01/01/2021
1 January 2021
HEARTY KALPATARU GREETINGS
Kalpataru : Sri Ramakrishna reveals himself
(Editorial Prabuddha Bharata December 1987)
Sri Ramakrishna finally revealed Himself. It was a time when his intense physical suffering due to cancer, threatened the faith of some of the devotees in the divinity of their teacher. Yet he always remained the same child of Divine Mother and lived in a state of bliss. Despite the dreaded disease, his serenity, God-consciousness, and above all, his passion to lead mankind to God,never ceased even for a moment.
A devotee who came to see the ailing man, saw him shedding tears, and lamenting, ‘Ah me! Nityananda went from door to door, walking on foot and gave divine love. Alas! I cannot move out except in a carriage’.
Another day he said, ‘Well, I shall go on doing good to others even when I am on barley water.’
To the devotees who were feeling pain at his own terrible suffering, he spoke in consoling words:
My Divine Mother has brought this illness upon this body to convince the sceptics of the present age that Atman is divine, that God-consciousness is as true and practical as it was in the Vedic period, that when one reaches perfection, freedom from bondage is attained. All my religious practices, yoga practices, devotional exercises have been for the good of others and not for my own good. My Mother has set through this form a living example in this age.
Yet despair crept into the hearts of many. The devotees brought their teacher a little towards Calcutta in a spacious garden of Cossipore, for better treatment and quicker recovery. Best doctors were brought. An unspoken gloom lurked in their minds.
Only a few like Naren and Girish dared to see the presence of the incarnation of God of this age in the decaying body of Sri Ramakrishna. Their burning faith and devotion kept the drooping spirit of others high. Amid this gloom, Ramakrishna brought the blessed moment of theophany—the revelation of the power of the incarnation of God. Transcending far above the physical sufferings of the apparent man, he stood before his devotees, like a Divine Being capable of giving them everything, and even lifting them up to sunlit heights of unexpected illuminations.
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It was on 1st January 1886. Only two weeks ago Sri Ramakrishna had been brought to the Cossipore garden. So long bed-ridden, the Master felt, for the first time, a desire to take a walk below in the garden. It was 3 p.m. Dressed in a red- bordered cloth, a shirt, a wrapper also with a red border, a cap covering the ears, and a pair of slippers, Ramakrishna came down from upstairs along with Latu. Naren and others were sleeping as they kept vigil previous night. The lay devotees who could not come very often to the Master, due to their domestic pre-occupations, were present in a large number, as it was a holiday on account of New Year’s Day.
As the Master came down unexpectedly into the garden, the lay devotees came forward in joy to greet and accompany him. Latu returned to clean and rearrange the bedding of the Master. There was a freshness and joy in the minds of all, at this recovery of the Master.
It was Girish, the symbol of faith, who precipitated the historic moment. Girish was talking with other devotees like Ram, under a mango tree. For the last few months, despite Sri Ramakrishna’s illness, Girish was openly declaring to others that the Master was the latest incarnation of God on earth.
Sri Ramakrishna came along the way to where Girish and others sat, and asked Girish, ‘Girish, what have you seen (in me) which makes you say so many things publicly in glorification of me before one and all?’
With all his devotion and faith, Girish at once stood up, came near the Master, and fell at his feet. Then with folded hands and a voice choked with emotion, he said, ‘What more can I say about Him, even a fraction of whose Vyasa and Valmiki miserably failed to express in their immortal epics and puranas !’2 *
With these words of fervent faith, a visible change came in Sri Ramakrishna, In front of the devotees he now stood radiant and, through Girish, addressed the gathering of these lay devotees, ‘What more shall I say to you? Be illumined.’ Hardly had he spoken these words, when he went into samadhi.
The words uttered out of a deep compassion immediately brought a divine awakening in all present. At once all of them fell at the Master’s feet, took the holy dust of his feet, and rent the skies shouting, ‘Victory to Ramakrishna’.
Out of a mood of divine grace Sri Ramakrishna now began to bless the devotees, one after the other, with his divine touch. This brought an instant transfiguration in them. Some of them looked at him spell-bound, some of them saw a light or effulgence, some felt the onrush of a spiritual power in them, some of them unable to bear the overflowing joy began to move restlessly, and call loudly to all within the house to come and get the divine touch. Still some others collected flowers and worshipped the Master with them, uttering various mantras. Sarat and Latu heard the calls and saw the whole scene from above. But they continued their task of love, thus renouncing their
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share of joy. The moment of theophany overwhelmed them, too. Sarat wrote later of those blessed moments.
