God Is Infinite: Ayan Maharaj

“God Is Infinite, and the Paths to God
Are Infinite”: A Reconstruction and

Defense of Sri Ramakrishna’s Vijñāna-
Based Model of Religious Pluralism*
Ayon Maharaj / Ramakrishna Mission
Vivekananda University
Contemporary theologians have discussed a wide range of theories of reli-

gious pluralism, including John Hick’s well-known quasi-Kantian theory,
David Ray Griffin’s Whiteheadian theory, Paul Knitter’s soteriocentric the-
ory, and S. Mark Heim’s “multiple salvations” theory.1 However, Sri Rama-
krishna’s pioneering teachings on religious pluralism have been largely ig-
nored. The Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna (1836–86) taught the harmony
of all religions on the basis of his own richly varied spiritual experiences
and his remarkably eclectic religious practices, both Hindu and non-Hindu.
As Sri Ramakrishna put it, “With sincerity and earnestness one can realize
God through all religions.”2 Of course, Sri Ramakrishna was a God-intoxicated
mystic rather than a philosopher, so he did not present a systematic theory
of religious pluralism. Not surprisingly, there has been a great deal of inter-
pretive controversy regarding precisely how Sri Ramakrishna harmonized the
various religions and spiritual philosophies. Three interpretations of his views
on religious pluralism are especially prevalent. Frank Morales and Stephen
Prothero, among others, have attributed to Sri Ramakrishna the view that
* I am grateful to one of the anonymous referees, whose trenchant and detailed feedback
led me to make numerous important revisions to the article.
1
See John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1989), 233–97; David Ray
Griffin, ed., Deep Religious Pluralism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 1–66;
Paul Knitter, “Dialogue and Liberation,” Drew Gateway 58, no. 1 (1987): 1–53; S. Mark Heim,
Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995).
2
Mahendranath Gupta, Śrīśrīrāmakrṣ ṇ ̣akathāmrta:
̣ Śrīma-kathita (Kolkata: Udbodhan, 2010),
151. For the English translation, see The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. Swami Nikhilananda
(New York: Ramakrishna-Vedanta Center, 1992), 191. Hereafter, citations to Kathāmrta ̣ will be
given in parentheses in the body of the essay, first citing the page number of the Bengali orig-
inal and then citing the page number of the English translation. I sometimes modify Nikhi-
lananda’s translation.
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The Journal of Religion
all religions are essentially the same and that their differences are negligi-
ble.3 As Morales puts it, Sri Ramakrishna subscribed to a “radical universal-
ism,” the view that “all religions are the same, with the same purpose, goal,
experientially tangible salvific state, and object of ultimate devotion.”4
By contrast, numerous scholars have claimed that Sri Ramakrishna har-
monized the world religions from the standpoint of a particular philosoph-
ical or religious sect. Swami Ghanananda, Swami Dhireshananda, and Swami
Ashokananda have argued that Sri Ramakrishna harmonized the world re-
ligions on the philosophical basis of Advaita Vedānta, which accepts the ul-
timate reality of nirgun ̣a Brahman, the attributeless nondual Absolute.5 For
instance, according to Swami Dhireshananda, Sri Ramakrishna main-
tained that the common goal of all religions is the “direct spiritual experi-
ence of Vedāntic nirgun ̣a Brahman.”6 Meanwhile, Jeffrey Kripal claims that
Sri Ramakrishna’s ultimate standpoint was Śākta rather than Advaitic. Ac-
cording to Kripal, Sri Ramakrishna, like the Śākta poet Ramprasad, took
the Goddess Kali to be “the actress behind the world’s religious masks.”7
A third group of scholars—including Satis Chandra Chatterjee, Swami
Tapasyananda, and Jeffery Long—argues that Sri Ramakrishna’s religious
pluralism stems from his capacious and resolutely nonsectarian concep-
tion of God as the Infinite Reality that is both personal and impersonal,
and both with and without form.8 According to these scholars, Sri Rama-
krishna maintains that the various religions are different paths to the real-
ization of the Infinite Divine Reality in any of its innumerable aspects, both
3
See Frank Morales, Radical Universalism: Does Hinduism Teach That All Religions Are the Same?
(New Delhi: Voice of India, 2008); and Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One (New York: HarperOne,
2010).
4
Morales, Radical Universalism, 3.
5
Swami Ghanananda, Sri Ramakrishna and His Unique Message (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 1969),
107–33; Swami Ashokananda, A Call to the Eternal (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 1995), 125–51; Swami
Omkarananda, “Brahma o Śakti abhed,” Udbodhan 66, no. 5 (1964): 227–32, and “Nitya o Līlā,”
Udbodhan 66, no. 6 (1964): 287–96; Swami Dhireshananda, “Swami Vivekananda o Advaitavāda,”
Udbodhan 65, no. 2 (1962): 73–80 and 65, no. 3 (1962): 80–81, 138–44, and “Nānā Dṛsṭ ̣ite Sri
Ramakrishna,” Udbodhan 82, no. 5 (1980): 220–26.
6
Swami Dhireshananda, “Swami Vivekananda o Advaitavāda,” 144.
7
Jeffrey Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2007), 102–3.
8
Swami Tapasyananda, Sri Ramakrishna’s Thoughts on Man, World and God (Mylapore: Sri
Ramakrishna Math, 2007), 135–50; Satis Chandra Chatterjee, “Vivekananda’s Neo-Vedantism
and Its Practical Application,” in Vivekananda: The Great Spiritual Teacher (Kolkata: Advaita
Ashrama, 1995), 255–80, and “Sri Ramakrishna: A Life of Manifold Spiritual Realization,” in Sri
Ramakrishna: The Great Prophet of Harmony (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 1986), 340–47; Swami
Bhajanananda, Harmony of Religions from the Standpoint of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda
(Kolkata: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, 2008); Jeffery Long, “Advaita and Dvaita:
Bridging the Gap—the Ramakrishna Tradition’s both/and Approach to the Dvaita/Advaita De-
bate,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 16, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 49–70, “(Tentatively) Putting the Pieces
Together: Comparative Theology in the Tradition of Sri Ramakrishna,” in The New Comparative
Theology, ed. Francis Clooney (London: Continuum, 2010), 151–70, and A Vision for Hinduism
(New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Ayon Maharaj, “Śrī Rāmakṛsn ̣ ̣ a’s Philosophy of Vijñāna Vedānta,”
International Journal of Hindu Studies (forthcoming).
182

“God Is Infinite”
personal and impersonal. As Swami Tapasyananda puts it, Sri Ramakrishna

taught that all religions lead to “the same Infinite Personal-Impersonal be-
ing, in spite of the different versions they give of it and the differing paths
they prescribe to their aspirants.”9
In this article, I will adopt and defend this third interpretive approach,
since I believe it is much more plausible and nuanced than the other two
approaches. Sectarian interpretations of Sri Ramakrishna’s views tend to
be Procrustean, since they fail to account for Sri Ramakrishna’s nonsectar-
ian acceptance of all religious paths and spiritual philosophies.10 Hence, it
is implausible to interpret Sri Ramakrishna’s views on religious pluralism
from a narrow sectarian standpoint, be it Advaitic, Śākta, or otherwise. It
is equally implausible to interpret Sri Ramakrishna as a radical universalist
in Morales’s sense, since Sri Ramakrishna taught not that all religions are
the “same” but that all religions are different paths to the shared goal of God-
realization. Moreover, according to Sri Ramakrishna, every religious practi-
tioner can realize God in the particular aspect he or she prefers. For instance,
while the Advaitin aims to realize the impersonal (nirgun ̣a) aspect of the In-
finite Reality, bhaktas strive to realize various personal (sagun ̣a) aspects and
forms of the same Infinite Reality.
Section I provides a detailed reconstruction of Sri Ramakrishna’s model
of religious pluralism on the basis of his recorded Bengali teachings.11 I
argue that Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings on the harmony of religions are
based on his own direct spiritual experience of what he calls vijñāna (spe-
cial knowledge), the knowledge of God as the Infinite Reality that is both
personal and impersonal, both with and without form, both immanent in
the universe and transcendent to it. On the basis of his experience of vij-
ñāna, Sri Ramakrishna declares that God is infinite and illimitable and
hence that there are correspondingly infinite ways of approaching and re-
alizing God. According to Sri Ramakrishna, every religion is a salvifically ef-
fective means of attaining the common goal of God-realization, the direct
spiritual experience of God in any of his innumerable aspects or forms.12
As Hick and many others have pointed out, any viable theory of religious
pluralism has to confront head-on the thorny problem of conflicting reli-
gious truth claims. How are we to reconcile the various apparently conflict-
ing claims made by the world religions regarding such matters as human
9
Swami Tapasyananda, Sri Ramakrishna’s Thoughts on Man, World and God, 147.
10
I have argued elsewhere that Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophy is best understood as a non-
sectarian Vedāntic philosophy rooted in the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gītā. See my article,
“Śrī Rāmakṛsn ̣ ̣ a’s Philosophy of Vijñāna Vedānta.”
11
For an elaboration of the hermeneutic principles governing my reconstruction of Sri
Ramakrishna’s philosophical views, see Part I of my article, “Śrī Rāmakṛsn ̣ ̣ a’s Philosophy of
Vijñāna Vedānta.”
12
In this article, I sometimes refer to God as “he” for the sake of convenience, but of course
God is equally “she” and “it.” In fact, Sri Ramakrishna himself frequently referred to God as
the “Divine Mother.”
183

destiny, eschatology, and the nature of the ultimate reality? In Section II,
I will reconstruct Sri Ramakrishna’s sophisticated and multifaceted answer
to this very difficult question. Sri Ramakrishna reconciles religious claims
about the nature of the ultimate reality on the basis of his distinctive ontol-
ogy of the infinite and illimitable God: every religion captures a uniquely
real aspect of the infinite impersonal-personal Supreme Reality. Regarding
other types of religious truth claims, Sri Ramakrishna asserts that every re-
ligion has at least some errors but that these errors do not substantially di-
minish the salvific efficacy of religions.
In Section III, I will address some of the major criticisms leveled against
Sri Ramakrishna’s views on religious pluralism. While some scholars have
accused Sri Ramakrishna of subscribing to a radical universalism that fails
to honor the very real differences among religions, others have argued—
on the contrary—that Sri Ramakrishna’s model of religious pluralism priv-
ileges certain worldviews and spiritual paths over others and is therefore
more inclusivist than pluralist. Drawing on my reconstruction of Sri Rama-
krishna’s model of religious pluralism in Sections I and II, I will argue that
such criticisms stem from a misunderstanding and oversimplification of Sri
Ramakrishna’s views. In Section IV, I call for a broad cross-cultural approach
to religious pluralism that takes into account both Western and non-Western
pluralist theories. Sri Ramakrishna’s unique and sophisticated views on reli-
gious pluralism, I suggest, deserve a prominent place in this nascent cross-
cultural enterprise.
I. A RECONSTRUCTION OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA’S MODEL

OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
Crucially, Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings on religious pluralism are based on

his own unique and varied spiritual experiences. From 1855 to 1874, Sri
Ramakrishna practiced numerous spiritual disciplines in a variety of tra-
ditions, including Tantra, Vaiṣṇ avism, Advaita Vedānta, Islam, and Chris-
tianity. After first attaining a vision of Kālī by worshipping her as the Divine
Mother, he went on to practice, and to attain perfection in, numerous other
bhāvas (attitudes toward God), including dāsyabhāva (attitude of a servant),
vātsalyabhāva (attitude of a parent), sakhībhāva (attitude of a friend), and
mādhuryabhāva (attitude of a lover). In 1866, he practiced Islamic disciplines
under the guidance of a Muslim guru named Govinda Roy—who was likely a
Sufi—and attained the direct experience of God both with and without
form.13 Toward the end of 1874, Sri Ramakrishna attended Bible reading
sessions and began to cultivate devotion toward Jesus, which culminated
13
During Sri Ramakrishna’s Islamic practice, passages from the Bengali translation of the
Qu’ran were read out to him. He also practiced the disciplines prescribed in the Qu’ran and
stopped worshipping Hindu deities during his Islamic practice. See Swami Saradananda,
184

in an overwhelming vision of Jesus, who approached him and finally merged

into him.14
In 1864, he engaged in Advaitic discipline under the guidance of the
itinerant Advaitin monk Totapuri. Sri Ramakrishna quickly attained the
highest knowledge of nondual Brahman in nirvikalpa samādhi, a trance state
in which all consciousness of duality is transcended. After Totapuri left, Sri
Ramakrishna remained in nirvikalpa samādhi for six months until he finally
received a command from the Divine Mother to remain in “bhāvamukha,” a
threshold state of consciousness between the relative and the Absolute.15 Ac-
cordingly, instead of leaving his body in nirvikalpa samādhi, he remained in the
state of bhāvamukha, reveling in both the personal and impersonal aspects of
God and thereby realizing the equal salvific efficacy of the paths of bhakti
(devotion) and jñāna (knowledge).16
Sri Ramakrishna’s unique state of bhāvamukha and his realization of God
through various spiritual paths formed the experiential basis for his teach-
ings in the last five years of his life. The most comprehensive and accurate
record of these teachings is contained in the Śrīśrīrāmakrṣ ṇ ̣akathāmrta
̣ (here-
̣ a Bengali diary kept by his intimate disciple Mahendranath
after Kathāmrta),
Gupta, which was later translated into English as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.
In the Kathāmrta,̣ Sri Ramakrishna repeatedly draws a distinction between
“jñāna” (knowledge), the Advaitic realization of the impersonal Brahman,
and “vijñāna” (special knowledge), a deeper and more intimate realization
of God as the Infinite Reality that is both personal and impersonal, and much
more besides:
The jñānī gives up his identification with worldly things, discriminating, “Not this,
not this.” Only then can he realize Brahman. It is like reaching the roof of a house
by leaving the steps behind, one by one. But the vijñānī, who is more intimately ac-
quainted with Brahman, realizes something more. He realizes that the steps are
made of the same materials as the roof: bricks, lime, and brick-dust. That which
Śrīśrīrāmakrṣ ṇ ̣al īlāprasaṅ ga, vol. 1 (Kolkata: Udbodhan, 2008), 175–77, and Sri Ramakrishna and His
Divine Play, trans. Swami Chetanananda (St. Louis: Vedanta Society of St. Louis, 2003), 318–19.
For a detailed account of Sri Ramakrishna’s Islamic sādhana, see Swami Prabhananda, More about
Ramakrishna (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 1993), 80–109.
14
Sri Ramakrishna revered Jesus as an incarnation of God and he owned a copy of the Bi-
ble, which was read out to him on occasion—especially the teachings of Jesus contained in
the synoptic gospels. In general, it can be said that the form of Christianity practiced by
Sri Ramakrishna was based more on the spiritual and ethical teachings of Jesus than on Chris-
tian theological dogmas, although Sri Ramakrishna did accept the central theological doc-
trine of the divinity of Christ. For more details about Sri Ramakrishna’s Christian practices,
see Swami Prabhananda, More about Ramakrishna, 110–48.
15
See Saradananda, Śrīśrīrāmakrṣ ṇ ̣alīlāprasaṅ ga, 1:159–78; Sri Ramakrishna and His Divine
Play, 303–21.
16
See Swami Tapasyananda’s excellent discussions of Sri Ramakrishna’s state of bhāva-
mukha in Bhakti Schools of Vedānta (Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1990), 359–64, and Sri Ra-
makrishna: Life and Teachings (An Interpretative Study) (Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 2008),
60–74.
185

is realized as Brahman through the eliminating process of “Not this, not this” is
then found to have become the universe and all its living beings. The vijñānī sees
that the Reality which is nirgun ̣a [without attributes] is also sagun ̣a [with attributes].
A man cannot live on the roof for a long time. He comes down again. Those who re-
alize Brahman in samādhi come down also and find that it is Brahman that has become
the universe and its living beings. . . . This is known as vijñāna.(50–51/103–4)
The jñānī attains the Advaitic realization of the impersonal Brahman through
the path of discrimination. The vijñānī, according to Sri Ramakrishna, first
attains knowledge of the impersonal Brahman and then ascends to the
deeper and more comprehensive insight that “the Reality which is nirgun ̣a
is also sagun ̣a”: God is at once the impersonal Brahman and the personal
theistic God who both rules and pervades the universe. Instead of remaining
merged in the impersonal Absolute, the vijñānī revels in various manifesta-
tions and aspects of God, both personal and impersonal.
Tellingly, Sri Ramakrishna explicitly declares himself to be a vijñānī: “I
do not have the nature of a jñānī. . . . The Divine Mother has kept me
in the state of a bhakta, a vijñānī” (391/393). Indeed, his teachings on the
infinitude of God and the salvific efficacy of all religious paths are based
directly on his own experience of vijñāna. According to Sri Ramakrishna,
God is infinite and illimitable, and hence both personal and impersonal,
both with and without form, both immanent in the universe and transcen-
dent to it. Sri Ramakrishna’s startlingly expansive conception of God is
best captured in his pithy teaching, “There is no limit to God” (tāhār iti
nai) (997/920). Since God is infinite, we should never limit God to what
our finite intellects can grasp of Him. Sri Ramakrishna elaborates on the
illimitability of God as follows: “That Reality which is the nitya [eternal]
is also the līlā [God’s play]. . . . [E]verything is possible for God. He is formless,
and again He assumes forms. He is the individual and He is the universe. He
is Brahman and He is Śakti [the dynamic Lord who creates, maintains, and
destroys the universe]. There is no limit to God. Nothing is impossible for
Him” (997/920).
To the rational intellect, attributes such as personality and impersonal-
ity, form and formlessness, and immanence and transcendence seem to
be contradictory, so it is difficult to grasp how God can possess all of these
attributes at the same time. However, Sri Ramakrishna insists that the ratio-
nal intellect can never grasp the supersensuous truths of the spiritual do-
main. Accordingly, he repeatedly emphasizes our inability to “comprehend
the nature of God” (341/351) or to “understand God’s ways” by means of
the rhetorical question, “Can a one-seer pot hold ten seers of milk?” (229/
257). By likening the finite mind to a “one-seer pot,” Sri Ramakrishna points
to the fundamental limitations of the rational intellect and its inherent in-
ability to grasp spiritual realities. For Sri Ramakrishna, spiritual truths that
might seem contradictory or illogical to the rational intellect are validated
186

