His Words by Amiya P Sen

Author:Amiya P Sen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670084333
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

SECTION V

Social and Spiritual Counsel for

the Man of the World

The excerpts selected for this section are all premised on the belief that, notwithstanding certain inherent difficulties, God-realization is consistent with the routine, everyday life of the householder. It also makes these excerpts distinctive in some ways. For one, they are expressed in plain language and seldom use complex theological or philosophical concepts by way of illustration. On the contrary, they tend to draw upon daily metaphors and experiences from the life of the people with which, presumably, many of Sri Ramakrishna’s devotees would have been familiar. Not surprisingly, this is also where the storyteller in Ramakrishna emerges at his best. What is also obvious from these excerpts is that his teachings were not addressed to any particular class as defined by its professional standing, income level or lifestyle. Rather, his chosen category was that of the samsari—the man totally involved in samsar or worldly life, as well as the one less involved. Poverty, illness and domestic squabbles were no doubt a part of samsaric life but these were less the cause than the symptoms of a deeper malaise—a tendency to view the world and worldly relationships only in material terms.

In Ramakrishna’s discourse, there is a recurring reference to the snares of kamini-kanchan but it is worth noting that this only reflects earlier Brahminical teaching. Ramakrishna also addressed long-standing fears of social and moral values being inverted in a degenerative Kali Yuga. These included the social ascendancy of the woman and the wife, a general decline in faith and the rise of scepticism. Some of these fears were already popular motifs in bazaar paintings of Kalighat or else in biting satires produced at the time. To these Ramakrishna added his own observation that the increase in consumerism was leading to an increase in the number of nagging wives and demanding children, thereby placing an additional burden on paltry clerical incomes.

Even when reiterating older concerns or anxieties, Ramakrishna did so more directly and forcefully. Few men appear to have stated, as categorically as he did, that marriage and family life were the most effective causes of man’s material bondage. He did not ascribe the dasatya (servility) of men vis-à-vis women to a functional dependence on wives or women, or even to income levels. Rather, it appeared to him as symptomatic of the changes that had been brought about in the lives of the people by the introduction of an alien culture and work routines. Sri Ramakrishna was highly amused to find that that even Viswanath Upadhyay, a highly placed employee of the Nepalese government and drawing a salary of no less than Rs 600 a month (as against a clerical salary of Rs 25 in the mercantile office of a government department) could not go against the wishes of his wife.1

Though Ramakrishna found that the man who renounced the world was better equipped for a spiritual life, he also held out hope and reassurance for the grihastha (householder) who either would not or could not permanently sever his ties with society.

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