Ramakrishna and His Disciples
Christopher Isherwood
4.34
333 ratings34 reviews
This biography of Ramakrishna was written for the West by one of England's most talented authors. The writing is beautiful in itself, but the story of a most unusual man with unheard of spiritual yearning is what this book is really about. "This is the story of a phenomenon. I will begin by calling him simply that, rather than "holy man,""mystic,"or "saint"; all emotive words with mixed associations which may attract some readers, repel others.
"A phenomenon is always a fact, an object of experience. That is how I shall try to approach Ramakrishna . . . I only ask you to approach Ramakrishna with the same open-minded curiosity you might feel for any highly unusual human being."
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Hinduism
Biography Memoir
Sociology
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340 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
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Christopher Isherwood
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English-born American writer Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood portrayed Berlin in the early 1930s in his best known works, such as Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the basis for the musical Cabaret (1966). Isherwood was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist.
With W.H. Auden he wrote three plays— The Dog Beneath the Skin (1932), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). Isherwood tells the story in his first autobiography, Lions and Shadows .
After Isherwood wrote joke answers on his second-year exams, Cambridge University in 1925 asked him to leave. He briefly attended medical school and progressed with his first two novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932). In 1930, he moved to Berlin, where he taught English, dabbled in Communism, and enthusiastically explored his homosexuality. His experiences provided the material for Mister Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1938), still his most famous book.
In Berlin in 1932, he also began an important relationship with Heinz Neddermeyer, a young German with whom he fled the Nazis in 1933. England refused entry to Neddermeyer on his second visit in 1934, and the pair moved restlessly about Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in May 1937 and then finally separated them.
In 1938, Isherwood sailed with Auden to China to write Journey to a War (1939), about the Sino-Japanese conflict. They returned to England and Isherwood went on to Hollywood to look for movie-writing work. He also became a disciple of the Ramakrishna monk, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He decided not to take monastic vows, but he remained a Hindu for the rest of his life, serving, praying, and lecturing in the temple every week and writing a biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965).
In 1945, Isherwood published Prater Violet, fictionalizing his first movie writing job in London in 1933-1934. In Hollywood, he spent the start of the 1950s fighting his way free of a destructive five-year affair with an attractive and undisciplined American photographer, William Caskey. Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, The Condor and The Cows (1947). Isherwood’s sixth novel, The World in the Evening (1954), written mostly during this period, was less successful than earlier ones.
In 1953, he fell in love with Don Bachardy, an eighteen-year-old college student born and raised in Los Angeles. They were to remain together until Isherwood’s death. In 1961, Isherwood and completed the final revisions to his new novel Down There on a Visit (1962). Their relationship nearly ended in 1963, and Isherwood moved out of their Santa Monica house. This dark period underpins Isherwood’s masterpiece A Single Man (1964).
Isherwood wrote another novel, A Meeting by the River (1967), about two brothers, but he gave up writing fiction and turned entirely to autobiography. In Kathleen and Frank (1971), he drew on the letters and diaries of his parents. In Christopher and His Kind (1976), he returned to the 1930s to tell, as a publicly avowed homosexual, the real story of his life in Berlin and his wanderings with Heinz Neddermeyer. The book made him a hero of gay liberation and a national celebrity all over again but now in his true, political and personal identity.
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Nisha Sharma
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October 15, 2017
This book forms my first comprehensive introduction to Sri Ramakrishna.
It presents the story of an era where the strength of a man and his stature in society was not measured by his materialistic views and wealth but by the simplicity of his life, his devotion towards fellow beings and his spiritual advancement.
While the story is truly inspirational and lays forth the essence of Bhakti Yoga, what was really heart touching was the devotion of the Guru to his disciples and their spiritual development. Ramakrishna gives himself fully to whomsoever he meets and unleashes the divinity in him to transform the lives of his devotees. His innocence is heart touching, his devotion unparalleled, his beauty unfathomable and his teachings timeless.
I would recommend this book to any spiritual seeker and a non seeker as well, for it contains the most profound lessons of life...
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Tara
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January 2, 2011
This was a very good introduction to the Indian Saint/mystic Ramakrishna who lived in the 19th century near Calcutta. He is the teacher of Vivikenanda, who was one of the first teachers from India who came to the first Parliament of World's Religions in Chicago in 1893. Vivekenanda founded the Vedanta Society in the US and other centers in Europe and South America.
It is a bit of wild story of Ramakrishna's life, who was said to be an avatar - an incarnation of God - that comes only once in a great while. His behavior was so bizarre to others - going into Samadhi - losing consciousness of the outside world and directly experience union with God/Goddess or going into estatic singing/dancing at a drop of a hat. His friends and family called in doctors - thinking that he was insane. It was fortunate that he had early followers that supported him that recognized his greatness and because of this, his influence/teachings continue today. He lived as a priest at a temple at Dakshineswar and was able to honor the Hindu gods/goddesses but was not limited to Hindu practice itself.