on the experiential basis of vijñāna. Since God’s infinite nature cannot be

confined within the narrow walls of our rational understanding, we should
humbly accept that “everything is possible for God.”17 Sri Ramakrishna
conveys the infinitude and illimitability of God by comparing God to an
infinite ocean that freezes into ice formations at certain places: “The
bhaktas—the vijñānīs—accept both the Impersonal and the Personal God
[nirākār-sākār], both God without form and God with form [arūp-rūp]. In
a shoreless ocean—an infinite expanse of water—visible blocks of ice form
here and there by intense cold. Similarly, under the cooling influence of
bhakti, as it were, the Infinite appears before the worshipper as God with
form. Again, with the rising of the sun of knowledge [ jñāna-sūrya], those
blocks of ice melt and only the infinite ocean remains” (861/802). Sri
Ramakrishna explicitly frames this analogy from the standpoint of the
vijñānī, who realizes that God is both personal and impersonal, both with
and without form. For Sri Ramakrishna, the infinite ocean corresponds to
the impersonal (nirgun ̣a) aspect of the Infinite Reality realized by jñānīs in
the state of nirvikalpa samādhi, while the ice formations correspond to the
various personal (sagun ̣a) aspects and forms of the same Infinite Reality,
realized by bhaktas. Just as the liquid ocean and the ice formations are sim-
ply different states of the same water, the impersonal Brahman of the
Advaitic jñanīs and the personal God of the bhaktas are both equally real,
since they are different aspects or forms of one and the same impersonal-
personal Infinite Reality.
Sri Ramakrishna also indicates the ontological parity of the personal
God of the bhaktas and the impersonal Absolute of the jñānīs by insisting
on the inseparability of what he calls “Brahman” and “Śakti”: “When God
̣
is actionless [niskriya], I call God ‘Brahman’; when God creates, preserves,
and destroys, I call God ‘Śakti’” (861/802). From Sri Ramakrishna’s stand-
point of vijñāna, “That which is Brahman is also Śakti” ( jinī brahma, tinī
śakti): in other words, the static impersonal Brahman and the dynamic
Śakti are different—but equally real—aspects of one and the same Divine
Reality (379/382).18 As he puts it, “I have realized that Brahman and Śakti
are inseparable [abhed], like water and its wetness, like fire and its power to
17
Sri Ramakrishna’s thought here bears striking affinities with Acintyabhedābheda Ve-
dānta, which holds that the paradoxical relationship of difference and nondifference be-
tween the Supreme Reality and the universe is incomprehensible (“acintya”) to the finite ra-
tional intellect. For a summary of Acintyabhedābheda philosophy, see Radha Govinda Nath,
“The Acintya-Bhedābhedha School,” in The Cultural Heritage of India, vol. 3, ed. Haridas Bhatta-
charya (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, 1953), 366–83.
18
Sri Ramakrishna’s teaching that both Brahman and Śakti are equally real finds an early
precedent in Tāntrika philosophy, which maintains that Śiva and Śakti are both ontologically
real and inseparable. For a discussion of this doctrine in Tāntrika philosophy, see Swami
Pratyagatmananda, “Philosophy of the Tantras,” in Bhattacharya, The Cultural Heritage of India,
3:437–48.
187

burn. Brahman dwells in all beings as the Vibhū [the all-pervasive Con-
sciousness]” (568/550). Clearly, the main point of his teaching that Brah-
man and Śakti are “inseparable” is to grant equal ontological status to both
Brahman and Śakti.
On the basis of his own realization of both the impersonal and personal
aspects of the Infinite Reality, Sri Ramakrishna teaches that various theistic
and nontheistic spiritual philosophies are equally effective paths to realiz-
ing God: “The vijñānī sees that the Reality which is nirgun ̣a is also sagun ̣a. . . .
The jñānī’s path leads to Truth, as does the path that combines jñāna and
bhakti. The bhakta’s path, too, leads to Truth. Jñānayoga is true, and bhak-
tiyoga is true. God can be realized through all paths” (51/103–4). Since
the vijñānī has realized the truth of both the personal and impersonal as-
pects of God, the vijñānī affirms the equal salvific efficacy of both bhaktiyoga
and jñānayoga. For Sri Ramakrishna, jñānayoga encompasses nontheistic spir-
itual philosophies such as Advaita Vedānta and Buddhism,19 while bhaktiyoga
encompasses theistic religions such as Christianity, Islam, the Brāhmo Samāj,
and the Hindu sects of Vaiṣṇ avism and Śāktism (see 151/191). Hence, Sri
Ramakrishna affirms a robust religious pluralism on the basis of his own spir-
itual experience of vijñāna.
Sri Ramakrishna’s religious pluralism derives directly from his concep-
tion of God as infinite and illimitable. Since God is infinite, there must
be correspondingly infinite ways of approaching and ultimately realizing
God. As Sri Ramakrishna succinctly puts it, “God is infinite, and the paths
to God are infinite” (tini ananta, patho ananta) (511/506). From Sri Ra-
makrishna’s standpoint of vijñāna, the infinite impersonal-personal God
is conceived and worshipped in different ways by people of various temper-
aments, preferences, and worldviews. Hence, a sincere practitioner of any
religion can realize God in the particular form he or she prefers.
Indeed, Sri Ramakrishna goes even further by providing a divine ratio-
nale for the differences in the various world religions:
Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Śāktas, Śaivas, Vaiṣṇ avas, the Brahmajñānīs of the time
of the rishis, and you, the Brahmajñānīs of modern times [i.e., the members of the
Brāhmo Samāj], all seek the same object. A mother prepares dishes to suit the stom-
achs of her children. Suppose a mother has five children and a fish is bought for the
family. She doesn’t cook pilau or kalia for all of them. All have not the same power
of digestion; so she prepares a simple stew for some. But she loves all her children
equally. . . . Do you know what the truth is? God has made different religions to suit
different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are so many paths; but a path
is by no means God Himself. [deś-kal-pātra bhede iśvar nānā dharma korechen. kintu sab
matī path, mat kichu iśvar noy.] Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the
paths with whole-hearted devotion. (577/559)
19
For details on Sri Ramakrishna’s Vedāntic interpretation of Buddhism, see Section III below.
188

Just as a mother prepares fish in five different ways for her five children,
God himself—in his infinite wisdom—has made different religions to suit
people of differing temperaments, cultural preferences, and spiritual ca-
pacities. Just as all five children eat the same fish in a variety of forms, prac-
titioners of various religions worship one and the same God in numerous
forms and call Him by various names. Moreover, just as it would not make
sense to claim that one particular fish preparation is objectively better than
all the others, it is equally foolish to claim that one religion is superior to
all others. Each child’s hunger is fully appeased by eating the particular
fish preparation he or she prefers. Similarly, all religions are effective paths
to the common goal of realizing God in the particular form or aspect pre-
ferred by each religious practitioner.
Sri Ramakrishna sums up his teachings on religious pluralism in the
striking statement: “All doctrines are so many paths; but a path is by no
means God Himself.” Sri Ramakrishna suggests here that one of the main
sources of religious conflict and fanaticism is the tendency to confuse
means and end. Instead of practicing a particular religion as a means to
the end of spiritual fulfillment, religious dogmatists tend to absolutize re-
ligious doctrine itself and thereby lose sight of the Divine Absolute that is
the goal of all religions. From Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical standpoint, since
all religious doctrines are expressed in human language, they can never be
fully adequate to the Divine Reality that lies beyond words and thought,
but they can nonetheless serve as effective “paths” to the direct spiritual
experience of the Divine Reality. Sri Ramakrishna sears this message into
the minds of his visitors by means of an ingenious wordplay, repeatedly
conjoining the rhyming Bengali monosyllables “mat” (doctrine or view)
and “path” (path). As he puts it on several occasions, “mat path” (Every re-
ligious doctrine is a path) and “ananto path ananto mat” (Infinite are the
paths and infinite the views) (111/158).
Sri Ramakrishna frequently recites his favorite parable of the chameleon in
order to illustrate the harmony of religions from the standpoint of vijñāna:
Once a man entered a forest and saw a small animal on a tree. He came back and
told another man that he had seen a creature of a beautiful red color on a certain
tree. The second man replied: “When I went into the forest, I also saw that animal.
But why do you call it red? It is green.” Another man who was present contradicted
them both and insisted that it was yellow. Presently others arrived and contended
that it was gray, violet, blue, and so forth and so on. At last they started quarrelling
among themselves. To settle the dispute they all went to the tree. They saw a man
sitting under it. On being asked, he replied: “ Yes, I live under this tree and I know
the animal very well. All your descriptions are true. Sometimes it appears red, some-
times yellow, and at other times blue, violet, gray, and so forth. It is a chameleon.
And sometimes it has no color at all. Now it has a color, and now it has none.”
In like manner, one who constantly thinks of God can know God’s real nature;
he alone knows that God reveals Himself to seekers in various forms and aspects.
189