They forgot time and space, forgot the disease of the Master, forgot their previous determination not to touch him till he recovered, and were aware only that an extraordinary Divine Being, out of sympathy for them in their plight, feeling excruciating pain at their misery and overflowing with compassion for them, had come down from heaven and called them affectionately to Him for giving protection, like a mother sheltering her children against all ills by covering them lovingly with the upper part of her sari.3
The much-awaited moment of theophany arrived. God once again revealed Himself through the human body of Sri Ramakrishna. The divine feast was suddenly thrown open to the hungry seekers of divinity, and now they came running. Vaikunthanath Sanyal, who was so long pressing Sri Ramakrishna for the divine grace, was blessed with this divine touch. ‘ But as a result of it’, he wrote, ‘a great revolution took place in my mind. I saw the figure of the master light up with a gracious smile in sky, in the houses, trees, plants, men and in whatever else I looked at.’ Beside himself with an unspeakable joy he cried to Sarat and Latu, on the roof, ‘O you all! Wherever you be, come without delay!’
The vision of his beloved Master in everything continued for some days even throughout his waking state, until Sanyal found it unbearable and maddening. Frightened, he returned after some days to the Master with the prayer, ‘O Lord I am not able to contain this mental state; please ordain that it may come to an end.’ The uninterrupted continuity of visions came to an end, although he ‘felt blessed and amazed at the sudden appearance of this vision a few times daily.’ Later Sanyal used to regret, ‘Woe be to human weakness and stupidity! Why did I pray so? Why did I not keep my faith firm in him?’
Ramachandra Dutta, blessed with the divine touch on that day wrote:-
We saw that our Master had turned into the Kalpataru, the wish-fulfilling tree. We became intoxicated with joy…. Whomever we found in front of us, we brought to the Master, and he blessed them…. We realized that such a rare moment may not come in our life. Frantically we ran hither and thither in search of anyone and everyone to be blessed ; until there was none left out. With the loud chantings in the name of Ramakrishna, the sky began to resonate. The devotees. began to make a shower of flowers. A sea of divine bliss welled up.
Ramachandra went out running and told Navagopal Ghosh, ‘Well, what are you doing, Sir? The Master has turned ‘into Kalpataru today. Go there, hurry up please! If you have desire for something, ask for it right now.’—Excited.. Ghosh—ran—towards the Master, fell at his feet and said, ‘What will happen to me, Sir?’ The Master asked him if he could do a little spiritual practice or even a little of japam on the beads a number of times daily. Ghosh surrendered and said that he could do neither because of the heavy load of his worldly duties.
The Master then asked, ‘Well, can you take my name a little?’ ‘That I can do no doubt’, he replied. Pleased, the Master blessed him with the words, ‘That will be enough—you will not have to do anything further.’
Ramlal, Sri Ramakrishna’s nephew, was struggling to have the full vision of his chosen deity in meditation but so long he could not succeed. He, too, now came running. The Master removed the wrapper from his body and slowly passed his hands on his chest saying, ‘Now, have a good look’. At once an illumination overwhelmed him. He said, ‘Ah! What a beauty ! What a splendour of light! How can I tell them?’ Later on he confided, ‘But no sooner had the Master touched me that day, than the form of my chosen ideal appeared suddenly from head to foot in the lotus of my heart and moved and looked benign and effulgent.’
Girish virtually dragged the cook Ganguly from the kitchen and placed him at the feet of the Master, who bestowed his grace on him. Harmohan Mitra, another devotee, was similarly brought before him, and the Master touched him saying, ‘Today let
but never forgot the Master, the giver of his prosperity.
Sri Ramakrishna’s prediction that ‘I will cast my whole secret to the winds’, came finally true. Some of the devotees while returning home after this theophany wondered, ‘How is it possible that the Master’s frail frame, his ailing body, could contain the Self of a God-man with such wonderous powers?’ But there were others who realized that this is how God descends through human form, out of sheer compassion for men suffering in worldly bondages, and then gives them just out of love, the blessings of divine grace and freedom from fear.
M. wrote later, ‘The Master stood like One of the most blessed was Haranchandra Das. For as soon as he bowed down at the Master’s feet, the Master placed his lotus feet on Haran’s head. It is only on a few occasions that the Master used to bestow his grace in this way. Haran used to celebrate an annual festival in memory of the grace the Master bestowed on him on this occasion.
As Sri Ramakrishna was now returning to his room, Akshoy Kumar Sen came running. The Master placed his right hand on his chest saying, ‘Be awakened and muttered a holy mantra into Akshoy’s ear. A powerful, divine force welled up within him. He felt blessed but could hardly stand the great upsurge of the spiritual emotion, which violently began to convulse his body and turned him virtually into a heap of twisted limbs. He experienced a profound bliss, and shed profuse tears of joy.