It's a book for those interested and familiar with Hindu/Yoga philosophy and practice.
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Alex Fear
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November 13, 2015
It was interesting in parts and I read it to the end but a bit dry and laborious. Could've been a lot shorter, could've had a bit more feeling and not so many unnecessary detours into followers full biographies.
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David Guy
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December 13, 2018
“God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with whole-hearted devotion…One may eat a cake with icing either straight or sidewise. It will taste sweet either way.”
― Ramakrishna, Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
Those who are proud of their twenty-minutes-twice-a-day or forty-minutes-every-morning meditation practice would do well to read about the great Indian saints, for whom spiritual practice was virtually all they did. Ramana Maharshi is a good example, or Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, or—perhaps most notably—Ramakrishna. It wasn’t that he scheduled periods of meditation through the day, or had any particular schedule at all. He decided as a young man to retreat to life in a temple, and from then on meditation was a way of life for him. He fell into samadhi at the drop of a hat.
Samadhi for him was not the mild feeling of being settled in sitting that it is for the rest of us. For Ramakrishna it could be quite incapacitating—his associates sometimes had to hold him up—and might take place in any posture. Several photos show him in this state, like these (of the seated photo, he said that it would serve as an inspiration for future practitioners, and would be hung in countless practice places). He might stay in the state for hours or days. He also entered a different state called ecstasy, when he might sing or dance; in one dancing state, pretty close to the end of his life, he was said to be moving so gracefully that it was as if his joints were rubber.
I grew interested in Ramakrishna when I stumbled across the quote with which I’ve led this article. More and more in my life, the things I read about different religions seem to be converging. I assume that others have noticed that the three persons of the Buddha—the Dharmakaya, Nirmanakaya, Sambogkaya—bear a striking resemblance to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the same way that Hindus regard Brahma as the one God, and see other gods as aspects of his personality. Virtually every religion seems to revere a female figure, whether it’s the Virgin Mary, or the Divine Mother in Hinduism, or the Kwan Yin that Buddhists call on in times of difficulty.
John E. A. Robinson spoke of God not as a being somewhere out there, but as the ground of being, the depth of life, the same way that Buddhists speak of going deeper in meditation, and Hindus fall into deep states of samadhi. Vedantic practitioners seem to see all of us as manifestations of God in a way, but also see particular people as avatars, people who were fully realized incarnations. They saw Jesus as one such person. And there were people in Ramakrishna’s life who declared that he was an avatar. They sometimes discussed this possibility in front of him, and he listened with deep interest, as if they were discussing someone else. He didn’t seem to care one way or another.
Ramakrishna himself was famously open to other practices; when one of his teachers for a time was an Islamic practitioner, his Hindu convictions took a back seat for him, and he had a period when he actually practiced Islam, and prayed five times a day. The same thing happened when he came in contact with a man who first read to him from the Bible. This incident was the most striking one for me in the entire book.
“Ramakrishna’s thoughts began to dwell on the personality of Jesus. As it happened, he often took walks to a garden-house which was situated to the south of the Dakshineswar Temple grounds, and rested there; and the parlour of this garden-house was hung with pictures of holy personalities, including one of the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus sitting on her lap. Ramakrishna became especially attached to this picture. One day, while he was looking at it, he felt that the figures of the Mother and Child began to shine, and that rays of light struck forth from them and entered his heart. As this happened, he was aware of a radical change in his attitude of mind. He felt—just as he had felt during the time of his initiation into Islam by Govinda Ray—that his Hindu way of thinking had been pushed into the back of his mind and that his reverence for the Hindu gods and goddesses had weakened. Instead, he was filled with love for Jesus and for Christianity. He cried to Kali, ‘Oh Mother, what are these strange changes you are making in me?’, but his appeal did not alter his condition. And now he began to see visions of Christian priests burning incense and waving lights before the images of Jesus in their churches, and he felt the fervor of their prayers. Ramakrishna came back to Dakshineswar under the spell of these experiences, and for three days he did not even go into the temple to salute the Divine Mother. At length, on the evening of the third day, while he was walking in the Panchavati, he saw a tall, stately man with a fair complexion coming towards him, regarding him steadfastly as he did so. Ramakrishna knew him at once to be foreigner. He had large eyes of uncommon brilliance and his face was beautiful, despite the fact that his nose was slightly flattened at the tip. At first, Ramakrishna wondered who this stranger could be. Then a voice from within told him, ‘This is Jesus the Christ, the great yogi, the loving Son of God and one with his Father, who shed his heart’s blood and suffered tortures for the salvation of mankind!’ Jesus then embraced Ramakrishna and passed into his body. Ramakrishna remained convinced, from that day onward, that Jesus was truly a divine incarnation.”