God is sagun ̣a as well as nirgun ̣a. Only the man who lives under the tree knows that
the chameleon can appear in various colors, and he knows, further, that the animal
at times has no color at all. It is the others who suffer from the agony of futile ar-
gument. (101/149–50)
Like the chameleon that appears in various colors and sometimes has no
color at all, God assumes various forms for different types of spiritual aspi-
rants.20 While most people make the mistake of thinking that the chame-
leon only has the color that they see it as having, the man always sitting
under the tree sees that the chameleon has various colors and hence that
everyone is partially correct. The colorless chameleon corresponds to nir-
gun ̣a Brahman, while the chameleon with various colors corresponds to
sagun ̣a Brahman, and it is clear that Sri Ramakrishna does not privilege
nirgun ̣a Brahman. According to Sri Ramakrishna, nirgun ̣a and sagun ̣a Brah-
man have equal ontological status. The man sitting under the tree repre-
sents the vijñānī—such as Sri Ramakrishna himself—who has realized both
the sagun ̣a and nirgun ̣a aspects of God and hence affirms on the basis of his
or her own spiritual experience that all religions are effective paths.21
Sri Ramakrishna’s chameleon parable also helps clarify the common goal
of God-realization to which all spiritual paths lead. While the Advaitin he-
gemonically imposes the goal of realizing nirgun ̣a Brahman onto all the
world religions, Sri Ramakrishna’s parable implies a very broad and non-
hegemonic soteriological outlook: people of various temperaments can re-
alize the Infinite God in any of his innumerable forms and aspects, all of
which are real. Although different people see the chameleon in different
colors, they all see one and the same chameleon.
Sri Ramakrishna’s nonhegemonic outlook is also captured by the well-
known parable of the blind men and the elephant, which he was fond
of reciting. Just as each blind man touches a different part of the elephant
and takes that part to represent the elephant as a whole, religious prac-
titioners often make the mistake of assuming that the particular aspect
of God they understand or value represents the whole of God (see 151/
191).22 From Sri Ramakrishna’s perspective, religious exclusivism and fa-
naticism stem from limiting God dogmatically to what one has understood
or experienced of God. According to Sri Ramakrishna, “there is no limit to
God,” so we should never limit God to what our finite intellects can grasp
20
The limitation of this parable is that the chameleon can only be one color at a given
time, while God can assume various forms and aspects simultaneously. The parable of the blind
men and the elephant, which I will discuss below, makes clear that just as the various blind
men touch different parts of the elephant at the same time, God assumes different forms si-
multaneously.
21
See Swami Tapasyananda’s helpful discussion of Sri Ramakrishna’s chameleon parable
from the standpoint of vijñāna in his book Bhakti Schools of Vedānta, 29–30.
22
It is clear from Sri Ramakrishna’s own explanation of the elephant parable and his other
teachings about God that the elephant parable should not be taken to imply that God literally
has parts.
190

of Him (997/920). Moreover, just as the person with sight can see the el-
ephant as a whole, the vijñānī sees that all religions are salvifically effective,
since each of them—represented by the blind men—makes contact with a
real aspect of God, though none of them captures the whole of God, who
is infinite and illimitable.
Since both the person with sight in the elephant parable and the man
living under the tree in the chameleon parable represent Sri Ramakrishna’s
vijñānī, one might be led to assume that the vijñānī realizes God in all his
aspects. However, Sri Ramakrishna indicates that no one—not even the
vijñānī—is capable of realizing the Infinite God in all his aspects:
People often think they have understood Brahman fully. Once an ant went to a hill
of sugar. One grain filled its stomach. Taking another grain in its mouth it started
homeward. On its way it thought, “Next time I will carry home the whole hill.” That
is the way shallow minds think. They don’t know that Brahman is beyond words
and thought. However great a man may be, how much can he know of Brahman?
Śukadeva and sages like him may have been big ants; but even they could carry at
the utmost eight or ten grains of sugar! (49/102)
Sri Ramakrishna makes clear here that the difference between an ordinary
soul and a vijñānī is like the difference between a small ant and a big ant.
While the ordinary soul is able, at best, to realize God in one particular as-
pect, the vijñānī realizes multiple aspects of God—both impersonal and
personal—and so is in a unique position to affirm the equal salvific efficacy
of theistic and nontheistic religions. Even a big ant, however, cannot carry
the whole hill of sugar. That is, since God is infinite, even the vijñānī cannot
realize the whole of God. From Sri Ramakrishna’s standpoint of vijñāna, sin-
cere practitioners of all religious faiths can attain the goal of God-realization,
even though they may end up realizing different aspects or forms of one
and the same Infinite Reality.
Some important questions arise at this point. What counts as a “religion”
in the first place for Sri Ramakrishna? When Sri Ramakrishna teaches that
“all religions” are paths to God, what religions does he have in mind? Does
Sri Ramakrishna affirm the equal salvific efficacy of all religions or does he
claim that some religions have greater salvific efficacy than others? We can
begin to address these questions by considering a relevant passage from the
Kathāmrta:̣ “With sincerity and earnestness one can realize God through all
religions [āntarik hole sab dharmer bhitor diyai īśvarke pawa jai ]. The Vaiṣṇ avas
will realize God, and so will the Śāktas, the [Advaita] Vedāntins, and the
Brāhmos [who worship the formless personal God]. Muslims and Chris-
tians will realize Him, too. All will certainly realize God if they are earnest
and sincere” (151/191). It is highly significant that Sri Ramakrishna grants
the status of “religion” (dharma) not only to major world religions such as
Christianity and Islam but also to the modern religious movement of the
Brāhmo Samāj. Clearly, Sri Ramakrishna’s conception of religion is suffi-
191

ciently dynamic and flexible to accommodate new religious movements

and spiritual philosophies. This flexible attitude is entirely in keeping with
his teaching that the “paths to God are infinite,” which indicates that he
has in mind not only the finite set of existing religious paths but also
the innumerable religious paths that are to come.
Sri Ramakrishna typically uses the Bengali terms dharma and mat to refer
to religious and spiritual paths. Although Sri Ramakrishna does not pro-
vide an explicit definition of religion anywhere in the Kathāmrta, ̣ he does
provide hints at various places that any religious or spiritual path must ful-
fill two conditions: first, it must have at its center some aspect or form of
the Divine Reality, whether personal or impersonal; second, it must pre-
scribe ethical and spiritual practices that bring us into contact with that Di-
vine Reality. Sri Ramakrishna explicitly specifies this first condition of reli-
gion in numerous passages, such as this one: “But I find that all views point
to the One. All views [mat ]—the Śākta, the Vaiṣṇ ava, the Advaitic—have
that One [sei ek] for their center. He who is impersonal is also personal,
and it is He again who assumes various forms” (494/490). It is clear from
this passage that Sri Ramakrishna’s broad conception of religion encom-
passes not only theistic faiths such as Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity
but also nontheistic spiritual philosophies such as Advaita Vedānta. For
Sri Ramakrishna, every religion has one and the same God at its center,
whether God is conceived as personal or impersonal. It is worth noting,
then, that Sri Ramakrishna would not consider secular humanism or Marx-
ism to be religions, since they do not meet this first condition.
As for the second condition, Sri Ramakrishna believed that while the
specific ethical and spiritual practices prescribed by the various religions
differ, all these religious practices have the common aim of diminishing
egoism and selfishness in order to bring us closer to the Divine Reality. Ac-
cordingly, he frequently emphasizes the need to eliminate the selfish atti-
tude of “‘I’ and ‘mine’ ” (292/308) and to cultivate ethical virtues such as
compassion and forbearance, which purify the mind (see 47/101). Ex-
ploiting the etymological affinity between dharma in the sense of “religion”
and dharma in the sense of ethical action, Sri Ramakrishna defines “ad-
harma” as “unrighteous actions” (asat karma) and “dharma” as “pious ac-
tions prescribed by religion” (vaidhī karma), such as “charity to the poor,
feeding the Brahmins, and so on” (669/635). Clearly, then, any self-styled
“religion” that prescribes unethical practices—such as violence, hatred, or
excessive sense-indulgence—would not count as a “religion” (dharma) in
Sri Ramakrishna’s sense.23 Accordingly, Sri Ramakrishna condemns the
23
An anonymous referee asks whether Sri Ramakrishna would have taken the modern re-
ligiously inspired terrorist groups such as ISIS and Aum Shinrikyo to be genuine religions. I
believe Sri Ramakrishna would not have accepted them as religions (dharma), since they pre-
scribe unethical practices that violate the second condition that any religion must meet.
192

immoral behavior of a monk who tries to give an Advaitic justification for

breaking his monastic vow of celibacy:
Once a sādhu came to the Panchavati. He used to talk much on [Advaita] Vedānta
before others. Later I came to know that he had illicit connection with a certain
woman. After that, when I went to Panchavati, I found him sitting there. I asked
him, “You talk so glibly of Vedānta; but what is all this they talk about you?” “What
of that?” he replied, “I shall show you that there is no harm in it. If the whole world
is unreal at all times, how can my fall alone be real?” I said in utter disgust, “I spit
on such knowledge of Vedānta. It is not real Knowledge, but a mere sham, falsely
professed by the worldly-minded, by wiseacres with gross worldly attachments.”24
Sri Ramakrishna does not consider the pseudo-Vedānta practiced by this

fallen monk to be a genuine religious path, since it sanctions unethical be-
havior that strengthens rather than diminishes egoism and selfishness.
Hence, when Sri Ramakrishna declares that “one can realize God through
all religions,” he does not mean that all self-styled religions are salvifically ef-
ficacious paths to God. Rather, he means that all genuine religions—a “gen-
uine” religion defined as any religious path that meets the two conditions
specified above—are paths to God. In numerous passages concerning the
harmony of religions, Sri Ramakrishna specifically mentions Christianity,
Islam, the theistic Hindu sects of Śāktism and Vaiṣṇ avism, the nontheistic
Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedānta, and the Brāhmo Samāj (see 151/191
and 577/559). Although Sri Ramakrishna does not mention Buddhism in
the context of the harmony of religions, he mentions on numerous occasions
that Buddhism is a form of nontheistic jñānayoga akin to Advaita Vedānta (see
1028/947–48).25 Hence, by dint of mentioning Advaita Vedānta in the pas-
sages concerning the harmony of religions, Sri Ramakrishna implies that Bud-
dhism is also a salvifically efficacious religious path.
That Sri Ramakrishna grants maximal salvific efficacy to all of these re-
ligious paths is abundantly clear from the various analogies he invokes. For
instance, in the passage cited above, Sri Ramakrishna likens the world re-
ligions to different preparations of fish, which are meant to suit different
tastes and digestive capacities. Elsewhere, he likens the various religions to
different means of climbing to the roof of a house: “God can be realized
through all paths. All religions are true. The important thing is to reach
the roof. You can reach it by stone stairs or by wooden stairs or by bamboo
steps or by a rope. You can also climb up by a bamboo pole” (59–60/111).
Sri Ramakrishna also frequently invokes the analogy of a lake called by var-
ious names:
It is not good to feel that one’s own religion alone is true and all others are false. God
is one only, and not two. Different people call on Him by different names: some as
24
Saradananda, Śrīśrīrāmakṛṣṇal īlāprasaṅ ga, 1:38; Sri Ramakrishna and His Divine Play, 428.
25
See also my discussion of Sri Ramakrishna’s interpretation of Buddhism in Section III.
193