Atul Krishna Ghosh, and Kishori Roy came. The Master blessed them. Bhai Bhupati came and prayed for samadhi. The Master was all grace that day, and said, ‘You will have samadhi’. Upendranath
Mukhopadhyaya came and prayed for material prosperity. The Master said, ‘You will have wealth’. He did have wealth,
one of those fruit-sellers who bring their fruits to the market-place, bargain at first about the prices, but then toward the sunset, when the market is about to close, give away the fruits indiscriminately.7
Sometime after this incident, the Master one day asked Ram, ‘Tell me why, although you speak all these of me (as an incarnation of God etc.) there is this cancer in the throat? Why is there this emaciated body? Ah! how much of beauty, knowledge and miraculous power Sri Gauranga had! And I have none. And why had I to leave Dakshineswar?’ Deeply moved at these words of the Master, Ram answered,
Yes, Lord, from my childhood I have heard about , the physical beauty and the divine powers of Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Gauranga and Christ…. I also heard you were just a saint… But today I realize that you have occupied the seat in my heart which was meant for the Almighty. How much have I tried to remove you from that blessed seat and install God there!…. But…. All the worldly intelligence, knowledge and decisions of men, have failed to dislodge you from that blessed spot. Therefore what else can I do? I am compelled to call you as God.
On another occasion Ram spoke to the Master with the same devotion :
Lord, do we not see openly how men without devotion, prayers, austerities, even the downright scoundrels, are changing into divine beings? Shall we mistake you even after seeing these incidents?…. From the day you have come out of Dakshineswar common people have been blessed. In the form of a diseased man, thou hast blessed thousands by allowing them to have your darshans.
Sri Ramakrishna asked none of the fortunate souls to worship this God, read that book, or visit this place of pilgrimage or that. He brought to them at once what one achieves through births of austerities—the final awakening of the divine consciousness. The blessed day of the 1st January has since then been immortalized in the minds of these devotees, It was, as his monastic disciple Saradananda said, ‘the day of self- revelation of the Master, or the bestowal of freedom from fear on all devotees by revealing himself.’9 The incarnation power in Sri Ramakrishna could not be hidden any more. The pot of nectar was broken in the market-place of life. The King of the Divine world who, according to the Master’s own simile, was so long moving incognito in the guise of a beggar, was finally discovered at the very middle of the road. And the poor beggars of grace came rushing to fill their bowls. Now the King was all compassion. He gave out of God’s plenty, overbrimming their little vessels, and inundating them with the divine flood. ‘He was the power, he was the slope, he was the current, and other streams and
currents ran towards this river. He was the Ganga itself’, wrote Rolland.
Like the all-purifying Ganga, Sri Ramakrishna on this day of theophany, made no distinction between the fit and the unfit, between the saint and the sinner. Even the lost sheep of the fold, the so-called ‘worthless’ got the Master’s encouragement and love which was destined to ‘change the very course of their lives thereby.’
As Vivekananda said, Sri Ramakrishna ‘used to handle human minds, like the lumps of clay, breaking, moulding and remoulding them at ease and filling them with new ideas by mere touch.’ For these blessed souls, the centre of life was shifted for ever from the mire of the world, to the divinity within. When man’s divine awareness or hush is awakened then only he can be called maan-hush or man, Sri Ramakrishna used to say.
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Some of the devotees like Ramachandra preferred to call this day as the Kalpataru day—the day on which their Master Sri Ramakrishna turned into a Kalpataru—the mythical wish-fulfilling tree granting all boons to the devotees. Once Sri Ramakrishna said to Pundit Sasadhar, ‘Pray to God. He is full of compassion. Will He not listen to the words of the devotee? He is the Kalpataru. You will get whatever you desire from Him.’
The doubting Pundit asked again, ‘Does God listen to our prayers?’ The Master replied, ‘God is the Kalpataru, the wish-fulfilling tree. You will certainly get whatever you ask of Him. But you must pray standing near Him. Only then will your prayer be fulfilled.’
Ramakrishna often used to sing in the lines of Ramprasad, ‘Oh mind, let us go for a walk to Mother Kali, the wish-fulfilling tree, and you can gather easily the four fruits thereof—Dharma (fulfilment of worldly duties), Artha (wealth and prosperity), Kama (fulfilment of desires) and Moksha (divine awakening),’ One is reminded of Sri Krishna’s assurance to his beloved devotee Arjuna that God fulfils all the
needs of him who has totally surrendered himself to the Lord. In the Cossipore garden, on this blessed day, the desires of the devotees were fulfilled as they felt that they stood in the presence of God. Did they not wait long for this moment? Did not they surrender and develop total faith in their Master as an incarnation of God on earth?
