#000657
The Life of Ramakrishna
Romain Rolland
The French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland's admiring life of Sri Ramakrishna, the nineteenth-century Bengali mystic whose ecstatic devotion helped reshape modern Hinduism. Written for a Western audience, the book presents Ramakrishna not as an exotic curiosity but as a universal religious genius — a temple priest who pursued God through many paths, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian, and concluded that all led to the same reality. Rolland traces his life at the Dakshineswar temple, his visions, and his transmission of that fire to the disciple Vivekananda, who carried it to the world. Part biography, part meditation on mysticism itself, it is written with the lyrical intensity of a novelist and the sympathy of a seeker. First published in French in 1929, it introduced Ramakrishna to countless Western readers and remains a warm, if idealizing, doorway into his world.
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The author
Romain Rolland (1866–1944) was a French novelist, dramatist, and pacifist who won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature for Jean-Christophe. In his later years he grew deeply interested in Indian spirituality and struck up a famous correspondence with Sigmund Freud, to whom he described the "oceanic feeling" of mystical oneness.
The subject
Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) was a priest at the Dakshineswar Kali temple near Calcutta whose intense devotional experiences and teaching that all religions lead to one God made him a central figure of the Hindu renaissance; his disciple Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission.
The book
The Life of Ramakrishna (French, 1929; English via Advaita Ashrama) narrates the saint's life and reflects on the nature of mysticism, aimed at bridging East and West.
How it reads
Eloquent and heartfelt, but frankly devotional and idealizing; Rolland was an admirer, not a critical biographer, and modern scholars read it alongside more analytic and contextual studies. As an appreciative introduction it retains real charm.
For more context
Read with The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Mahendranath Gupta) for the primary record of his conversations.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Romain Rolland
- Publisher
- Advaita Ashrama
- Place of publication
- Calcutta
- Year
- 1929
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Colorado