Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita

This is the English translation of one of India's most famous books. It contains the dialogues of the Bengali saint Ramakrishna wrtten in almost stenographic accuracy.This edition is different translation of the Swami Nikhilananda "Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna" which was published in the forties and showed the restraint of that era.

Volume III of Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita in English. This book is a word-by-word translation of the original Bengali Edition of the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna... It contains the dialogues of the Bengali saint Ramakrishna written with almost stenographic accuracy. This edition is a different translation of the Swami Nikhilananda Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna which was published in the forties and showed the restraint of that era. All 5 volumes of the set are now available in English. This is volume 3 of the new edition. The expression woman and gold has been replaced by lust and greed or lust and gold. If you have read the Nikhilananda version, this translation will seem like a new Gospel.

This book locates the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita within the critical framework suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination, where he posits that the novel is intensely dialogic or dialogue-ridden. This perspective uncovers in the Kathamrita many moments of the dialogic interface between song and philosophy (epistemology), faith and empiricism, myth and scientific actuality, story-telling and historical documentation, bhava and reason. These multiple dialogues become a powerful portrait of the swirling, teeming, history-making and epoch-creating energies of the 19th century in Bengal, much in the way that in the England of Charles Darwin (1850's), the rival claims of faith versus reason drove thinking minds to the ultimate borders of intellectual questioning. Through his multiple interactions with leading intellectuals of the time like Keshab Chandra Sen, Girish Ghosh, Dr. Mahendralal Sarkar, Mahendranath Gupta, and also Narendranath Dutta, Sri Ramakrishna posits the power of urjita bhakti whereby a devotee exists in a state of joyous freedom that enables engagement with the world without being entrapped in it. Sri Ramakrishna insisted that God was the highest rasa of all and 'loksiksha' should be the prerogative of those who ardently followed 'sadhana' in their lives.

Mahendranath Gupta, a householder disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, is familiarly known by his pen name ‘M’ and popularly as ‘Master Mahashay’. He was the recorder of the great teachings and revelations that came to humanity through Sri Ramakrishna, which he eventually published in Bengali as Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, a unique classic in the religious literature of the world. This Bengali work was translated into English by Swami Nikhilananda as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. The present work, The Condensed Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, is M’s own English version of some of the most important and representative chapters of his voluminous work in Bengali. It is more a translation of thoughts contained in his diary than of its language. He has also included in this work several new elaborations and doctrinal discussions. In this sense, this book by nature is more of an original work by M in English rather than a mere translation.

This book is a word-by-word translation of the original Bengali Edition of the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. It contains the dialogues of the Bengali saint Ramakrishna written in almost stenographic accuracy. This edition is different translation of the Swami Nikhilananda Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna which was published in the forties and showed the restraint of that era.

For nearly a decade Swami Bhuteshananda, the 12th President of the Ramakrishna Order, devoted his weekly Bengali religious classes to discussions on Sri Ramakrishna and to the unique book, 'The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna'. His illuminating discussions brought out the thought-provoking deeper dimensions of the simple, homely utterances of the great prophet, and they helped the audience comprehend these simple sayings of the Great Master in the light of the ancient scriptures of India, specially the Vedanta, as well as modern thought. Not unoften, many abstruse concepts, many knotty philosophical questions and doubts of Vedanta metaphysics, were lucidly explained and resolved. These were later transcribed and eventually published in a seven-volume Bengali work, 'Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita Prasanga'. The present work is an English translation of volume six and the appendix to volume five of the original Bengali work. Published by Advaita Ashrama, a publication house of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math, India.