Just the fact that Ramakrishna had undergone these experiences would have made him fascinating to me, but when I realized that the great Christopher Isherwood had written a book about him—the man who Gore Vidal said wrote the best English sentences of his generation—I was sold. Isherwood was himself quite involved in Vedantic practice, and apparently took time off from his novels and screenplays to write this rather long book. It is, like all of his work, beautifully written. (I also highly recommend My Guru and His Disciple, which details his own involvement in religious practice.)
I’m fascinated by the way different cultures perceive different religious states. Indian people believe that these deep states of samadhi exist, and so their great saints experience them, while people from other religions—Japanese Zen and Tibetan Budddhism come to mind—see things otherwise and have no such experiences. To read about the physical agonies Ramakrishna went through as he got deeper and deeper into his realization is to wonder what Jesus must have gone through in his 40 days in the desert, and to marvel at how functional he eventually became. Ramakrishna led a largely sheltered existence for most of his life, with various people looking after him at the temple where he presided. He would talk to anyone who showed up, but didn’t go out and seek people. He lived pretty much without an agenda, just did whatever came up.
There is always the question, of course, of how we should live the one life we’ve been given: should we live in a cave all our lives, in a constant state of samadhi, or is it better to be out in the world engaging with people? Ramakrishna did finally touch many people, and seemed completely content with his life. He was an oddly childlike man, who had a deep understanding of spiritual matters but not much ability to live a practical life in the world. Eventually, though, a number of disciples gathered around him, and his most famous disciple, Vivekananda, founded an order in his name. Isherwood writes brief biographies of him and any number of others. It’s fascinating to see the variety of backgrounds they come from, and the various ways they arrive at this one place.
Ramakrishna developed throat cancer when he was relatively young, at a time and place where there was virtually no treatment for it. He died at the age of 50. But as Isherwood points out, he is a saint who didn’t live in the remote past, but at a time (1836-86) when there were historical records, and plenty of people to observe and record his life, as in the massive Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna that one follower put together. Isherwood does a wonderful job of bringing these accounts together and creating an engaging narrative. He sees the man as a phenomenon. There’s no way to explain him. There are only the accounts of various people who met him, and the words he left behind.
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Rohit Shinde
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August 26, 2020
Christopher Isherwood was an American novelist and a Western disciple of Sri Ramkrishna. He was introduced to Vedanta by Alduous Huxley. Huxley himself had a very long association with Sri Ramkrishna through the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Both of these authors were disciples of Swami Prabhavananda who wrote
The Spiritual Heritage of India
. They were later initiated by the Swami as well. I write about Isherwood a bit in order to emphasize that he wasn't just a famous Westerner who had a passing association with Vedanta, but that he had a deep relationship which lasted for around 40 years until his death.
Enough about the author, onto the review! In Isherwood's own words, he calls Ramkrishna a phenomenon, rather than call him a "mystic", "holy man" or any of the numerous qualifiers generally attributed to the "gurus" in religion. He doesn't wish to compete in calling the object of his writing as the "greatest". He simply asks for an open mindedness in approaching the subject matter.
The book describes in brief the life of Ramkrishna, his teachings and his disciples. With clear language and a lucid account, he explains Indian concepts to a Western audience. Although it was written with the West in mind, it is very useful even for Indian readers. He puts in writing what most Indians might be knowing, but are unable to articulate. Specifically to Sri Ramkrishna, there are many instances where even I have some questions of mine cleared up, and I have been following that philosophy for more than a decade now. He articulates concepts which I have found extremely difficult to explain to people because it requires context. Isherwood does it effortlessly without requiring much context. His writing clearly shows that he has spent an inordinate amount of time in the company of Vedantins.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to understand Sri Ramkrishna since it doesn't take the default route of declaring him to be holy above all else. Of course, he himself does consider Ramkrishna as immensely holy and pure. However, that's not reflected in his writings since that turns off quite a few people.
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Purushottam
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February 21, 2019
Most lucid biography of Ramakrishna Paramhansa as compared to other two,the one by Max Muller and the other by Romain Rolland.
Moreover Christopher Isherwood was one of the disciples of Swami Prabhavananda in his Vedantic circle of Ramakrishna order,along with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard.This makes this work particularly interesting.
Swami Prabhavananda himself wrote a short book comparing Christianity with Vedanta proper titled "Sermon on the mount according to Vedanta".
Ramakrishna was an extraordinary figure in modern times who gave an entire new definition to Hinduism. But to me he seems close to the idea of "Sanatan dharma",which in its truest terms doesnt require subscription to any religious denomination as explained in "Bhagvadgita as it is" by Prabhupad.
But still we are mortals who are within the maya of spatio temporal web and we can only have a relative viewpoint with respect to reality.So judging Ramakrishna is impossible in this context who transcended this web of Maya.
