Sri Ramakrishna was born in a little village of Kamarpukur. His parents were poor and devoted to Hinduism. When he was 16, his mother sent him to Calcutta where he became a priest at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple. The Hindu cult of washing, clothing, feeding and worshiping the statue of the goddess filled him with the desire for a direct experience of the divine. In the goddess Kali, Ramakrishna saw a universal Mother.

In order to suppress his strong tendency towards religion, his mother tried to include him into the everyday life and obliged him to marry in 1859. After a year and a half, Ramakrishna once again left his village for Calcutta where he continued the worshiping of Kali. During this period, he was strongly influenced by an ascetic Bhairavi Brahmani. He soon changed his birth name Gadadhar into Ramakrishna, a name that is composed of two favourite incarnations of Vishnu, Rama and Krishna.
 
A few years later, a visiting sufi at the temple of Kali acquainted him with Islam and he followed  Muslim regulations for some time. In the process of spiritual growth, Ramakrishna felt a growing desire to spread his own teachings. Narendro Natha Datto, more known by the name of Vivekananda is one of his most ardent followers. The teachings of Ramakrishna are a mixture of different religious traditions and express a strong desire for a mystic, direct and transdiscursive experience of the divine.

(Source: Vlasta Pacheiner-Klander, Življenje in nauk Šri Ramakrišne, Mladinska knjiga, Ljubljana 1994.)

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