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Once the water of immortality was tasted, could anyone remain satisfied anymore with the water of the ditch or the marshy pond? Does anyone wish to pray for a pice when suddenly confronted with the king with his outstretched arms full of gold and diamonds? As the minds of the devotees were lifted up to a higher level of consciousness at the vibrant presence of divinity, most of them begged for the higher, eternal wealth of a divine life, which neither moths can eat, nor theives can steal. With his usual, striking simile, Sri Ramakrishna used to say, ‘What need have I to know how many houses and how many government securities Jadu Mallik possess? All that I need is somehow to converse with Jadu Mallik…. Once I get a chance to talk to him, then he himself will tell me all about his possessions if I ask him. If one becomes acquainted with the Master, then one is respected by officers too.’ ‘He (who has realized the Atman) verily becomes the
king among men. Effortlessly he moves
around in all the worlds (all the spheres of
life)’, says the Chandogya Upanishad.
‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and
everything else shall be added unto it’,
said Christ.
On this thrice-blessed day.
the Master gave these beggars of grace, the
key to the kingdom of God. Could they
remain poor or starved, in any way,
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And this grace Sri Ramakrishna brought to the weak children of the Divine Mother, children who are bogged down in the terrible bondage of the worldly life, and are incapable of spiritual strivings. Out of sheer compassion, the Master lifted them, by superhuman power, up to the sunny heights of divine bliss and everlasting fulfilment. Ramakrishna proved what Jesus had told long before, ‘With man it is impossible, but with God nothing is impossible.’ The unheard cry of these pining souls, their total surrender and unshakable faith in the Master as the veritable manifestation of God on earth, who was also their father, mother, friend, well-wisher, teacher, guide and the dearest one in life, brought them this priceless gift of divine awakening. And this Sri Ramakrishna did, as his disciples believed, by taking their accumulated sufferings, both physical and spiritual on his own self, On that day Ramakrishna returned to his room and said. ‘Accepting the sins of the rogues (this is the word with which he used to address affectionately his beloved devotees) my limbs are burning. Bring some Ganga water.’ He sprayed himself with the holy water over his burning body. We remember words of prophet Isiah : ‘He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…. He was wounded for our transgression….
The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.’
Saints can show us the way to perfection. They can even inspire us on that path. It is only an incarnation of God who can bring sainthood even in the sinner by a single touch, word, or even a look. ‘A single glance of his could change a whole life.’ Vivekananda wrote about his Master. The great disciple himself realized what his Master once said to him : ‘Living faith may be given in a tangible fashion and more truly than anything else in the world.’ Sri Ramakrishna used to say, ‘It is in the degree of power only that an incarnation of God on the one hand, and a perfected man or Jiva on the other, differ.’
Many years later, on another 1st January, Ramachandra Dutta remembered this act of divine grace by their Master :
Today is that blessed day. It is on. this day that the God of the poor, overwhelmed with compassion for—the poor,—extended—His loving hands for His beloved children and showered on them the bliss of compassion!… Where are you, our Master, cur Ramakrishna? Today is that blessed day…. We have come again for your divine grace. Kindly appear before us in that blessed mood, in that world-bewitching human form. Kindly stand before us as the same wish-fulfilling tree. Let us have your radiant vision once again and fill our heart by listening to your words of nectar. O Master! graciously appear today before us once again, and make us hear
your words of eternal protection and fearlessness bestowed to your blessed children.
Is it always on this day only that Sri Ramakrishna’s grace is available? God’s grace is available wherever and whenever His children pray sincerely to the Lord. Prayer brings the grace of God. The unconditional grace becomes conditional by the intensity of devotion and prayer.
Sri Ramakrishna, the God of this age, is a ‘living presence’ today. He is, as a western disciple wrote, ‘a pulsing presence, a living personality … who is able to walk on the earth, whether in the flesh or in the spirit, a living presence among men.’ And there are blessed ones who even today receive the grace of the Master, a grace that transfigures them into saintly beings.
Only a few years ago, a young monk returned to the Belur Math after spending hours in the Cossipore garden on this blessed day of 1st January where thousands thronged to celebrate the Kalpataru festival and pray in Sri Ramakrishna’s room.
After returning to the Math he asked Revered Bharat Maharaj, why there was no celebration at the Math on that day. The old swami answered, ‘Do you know why we do not observe the Kalpataru festival at the Belur Math? We, too, like you boys, asked the same question to Revered Baburam Maharaj (Swami Premananda). And he replied, “Do you not know that in this Math the Master is Nitya-Kalpataru, always the wish-fulfilling tree, granting boons of all kinds to his devotees?’’
