Sri Ramakrishna was indeed no ordinary trainer: ‘Sometimes the Master was strong like a thunderbolt and other times tender like a flower; sometimes he crushed their egos by scolding them and again overwhelmed them with his unselfish love. He checked their physiognomies, read their minds, guided their eating and sleeping habits, and demonstrated to them how to practise karma, jnana, bhakti, and raja yogas. When he initiated them, he empowered them and removed the obstacles to their spiritual journey. He taught them the technique of reading one’s life like a book rather than depending solely on the scriptures, or swallowing others’ ideas. Most importantly, he always kept before them the shining ideal of renunciation, never allowing the slightest compromise with the basic principles of truth and purity. He sang, danced, played, had fun and cracked jokes
with them, and also taught them how to pray, meditate, and be immersed in God-consciousness.’

The critical element underlying all these components of Sri Ramakrishna’s training, and also overriding them, was love. ‘Do I love you?’ Swami Premananda, who was widely known as an especially loving soul, would tell the young monks at Belur Math, ‘No; if I did I would have bound you for ever to me. Oh, how dearly the Master loved us! We do not even bear a hundredth of that love towards you.’ Swami Vivekananda confessed that he could not ‘think or talk of Sri Ramakrishna long, without being overwhelmed’. The other brother disciples too bore eloquent testimony to the Master’s unworldly love that bound them into a fraternity.

This extraordinary love had a supramundane source. At the end of his sadhana, it was revealed to Sri Ramakrishna in a yogic vision that as an instrument of the Divine Mother he would have to found a religious order based on the universal truths revealed in his life and that many devotees would come to him to attain spirituality. It took several years for this vision to fructify fully. The great yearning that Sri Ramakrishna felt for his devotees in the intervening period—a longing that appears comparable to his longing for God—has been thus described by him: ‘In those days there was no limit to my yearning. During the daytime I could just manage to keep it under control. Severely tormented by the worthless mundane talk of worldly people, I would wistfully anticipate the day when my beloved companions would arrive. I hoped to find solace in conversing with them about God. … I kept planning what I should say to this one and what I should give to that one, and so forth. When evening came, I couldn’t control my feelings any longer. I would climb up to the roof of the kuthi [bungalow] and cry out at the top of my voice, with the anguish of my heart: “Come to me, my children! Where are you? I can’t bear to live without you!” A mother never longed so for the sight of her child, or a friend for a friend, or a lover for his sweetheart, as I did for them.’

For the last five years of his life, Sri Ramakrishna was actively engaged in training his monastic disciples, initiating them into ‘the secrets of his own nature and that of yoga’ and familiarizing them with the essentials of scriptural truths. Just before his passing away ‘he called in all his disciples but Swamiji [Naren] and gave them an express command that they were always to pay every attention to Swamiji, and never to leave anything undone that could add to his health or comfort. Then sending them out and calling in Swamiji he committed all his other disciples to his charge.’

Swami Vivekananda testified to the strength of the bond that bound the brothers to him. Speaking of the decade-long struggle to set the Order on a firm footing, he observed: ‘There was one thing always to keep us hopeful—the tremendous faithfulness to each other, the tremendous love between us. I have got a hundred men and women around me; if I become the devil himself tomorrow, they will say,
“Here we are still! We will never give you up!” That is a great blessing. In happiness, in misery, in famine, in pain, in the grave, in heaven, or in hell who never gives me up is my friend. Is such friendship a joke? … You need not worship any gods in the world if you have that faith, that strength, that love. And that was there with us all throughout that hard time.’

Swamiji’s love and admiration for his brother disciples was equally remarkable: ‘Sri Ramakrishna was a wonderful gardener. Therefore he has made a bouquet of different flowers and formed his Order. All different types and ideas have come into it, and many more will come. … Know each of those who are here to be of great spiritual power. … When they will go out, they will be the cause of the awakening of spirituality in people. Know them to be part of the spiritual body of Sri Ramakrishna, who was the embodiment of infinite religious ideas. I look upon them with that eye. … They are each a centre of religious power, and in time that power will manifest.’

Sister Nivedita was witness to the life of the monastic community at Belur Math in its early days. She wrote: ‘Nothing in the early days of my life in India struck me so forcibly or so repeatedly as the steadiness with which the other members of the
Order fulfilled this part of the mission laid upon them. Men whose lives were cast in the strictest mould of Hindu orthodoxy, or even of asceticism, were willing to eat with the Europeans whom their leader had accepted. Was the Swami [Vivekananda] seen dining in Madras with an Englishman and his wife? Was it said that in the West he had touched beef or wine? Not a quiver was seen on the faces
of his brethren. It was not for them to question, not for them to explain, not even for them to ask for final justification and excuse. Whatever he did, wherever he might lead, it was their place to be found unflinching at his side.’

Nivedita was actually seeing the early development of a new Indian monastic order that held together in its fold richly diverse personalities dedicated to a higher cause: ‘The highest types of the religious life in the past had been solitary, whether
as hermits or wanderers. In the monastery besides us there were men, as we were told, who did not approve of their leader’s talking with women; there were others who objected to all rites and ceremonies; the religion of one might be described as atheism tempered by hero-worship; that of another led him to a round of practices which to most of us would constitute an intolerable burden; some lived in a world of saints, visions, and miracles; others again could not be away with such nonsense, but must needs guide themselves by the coldest logic. The fact that all these could be bound together in a close confraternity bore silent witness to their conception of the right of the soul to choose its own path.’ The power that bound them together was, however, that of Sri Ramakrishna’s love and the palpable spiritual ideal he set before them.

A close study of the history of the Order leads one to the inevitable conclusion that ‘meaningless as would have been the Order of Ramakrishna without Vivekananda, even so futile would have been the life and labours of Vivekananda without, behind him, his brothers of the Order of Ramakrishna.’ It is to these monastic disciples of Sri Ramakrishna that this annual number is dedicated.