Allah, some as God, and others as Krishna, Siva, and Brahman. It is like the water in a
lake. Some drink it at one place and call it “jal,” others at another place and call it
“pānī,” and still others at a third place and call it “water.” The Hindus call it “jal,”
the Christians “water,” and the Muslims “pānī.” But it is one and the same thing. Views
are but paths. Each religion is only a path leading to God, as rivers come from differ-
ent directions and ultimately become one in the one ocean. (239/264 – 65)
The main point of all of these analogies is to illustrate the equal salvific
efficacy of various religions. From Sri Ramakrishna’s standpoint, claiming
that one’s own religion is superior to other religions is as absurd as claim-
ing that the fish preparation one prefers is somehow objectively superior
to other fish preparations or that a bamboo pole is a superior means of
reaching the roof compared to a staircase. The ontological justification
for Sri Ramakrishna’s analogies is furnished by the spiritual standpoint
of vijñāna. A vijñānī such as Sri Ramakrishna realizes that both the personal
and impersonal aspects of the Divine Reality are equally real and, thus, that
both theistic and nontheistic religious paths have equal salvific efficacy.
In short, Sri Ramakrishna grants maximal salvific efficacy to Christianity,
Islam, Hinduism, the Brāhmo Samāj, and (very likely) Buddhism. It is also
worth noting that he mentions these religions by way of example, so his fail-
ure to mention other religions such as Judaism, Taoism, and Confucianism
does not imply that he takes these religions to be less salvifically effective
than the religions he does mention. On the other hand, Sri Ramakrishna
does explicitly claim that certain religious paths are less salvifically effective
than other religious paths. For instance, while Sri Ramakrishna admits that
“vāmācāra”—the path of “left-handed” Tantra, which involves sexual inter-
course as part of its spiritual practice—is a genuine path to realizing God,
he insists that vāmācāra is inferior to other religious paths. In response to
Narendranath’s question about the vāmācāra practices of certain sects such
as Ghoṣpāṛā and Pañcanāmī, Sri Ramakrishna tells him:
You need not listen to these things. The bhairavas and the bhairavīs of the Tāntrika
sect also follow this kind of discipline. . . . Let me tell you this. I regard woman as
my mother; I regard myself as her son. This is a very pure attitude. There is no dan-
ger in it. . . . But to assume the attitude of a “hero” [vīra], to look on woman as
one’s mistress, is a very difficult discipline. Tarak’s father performed spiritual prac-
tice with this attitude. In this form of sādhana one cannot always maintain the right
attitude.
There are various paths to reach God. Each view is a path. It is like reaching the
Kālī temple by different roads. But it must be said that some paths are clean and
some dirty. It is good to travel on a clean path. (594/571–72)
While Sri Ramakrishna admits that there are sincere practitioners of vāmā-
cāra, such as Tarak’s father, who may be able to realize God through that
path, he insists that vāmācāra is nonetheless a “dirty” path, since it involves
sexual practices that can easily lead the spiritual aspirant to ruin.
194

̣
Sri Ramakrishna’s stance toward hathayoga, a practice based on physical
exercises, is similar to his stance toward vāmācāra: while he accepts hatha- ̣
yoga as a path to God-realization, he claims that it is greatly inferior to the
path of rājayoga, a practice based on meditation and devotion to God. Sri
Ramakrishna states: “There are two kinds of Yoga: hathayoga ̣ and rājayoga.
̣
The hathayogī practises physical exercises. His goal is to acquire supernat-
ural powers: longevity and the eight psychic powers. These are his aims.
But the aim of rājayoga is the attainment of devotion, ecstatic love, knowl-
edge, and dispassion. Of these two, rājayoga is the better” (214/244 – 45).
Elsewhere, Sri Ramakrishna points out that one of the main problems with
̣
hathayoga is that it strengthens identification with the body, which is a seri-
ous hindrance to God-realization (604/579).
For Sri Ramakrishna, then, while Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, the Brāhmo
Samāj, and (very likely) Buddhism have equal and maximal salvific efficacy,
certain religious paths such as vāmācāra and hathayogạ are less salvifically ef-
fective than other religious paths. Sri Ramakrishna judges the degree of salvific
efficacy of various religious paths on the basis of a largely implicit criterion: the
religious paths he deems to have maximal salvific efficacy are those that incul-
cate ethical and spiritual practices that diminish egoism, selfishness, and body
consciousness, thereby bringing us closer to God. Conversely, religious paths
that inculcate practices that run the risk of strengthening egoism and body
consciousness are less salvifically effective paths.
We can further clarify Sri Ramakrishna’s views on religious diversity by
relating them to the now well-known threefold typology of exclusivism, in-
clusivism, and pluralism, first developed by the Christian theologian Alan
Race in 1983.26 In a recent article, Perry Schmidt-Leukel provides very pre-
cise and rigorous definitions of these three positions:
(1) Exclusivism: Salvific knowledge of a transcendent reality is mediated

by only one religion (which naturally will be one’s own).
(2) Inclusivism: Salvific knowledge of a transcendent reality is mediated
by more than one religion (not necessarily by all of them), but only
one of these mediates it in a uniquely superior way (which again
will naturally be one’s own).
(3) Pluralism: Salvific knowledge of a transcendent reality is mediated
by more than one religion (not necessarily by all of them), and
there is none among them whose mediation of that knowledge is
superior to all the rest.27
26
See Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions
(London: SCM Press, 1983).
27
Perry Schmidt-Leukel, “Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism: The Tripolar Typology—Clarified
and Reaffirmed,” in The Myth of Religious Superiority, ed. Paul Knitter (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005),
20.
195

Sri Ramakrishna is clearly a religious pluralist in Schmidt-Leukel’s sense

because he grants maximal salvific efficacy to multiple religious paths, in-
cluding Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. As Schmidt-Leukel emphasizes,
one need not affirm the equal salvific efficacy of all religions in order to be
a religious pluralist.28 Hence, the fact that Sri Ramakrishna deems vāmā-
cāra and Haṭha Yoga to be inferior religious paths is perfectly consistent
with his pluralist position, which only affirms that more than one religion
has maximal salvific efficacy.29 Moreover, since Sri Ramakrishna nowhere
indicates that Hinduism’s mediation of salvific knowledge of God is supe-
rior in any way to that of non-Hindu religions, he is clearly not a religious
inclusivist in Schmidt-Leukel’s sense. Sri Ramakrishna’s model of religious
pluralism, I suggest, is best understood not as a “Hindu” model but as a
higher-order meta-theory that affirms the salvific efficacy of all first-order
religions. While Sri Ramakrishna was certainly a Hindu who held many tra-
ditional Hindu beliefs such as reincarnation, his teachings on religious
pluralism are rooted not in a narrowly Hindu worldview but in the vast ex-
periential standpoint of vijñāna, which encompasses all the world religions
without being reducible to any one of them.
One of the distinguishing features of Sri Ramakrishna’s particular model
of religious pluralism is that it provides an ontological rationale for the ro-
bust complementarity of various religious conceptions of the Divine Reality.
From the standpoint of vijñāna, since each religion captures a real and
unique aspect of the infinite and illimitable God, each religion makes a
uniquely valuable contribution to our understanding of God and spiritual
28
In fact, Schmidt-Leukel points out that Hick is a quintessential religious pluralist even
though he denies salvific efficacy to violent religious sects. See Schmidt-Leukel, “Exclusivism,
Inclusivism, Pluralism,” 20 n. 31.
29
An anonymous referee questions the general project of interpreting Sri Ramakrishna’s
thought in terms of the standard threefold typology and asks, “Why not stay faithful to the
native categories used by Ramakrishna, instead of imposing Western categories upon him?”
In response to this query, I would make three points. First, I believe that bringing the three-
fold typology to bear on Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings is not mutually exclusive with trying to
stay faithful to Sri Ramakrishna’s “native categories.” That is, throughout Section I, I do try to
stay as faithful as possible to Sri Ramakrishna’s “native categories” in my reconstruction of
his views. However, I also argue that the threefold typology—particularly as formulated by
Schmidt-Leukel—helps clarify Sri Ramakrishna’s complex position on religious diversity.
My aim in using the threefold typology vis-à-vis Sri Ramakrishna is in the service of exegesis
rather than eisegesis. Second, I find the threefold typology quite helpful in distinguishing var-
ious competing perspectives on religious diversity. Although I do not have the space here to
defend the cogency of the threefold typology, I refer the reader to Schmidt-Leukel’s excellent
article, “Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism,” which not only makes a convincing case that the
threefold typology is not fundamentally flawed but also defends the typology against numer-
ous criticisms. Third, identifying Sri Ramakrishna’s position as a form of religious pluralism
facilitates cross-cultural dialogue by helping to locate his position vis-à-vis Western views on
religious diversity. One of the reasons Sri Ramakrishna’s model of religious pluralism has such
profound contemporary relevance is that it belongs to the same family, as it were, as numerous
Western theories of religious pluralism and hence can be brought into fruitful philosophical
dialogue with these Western theories.
196