The idea of determinism of an indian kind which Ramakrishna hold comes close only to Einstein's conception of Reality and Universe which was derived from Spinoza's pantheism.
In contemporary times when the world is torn into diverse camps by fury of sectarianism,bigoted fundamentalism,religious extremism,the ideal propounded by Ramakrishna seems to be singular recourse left for tolerance.
If one wants to start from the scratch to understand Ramakrishna then one can start from here.
There are scores of other works which one might refer to if one is interested in exploring the Vedanta and future possibility of compatibility of various religions,some of them are-
Gospel of Ramakrishna by swami Nikhilananda
Perennial philosophy by Aldous huxley
Life of ramakrishna by Romain rolland
Life of Vivekananda by Romain rolland
First light by Sunil Gangopadhyay
Sadhana by Rabindranath tagore
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Gianmichael Salvato
5 books · 10 followers
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July 3, 2019
I have long been a fan of Christopher Isherwood, and this book certainly doesn't disappoint. Without trying to justify and without pretending to understand why, Isherwood paints a brilliant portrait of a brilliant sage, whose life was a mystery, even to his closest of disciples. Isherwood captures the essence of a man who feared relationships with women, and yet who was even more wholly devoted to Mother Kali than he was to the men with whom he was in love on this plane.
Overall, this portrait is just that... something of a vignette. It doesn't delve deeply into the teaching, nor attempt to interpret the teaching, leaving that to the reader and serious student to do on their own.
As one who dearly loves Sri Ramkrnsa Pôromôhongśo, whose devotion to Kali was something that deeply resonated with me throughout my formal monastic life, I think Isherwood did a fine job of paying tribute to this great sanyassin.
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Amitabh Sarwate
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October 7, 2020
This is an exceptional book. It profiles the life of Shri Ramakrishna, widely regarded as one of the greatest saints to walk this planet in the last 150 years. He was considered an avatar of Lord Vishnu, and by some an incarnation of Jesus Christ. The book also profiles the life of his 12 closest disciples. It makes for a fascinating read because it chronicles the rise of divinity in Shri Ramakrishna and how it inspired not only his disciples but also the thousands who follow his teachings. For the spiritual seeker, it’s a gem that shouldn’t be missed.
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Joe Rodeck
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November 17, 2017
Boring, lazily paced story blandly told. This book is alternately a biography (with a dozen mini-bios) and a primer/intro on Hindu theology/mythology. The author repeatedly has to tell us how saintly, highly intelligent, and superior his subjects are. More irritating is how he often interjects himself in the first person:
"At this juncture I feel the obligation to discuss this particular matter in more detail blah blah blah . . . .
Michael Nguyen
174 reviews · 14 followers
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August 16, 2021
Incredibly underwhelming. Mystical experiences, basic conversations, watered down advaita vedanta, stories about disciples that all ended up merging into one conglomerate sameness. The most interesting part of the book is the end where it describes Vivekenanda's vision for the world and for India, as a place of Godliness and Social Justice. Rationality, a sharp thinker was Vivekenanda, but the activities of Ramakrishna seemed more like spiritual meanderings and navel gazing.
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Top review from Australia
Gerry ONeill
5.0 out of 5 stars Good read
Reviewed in Australia on 4 October 2015
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A great read about an eastern culture so foreign to that of the west, yet so intreging.
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Top reviews from other countries
Stanley Wroblewski
5.0 out of 5 stars Jai Sri Ramakrishna! The West has a champion for Vedanta in Christopher Isherwoood!
Reviewed in the United States on 2 September 2023
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A brilliant biography of what many considered God incarnate in Sri Ramakrishna. An added plus are the 16 pictures, 5 of the six known photographs of the Bhagavan! A must read for all followers of Advaita Vedanta.
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DeeK
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read!
Reviewed in Canada on 19 April 2022
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Amazing book. Well written. I read it slowly because I didn't want it to end. Absolutely loved it
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Somesh
5.0 out of 5 stars Pure love and blessing
Reviewed in India on 4 December 2023
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Reading this book about Sri Ramakrishna is a blessing. To get to know a spiritual "phenomenon" so deeply, and closely is a true blessing. The writer has explained a lot of spiritual terms really well and it's an easy book to read and engaging as well. It felt like I was getting to know pure love.
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ALERGANT Bernard
3.0 out of 5 stars An insight into Hinduism
Reviewed in France on 18 August 2014
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Although written by an excellent author,and even though I was interested to obtain his insight into the Hindu religion, I didn't enjoy this book much because I wasn't convinced about the central character. In fact, it may be an excellent account of the life of Ramakrishna, but I was not persuaded. I haven't finished reading the book and I do not think I shall.
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MAKdaddy
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 December 2013
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Excellent view into the masters teachings and life, found it insightful and inspring. First hand perspective on a modern day saint
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