Swami Vivekananda about his Guru Sri Ramakrishna
He looked just like an ordinary man,
with nothing remarkable about him. He used the most simple language, and I
thought, 'Can this man be a great teacher?'
I crept near him and asked him the question which I had been
asking others all my life: 'Do you believe in God, sir?' 'Yes.' `How can you?'
'Because I see Him just as I see you here, only in a much more intense sense.'
That impressed me at once. For the first time I found a
person who dared to say that he saw God, that religion was a reality, to be
felt, to be sensed in an infinitely more intense way than we can sense the
world. I began to go to that man, day after day, and I actually saw that
religion could be given. One touch, one glance, can change a whole life.
C Rajagopalachari on Sri Ramakrishna
He [Sri Ramakrishna] did not pose as a philosopher or a
scholar. . . He was a common Hindu. He did not say, ‘I do not believe in idol
worship. I am a Vedantin.’ He did not say, ‘I do not believe in going to
temples. I believe only in the Upanishadic form of Hindu religion.’ He did not
make any statement like that. He was simply like a blade of grass, like any
other blade of grass in this country.
There was nothing different about him from the rest
and he did not, so to say, assume the air of ‘I am not the blade of grass, I am
a mango tree or I am a coconut tree’ or something like that. He was like the
grass that grows on earth, not distinct from any other grass, but like the rice
plant, which is also, a grass but which yields rice. Sri Ramakrishna was the
type of grass which yielded fruit and food in the form of true religion. He was
truly a rice plant. May we grow more and more of grass of that variety in our
country, and yet more of them.
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