life. Sri Ramakrishna’s point is not just that we should tolerate all religions
and spiritual paths because they are all effective paths to realizing God.
Rather, he makes the much more radical claim that we can—and should—
actively learn from religions and philosophical worldviews other than our
own, because they can give us insights into God and spiritual life that can
enrich and broaden our own religious outlook and practice.30 Accordingly,
Sri Ramakrishna frequently reminded worshippers of the personal God that
the impersonal aspect of God is also true.31 Conversely, he would teach
Advaitins that “Śakti,” the personal aspect of God, is as real as the impersonal
Brahman.32 From Sri Ramakrishna’s perspective, the best way to overcome
religious fanaticism and to enrich one’s understanding of God is to expose
oneself to religious points of view other than one’s own.
Sri Ramakrishna illustrates the complementarity of different religious
viewpoints in his parable of the washerman:
God assumes different forms and reveals Himself in different ways for the sake of
His devotees. A man kept a solution of dye in a tub. Many people came to him to
have their clothes dyed. He would ask a customer, “What colour should you like to
have your cloth dyed?” If the customer wanted red, then the man would dip the
cloth in the tub and say, “Here is your cloth dyed red.” If another customer wanted
his cloth dyed yellow, the man would dip his cloth in the same tub and say, “Here is
your cloth dyed yellow.” If a customer wanted his cloth dyed blue, the man would
dip it in the same tub and say, “Here is your cloth dyed blue.” Thus he would dye
the clothes of his customers different colors, dipping them all in the same solution.
One of the customers watched all this with amazement. The man asked him, “Well?
What colour do you want for your cloth?” The customer said, “Brother, dye my
cloth the colour of the dye in your tub.” (928/858–59)
Like the parables of the chameleon and the blind men and the elephant,
this parable teaches that God “assumes different forms and reveals Himself
in different ways for the sake of His devotees.” What is unique about the
parable of the washerman is that it emphasizes the value of learning from
numerous religious perspectives. While most customers ask the washer-
man to dye their cloth in the color they prefer, one customer watches these
other customers “with amazement,” noticing that the tub contains an ap-
parently magical universal dye that is all colors at once. Strikingly, instead
of following other customers in asking for his cloth to be dyed in a partic-
ular color, this unusual customer asks for his cloth to be dyed in the uni-
versal color of the tub dye itself. At one level, of course, this unusual cus-
tomer represents the vijñānī who revels in numerous forms and aspects of
the Infinite Divine Reality. At another level, however, this unusual customer
30
For a thorough discussion of this robustly pluralistic dimension of Sri Ramakrishna’s
views, see Long, “(Tentatively) Putting the Pieces Together.”
31
See, e.g., Sri Ramakrishna’s instruction to a Vaiṣṇ ava Goswami at 152/191.
32
See Sri Ramakrishna’s response to Hazra at 568/550.
197

represents the ideally broad-minded spiritual aspirant who deepens and en-
riches his or her own conception of God by actively learning from a variety of
religious standpoints. Instead of limiting God only to one particular aspect
or form, this rare spiritual aspirant thinks of God as the infinite and illimit-
able Divine Reality that has innumerable forms and aspects.
In sum, Sri Ramakrishna’s expansive ontology of the infinite and illim-
itable God provides the foundation for a maximally robust model of reli-
gious pluralism. On the basis of his own spiritual experience of vijñāna, Sri
Ramakrishna taught that every genuine religion captures some real aspect
of the Infinite Divine Reality and hence is an effective path to the goal of
God-realization. Instead of stopping there, however, Sri Ramakrishna further
affirmed the harmony of all religions: since the various religious conceptions
of the ultimate reality are complementary rather than conflicting, all reli-
gious practitioners can enrich and broaden their understanding of God by
learning from religious views other than their own.
II. SRI RAMAKRISHNA’S RESPONSE TO THE PROBLEM

OF CONFLICTING RELIGIOUS TRUTH CLAIMS
As Hick and others have pointed out, the greatest challenge to any theory
of religious pluralism is the fact that the truth claims of different religions
often conflict with one another. For instance, Christianity maintains that
Christ died on the cross, while Islam denies this. Hinduism and Buddhism
accept the doctrine of reincarnation, while Semitic religions—at least in
their orthodox forms—do not. Hinduism accepts multiple divine incarna-
tions such as Rama and Krishna, while Christianity accepts Christ as the
sole incarnation of God and Islam denies the very possibility of a divine in-
carnation.
Regarding such historical and metaphysical issues, some religions are
surely right while other religions are surely wrong. If Christ did in fact
die on the cross, then Christianity is right on this issue, while Islam is wrong.
If souls do in fact reincarnate, then Hinduism and Buddhism are right,
while orthodox Semitic religions are wrong. In light of the mutual incom-
patibility of numerous religious truth claims, is religious pluralism even a
coherent possibility? Clearly, any theory of religious pluralism that straight-
forwardly affirms the truth of all the historical and metaphysical doctrines of
the various religions would be incoherent, since it would be committed to
the contradictory assertions that Christ did and did not die on the cross, that
reincarnation is and is not true, and so on.
Sri Ramakrishna, I will argue, is not committed to such an incoherent
position, since his model of religious pluralism affirms the salvific efficacy
of all religions without maintaining that all the doctrines of the various re-
ligions are true. In order to reconstruct Sri Ramakrishna’s sophisticated and
198

nuanced response to the problem of conflicting religious truth claims, I

will employ Hick’s helpful classification of three fundamental types of con-
flicting religious truth claims.33 First, there are disagreements about past
historical events “that are in principle accessible to human observation.”34
Second, there are disagreements about “trans-historical” matters—such as
reincarnation and the possibility of God incarnating as a human being—
which cannot be verified “by historical or other empirical evidence.”35 Third,
there are disagreements about “ultimate questions,” such as the nature of the
ultimate reality.36
We can reconstruct Sri Ramakrishna’s stance on these different types
of conflicting truth claims by examining his relevant teachings and his
responses to questions posed by visitors at numerous points in the Ka-
thāmrta.̣ 37 A prominent example of the first type of conflicting truth claim
is the disagreement among different Hindu sects about whether the divine
play (“l īlā”) between the avatāra Krishna and the “gopīs”—his female con-
sorts headed by Rādhā—was an actual historical event. While the Vaiṣṇ ava
sect takes Krishna’s gopī-l īlā to be a true historical event, other Hindu sects
take the gopī-l īlā to be a myth rather than a historical reality.
During Sri Ramakrishna’s time, the Brāhmo Samāj held that God is per-
sonal but formless (nirākāra) and hence that God cannot incarnate as a hu-
man being such as Krishna. Sri Ramakrishna was well aware of the Brāhmo
Samāj’s skepticism toward Krishna and his gopī-l īlā. While on a boat with
followers of the Brāhmo Samāj, Sri Ramakrishna—with tears in his eyes—
sang an ecstatic devotional song conveying Rādhā’s love for her beloved
Krishna and then told them: “Whether or not you accept the Rādhā-Krishna
l īlā, you should accept their attraction [tān] for each other. Try to create
that same yearning in your heart for God. God can be realized when this
yearning [vyākulatā] is present” (90/140). This remark about Krishna’s
gopī-līlā exemplifies Sri Ramakrishna’s subtle stance on conflicting religious
33
See Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 362–63.
34
Ibid., 363.
35
Ibid., 365. A bit later, Hick clarifies that while he is aware that numerous people in Asia
have claimed that there is a good deal of empirical evidence in favor of reincarnation, he
does not believe that any such empirical evidence is sufficiently strong at this point in time
to convince a skeptic. As Hick puts it on page 369, “We shall always hope for new evidence
or new arguments which will make the truth plain to all; but in the meantime we should re-
gard the matter as one about which it would be unwise to be unyieldingly dogmatic.”
36
Ibid., 363.
37
Freda Matchett and Nalini Devdas claim that Sri Ramakrishna never intended his teach-
ings on religious pluralism to be taken as a means of resolving conflicting religious truth
claims. As Matchett puts it, “It is . . . unlikely that Ramakrishna ever intended ‘Jata mat tato
path’ to be taken as a solemn pronouncement about the truth claims of the world’s great re-
ligions.” See Freda Matchett, “The Teaching of Rāmakrishna in Relation to the Hindu Tradi-
tion and as Interpreted by Vivekānanda,” Religion 11 (1981): 179. For a similar claim, see
Nalini Devdas, Sri Ramakrishna (Bangalore: Christian Institute for the Study of Science and
Religion, 1966), 107. In contrast to Matchett and Devdas, I argue in Section II that Sri Ra-
makrishna explicitly addresses the problem of conflicting religious truth claims at various
points in the Kathāmrta. ̣
199

