat before him. Members reading widely across traditions will find his life sits inside the fuller shelf through the house library.