truth claims about historical events in general. Instead of urging the Brāhmo
followers to accept the historical reality of Krishna’s gopī-līlā, Sri Ramakrishna
encourages them to try to emulate Rādhā’s extraordinary yearning (vyāku-
latā) for God, even if they do not take Rādhā or Krishna to be real historical
personages. While acknowledging that Brāhmos and Vaiṣṇ avas hold conflict-
ing views on the historical reality of Krishna’s gopī-līlā, Sri Ramakrishna insists
that the Brāhmos can nonetheless learn a valuable spiritual lesson from the
Vaiṣṇ ava doctrine.
Evidently, Sri Ramakrishna felt that belief in the historical reality of
Krishna’s gopī-l īlā is not soteriologically vital. Hence, even if the gopī-l īlā
did take place in the historical past and the followers of the Brāhmo Samāj
were mistaken in their rejection of the historical reality of the gopī-l īlā, Sri
Ramakrishna insists that this mistake would not diminish the salvific efficacy
of the path adopted by the Brāhmos. Conversely, even if Vaiṣṇ avas are mis-
taken in taking the gopī-līlā to be an actual historical reality, the Vaiṣṇ ava de-
votional faith and practice would not thereby be invalidated, since the
Vaiṣṇ avas would still be able to realize God by trying to cultivate the yearning
for God exemplified in Rādhā’s love for Krishna.
Sri Ramakrishna seems to hold a similar stance on conflicting truth claims
about transhistorical matters. Although Sri Ramakrishna himself believes
in the traditional Hindu doctrine of reincarnation, he maintains that be-
lief in the truth of reincarnation is not soteriologically vital. When asked
whether he believes in reincarnation, Sri Ramakrishna replies: “ Yes, they
say there is something like that. How can we understand the ways of God
through our small intellects? Many people have spoken about reincarnation;
therefore I cannot disbelieve it” (105/153). In fact, at numerous points in
the Kathāmr ̣ta, Sri Ramakrishna appeals to the doctrine of reincarnation to
explain spiritual truths and to resolve doubts in the minds of some of his vis-
itors.38 For instance, he remarks, “As long as you do not feel that God is the
Master, you must come back to the world, you must be born again and again.
There will be no rebirth when you can truly say, ‘O God, Thou art the Mas-
ter’” (291/308).39
The following exchange with a Vaiṣṇ ava devotee reveals Sri Ramakrishna’s
subtle stance on reincarnation:
V A I S ̣ Ṇ A V A :
Sir, is a man born again?
M A S T E R : It is said in the Gı̄tā that a man is reborn with those tendencies that are
in his mind at the time of his death. King Bharata thought of his deer at the time of
death and was reborn as a deer.
V A I S N A V A : I could believe in rebirth only if an eye-witness told me about it.
˙ ˙
38
See, for instance, Sri Ramakrishna’s appeal to the doctrine of reincarnation in his remark
about the devotee Purna in the entry from July 15, 1885 (871/812–13) and in his remark about
Ajāmila from the Bhāgavata Purān ̣a in the entry from March 11, 1883 (150–51/190).
39
See also Sri Ramakrishna’s references to reincarnation at 114/163, 547/533–34, and 1020/
940.
200

M A S T E R : I don’t know about that, my dear sir. I cannot cure my own illness, and
you ask me to tell you what happens after death! What you are talking about only
shows your petty mind. Try to cultivate love of God. You are born as a human being
only to attain divine love. You have come to the orchard to eat mangoes; what need is
there of knowing how many thousands of branches and millions of leaves there are
in the orchard? To bother about what happens after death! How silly! (907/841)
Knowing that his visitor is a Vaiṣṇ ava, Sri Ramakrishna responds to his query
about reincarnation by appealing to the Bhagavad Gītā, a scripture revered by
most Vaiṣṇ avas. However, the Vaiṣṇ ava visitor is not satisfied with Sri Rama-
krishna’s appeal to scriptural authority and demands empirical proof of rein-
carnation. Noticing his visitor’s skeptical attitude, Sri Ramakrishna quickly
changes tack and tells him to “cultivate love of God” instead of indulging in
fruitless speculation about “what happens after death.” He responds to his
householder disciple Mahendranath Gupta’s query in a similar manner:
M. [G U P T A ]: I haven’t much faith in rebirth and inherited tendencies. Will that in
any way injure my devotion to God?
M A S T E R : It is enough to believe that all is possible in God’s creation. Never allow

the thought to cross your mind that your ideas are the only true ones, and that
those of others are false. Then God will explain everything. (232/259)
Sri Ramakrishna reassures Gupta that his skepticism about reincarnation

will not injure his devotion to God, but he also warns him against becom-
ing fanatical about his own “ideas.” Sri Ramakrishna’s overall position seems
to be that while he personally believes in reincarnation and frequently ap-
peals to the doctrine of reincarnation in his teachings on spiritual life, he
never tries to compel skeptics to accept reincarnation and even reassures
them that their lack of belief in reincarnation will not hinder their spiritual
progress so long as they are sincere and humble.
Sri Ramakrishna adopts a similar stance on the transhistorical question of
whether it is possible for God to incarnate as a human being. It is clear that Sri
Ramakrishna unambiguously accepts the doctrine of avatārhood. He remarks
for instance: “God has different forms, and He sports in different ways. He
sports as Īśvara, deva, man, and the universe. In every age He descends to
earth in human form as an Incarnation, to teach people love and devotion.
There is the instance of Chaitanya. One can taste devotion and love of God
only through His Incarnations. Infinite are the ways of God’s play, but what
I need is love and devotion. I want only the milk. The milk comes through
the udder of the cow. The Incarnation is the udder” (228/257). Evidently, Sri
Ramakrishna upholds the traditional Hindu view—adumbrated in chapter 4,
verse 7 of the Gītā—that God incarnates as a human being in every age.40
40
As Angelika Malinar points out, while the word “avatāra” is not used either in 4.7 or any-
where else in the Gītā, 4.7 can nonetheless be “seen as foreshadowing fully elaborated avatāra
doctrines.” Angelika Malinar, The Bhagavadg ītā: Doctrines and Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 99.
201

According to Sri Ramakrishna, ordinary people can learn to cultivate bhakti

by witnessing the ideal bhakti of avatāras (“Incarnations”) such as Chaitanya.
Sri Ramakrishna also teaches that devotion toward an avatāra is sufficient for
spiritual liberation. As Sri Ramakrishna puts it, the avatāra holds “in His hand
the key to others’ liberation” (204/237). At another point in the Kathāmrta, ̣
Sri Ramakrishna remarks: “To love an avatāra—that is enough. Ah, what
ecstatic love the gopīs had for Krishna!” (347/356).
On the other hand, Sri Ramakrishna points out that there are many spir-
itual aspirants who do not accept the doctrine of avatārhood, such as Ad-
vaita Vedāntins and those like Kabīr and followers of the Brāhmo Samāj
who believe in the personal but formless God: “[Advaita] Vedānta does
not recognize the Incarnation of God. According to it, Chaitanyadeva is
only a bubble of the nondual Brahman. . . . The Incarnation of God is ac-
cepted by those who follow the path of bhakti ” (292/308).41 Are Advaitins
and Brāhmos soteriologically handicapped because they reject the doc-
trine of avatārhood? Sri Ramakrishna answers with an emphatic “No”: “The
sum and substance of the whole matter is that a man must love God, must
be restless [vyākul ] for Him. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in God
with form or in God without form. You may or may not believe that God in-
carnates as a human being. But you will realize God if you have that yearn-
ing [anurāg]. Then God Himself will let you know what He is like” (450/
449). Sri Ramakrishna places much greater emphasis on vyākulatā, intense
restlessness for God, than on doctrinal religious beliefs, such as belief in ava-
tārhood. From Sri Ramakrishna’s standpoint, while religions frequently con-
flict on points of doctrine, they all agree on the importance of vyākulatā.
In theistic religions, this vyākulatā amounts to an intense love of God and
an all-consuming desire to realize God directly. In Advaita Vedānta, vyākulatā
takes the form of mumuksutva,̣ the intense longing for spiritual liberation. In
Buddhism, vyākulatā appears in the form of sammā saṅ kappa (“right resolve”)
and sammā vāyāma (“right effort”), the second and sixth components of the
Noble Eightfold Path, which amount to an intense desire to achieve libera-
tion from suffering through the attainment of nirvān ̣a. In sum, although
Sri Ramakrishna himself clearly accepted the doctrine of avatārhood and
he recognized that belief in an avatāra is soteriologically vital in certain devo-
tional traditions such as Vaiṣṇ avism and Christianity, he nonetheless insisted
that belief in the doctrine of avatārhood is not necessary for God-realization.
According to Sri Ramakrishna, religions make conflicting claims about
both historical and transhistorical matters, and some religions are correct
about such matters while others are mistaken. However, Sri Ramakrishna
emphasizes that none of these historical and transhistorical matters are
soteriologically vital, so even if some religions hold erroneous views on
41
See also Sri Ramakrishna’s reference to Kabir’s disparagement of Krishna at 345/354.
202

these matters, these errors do not diminish the salvific efficacy of these re-
ligions as paths to God-realization. Moreover, Sri Ramakrishna points out
that every religion has errors, so it is foolhardy to claim that one religion is
superior to all the others:
Ah, that restlessness [vyākulatā] is the whole thing. Whatever path you follow—
whether you are a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Śākta, a Vaiṣṇ ava, or a Brāhmo—
the vital point is restlessness. God is our Inner Guide [Antaryāmī ]. It doesn’t matter
if you take a wrong path—only you must be restless for Him. God Himself will put
you on the right path. Besides, there are errors in all paths. Everyone thinks his
watch is right; but as a matter of fact no watch is absolutely right. But that doesn’t
hamper one’s work. If a man is restless for God he gains the company of sādhus and
as far as possible corrects his own watch with the sādhu’s help. (1123/673)
Sri Ramakrishna likens religious fanatics to people who think that their
watch alone tells the correct time. According to Sri Ramakrishna, however,
“no watch is absolutely right.” That is, all religions have errors, but these
errors do not diminish the soteriological efficacy of these religions as
“paths” to God-realization. The essential attitude needed to make spiritual
progress in any religion is “restlessness” for God (vyākulatā). If a religious
practitioner has this vyākulatā, then even if he or she makes a mistake, God
Himself will put the religious practitioner “on the right path.”
Sri Ramakrishna illustrates this rather novel idea by means of an analogy:
All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself. In-
deed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devo-
tion. Suppose there are errors in the religion that one has accepted; if one is sin-
cere and earnest, then God Himself will correct those errors. Suppose a man has
set out with a sincere desire to visit Jagannath at Puri and by mistake has gone
north instead of south; then certainly someone meeting him on the way will tell
him: “My good fellow, don’t go that way. Go to the south.” And the man will reach
Jagannath sooner or later. If there are errors in other religions, that is none of our
business. God, to whom the world belongs, takes care of that. Our duty is somehow
to visit Jagannath. (577/559)
A man going on a pilgrimage to visit the Jagannath Temple in Puri might
start out in the wrong direction, but he will eventually be guided in the
right direction by a more experienced traveler. Similarly, if one sincerely
aspires to realize God through a particular religion, the errors in that re-
ligion will not hinder one’s spiritual progress, since one will eventually rec-
ognize them to be errors and modify one’s religious beliefs and practices
accordingly. Moreover, Sri Ramakrishna adds that we should devote our
full energy to practicing our own religion sincerely and wholeheartedly rather
than wasting our time pointing out “errors in other religions.” In short, re-
garding religious disagreements about historical and transhistorical mat-
ters, Sri Ramakrishna maintains that some religions are correct while others
203

are incorrect, but he hastens to add that all religions have errors and that
these errors do not detract from their salvific efficacy.
Regarding apparently conflicting truth claims about the nature of the ulti-
mate reality, Sri Ramakrishna’s approach is somewhat different. As we have
seen in Section I, Sri Ramakrishna’s unique spiritual experience of vijñāna
revealed to him that the infinite and illimitable God is both personal and im-
personal, both with and without form, both immanent in the universe and
transcendent to it. Hence, from the standpoint of vijñāna, all religious con-
ceptions of God are true, since they all capture real aspects of one and the
same infinite impersonal-personal God. While different religious concep-
tions of the ultimate reality seem to conflict, they are in fact complementary.
Theistic religions refer to the personal aspect of God under different names
and forms, while nontheistic religions like Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta
refer to the impersonal aspect of God as “Śūnyatā” or “Brahman.” While Is-
lam and Judaism emphasize the formless aspect of God, Christians and Hindu
Vaiṣṇ avas emphasize God’s capacity to incarnate as a human being. Since Sri
Ramakrishna’s thesis of the infinite and illimitable God is based on the direct
spiritual experience of vijñāna rather than on logical reasoning, it would be
beside the point to fault him for failing to provide a rational explanation of
how God can have apparently contradictory attributes—such as personality
and impersonality—at the same time. For Sri Ramakrishna, what might ap-
pear to be contradictions to the rational intellect are reconciled on the lofty
heights of suprarational spiritual experience.
Thus, according to Sri Ramakrishna, all religious conceptions of the ul-
timate reality are true, even though none of them captures the whole of the
infinite and illimitable Divine Reality. Moreover, even if a particular reli-
gious conception of God is partial or one-sided, it can nonetheless serve
as a salvifically effective path to God-realization. It is worth noting that
Sri Ramakrishna’s position on this issue does not commit him to religious
relativism, since he explicitly acknowledges that some religions might have
more sophisticated conceptions of God than others:
It is enough to have yearning for God. It is enough to love Him and feel attracted
to Him: Don’t you know that God is the Inner Guide? He sees the longing of our
heart and the yearning of our soul. Suppose a man has several sons. The older boys
address him distinctly as “Baba” or “Papa,” but the babies can at best call him “Ba”
or “Pa.” Now, will the father be angry with those who address him in this indistinct
way? The father knows that they too are calling him, only they cannot pronounce
his name well. All children are the same to the father. Likewise, the devotees call on
God alone, though by different names. They call on one Person only. God is one,
but His names are many.(60/112)
Taken out of context, Sri Ramakrishna’s final statement that “God is one, but
His names are many” could be taken to mean that religions differ only in the
various names they ascribe to God. However, the context of this statement
204

shows that Sri Ramakrishna’s position is much more nuanced. Just as babies
refer to their father as “Ba” or “Pa” while the older boys refer to him as “Baba”
or “Papa,” some religions may have less sophisticated conceptions of God
than others. Significantly, however, Sri Ramakrishna warns against wasting
our time trying to determine which religion is the most sophisticated in this
regard. Rather, he insists that just as the father loves all his children equally,
God loves equally the practitioners of all religions, in spite of their varying de-
grees of sophistication. Moreover, a given religion’s doctrinal sophistication
does not track its salvific efficacy. Therefore, religions that are less sophisti-
cated than others at the level of doctrine may nonetheless be as salvifically
effective as more doctrinally sophisticated religions.
For Sri Ramakrishna, the sheer diversity of religious truth claims about
historical and transhistorical matters, as well as about the ultimate reality,
far from undermining the possibility of religious pluralism, provides the
basis for a robust religious pluralism. As he puts it, “God has made differ-
ent religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries” (577/559).
In other words, various religions—with their differing, and often conflict-
ing, truth claims—appeal to people of various temperaments and cultures,
but all religions are salvifically effective paths to the common goal of God-
realization. If one finds the truth claims of a particular religion especially
convincing or appealing, then one can realize God by practicing that reli-
gion. But one should never assume that other religions are not salvifically
effective paths to God-realization because their truth claims differ from
the truth claims of one’s own religion.
III. ADDRESSING MAJOR OBJECTIONS TO SRI RAMAKRISHNA’S

MODEL OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
We are now in a position to consider some of the most serious objections

to Sri Ramakrishna’s views on religious pluralism. Scholars such as Morales
and Prothero question Sri Ramakrishna’s assumption that all religions are
paths to the same goal.42 Morales argues, for instance, that the various re-
ligious conceptions of the Absolute are mutually exclusive, so the respec-
tive goals of all religions must also be mutually exclusive:
There are several radically distinct, and wholly irreconcilable, religiously inspired
ideas about what constitutes the Absolute. Consequently, rather than attempting
to artificially claim that there is only one mountain top toward which all religions
aspire, it would be more truthful, and more in keeping with what the various reli-
gious traditions themselves actually say, to state that there are several different
42
See Morales, Radical Universalism, 28–29; Prothero, God Is Not One, 99, 194. For a similar
criticism, see J. N. Mohanty, “ Yato Mat Tato Path,” in Sri Ramakrishna’s Ideas and Our Times:
A Retrospect on His 175th Birth Anniversary (Kolkata: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture,
2013), 121–26.
205

mountains—each representing a radically different idea of what is the Absolute.

There is a Nirvana mountain, a Brahman mountain, an Allah mountain, a Jain
mountain. Some mountains are monotheistic, some are polytheistic, henotheistic,
pantheistic or panentheistic. Moreover, it is incumbent upon us all individually to
choose for ourselves which of these many possibly correct Absolute-mountains
we wish to scale. Only one of these mutually exclusive philosophical mountains,
however, can be the correct one.43
According to Morales, different religious conceptions of the Absolute are

“wholly irreconcilable,” so it is simply false to claim that all religions aspire
toward “only one mountain top.” Moreover, Morales insists that only one of
these “mutually exclusive” conceptions of the Absolute “can be the correct
one.” In other words, Morales defends the exclusivist view that if one reli-
gion is true, then all other religions must be false. First, it is worth noting
that Sri Ramakrishna himself anticipated Morales’s objection in his parables
of the chameleon and of the blind men and the elephant. To him, religious
exclusivists are like people quarrelling foolishly over the color of the chame-
leon or like blind men insisting that the part of the elephant they are touch-
ing is the whole of the elephant. Sri Ramakrishna was not so naïve or ideal-
istic as to deny that many religious practitioners hold exclusivistic beliefs.
Rather, on the basis of the vast spiritual experience of vijñāna and his own
practice of a variety of Hindu and non-Hindu faiths, Sri Ramakrishna taught
that the various religious conceptions of the ultimate reality are not, in fact,
mutually exclusive since they correspond to different aspects of one and the
same Infinite Reality.
Tellingly, Morales nowhere addresses Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings on
vijñāna or his parables illustrating religious pluralism, which convey an expan-
sive understanding of God as the infinite and illimitable impersonal-personal
Divine Reality. As a result, Morales overlooks the nuances of Sri Ramakrishna’s
model of religious pluralism, which is far less hegemonic than Morales alleges.
While Sri Ramakrishna maintains that all religions share the common goal
of God-realization, his conception of God-realization is extraordinarily capa-
cious. Indeed, his parables of the chameleon and the elephant suggest a very
broad and nonhegemonic soteriological outlook: people of various tempera-
ments can realize God in a variety of ways, since the infinite God has numerous
forms and aspects, all of which are real. Although different people see the cha-
meleon in different colors, they all see one and the same chameleon. Likewise,
all the blind men touch different parts of one and the same elephant. Accord-
ing to Sri Ramakrishna, the goal of the Advaitic jñānayogī is to realize nirgun ̣a
Brahman, “the Infinite, without form or shape and beyond mind and words”
(181/218). Sri Ramakrishna insists, however, that the bhakta who worships the
personal God can realize the same Infinite Reality as “eternally endowed with
43
Morales, Radical Universalism, 28.
206

form and personality” (nitya sākāra) (152/191).44 Elsewhere, Sri Ramakrishna

points out that God-realization for bhaktas amounts to the jīva’s realization of
its eternal divine relationship with the eternal personal God: “It can’t be said
that bhaktas need nirvān ̣a. According to some schools there is an eternal
Krishna and there are also His eternal devotees. Krishna is Spirit embodied,
and His Abode also is Spirit embodied. Krishna is eternal and the devotees
also are eternal” (834/779). From Sri Ramakrishna’s standpoint of vijñāna,
both the Advaitin and the bhakta attain the goal of God-realization, even though
they end up realizing different aspects or forms of one and the same Infinite
Reality. Since Morales ignores altogether the ontological framework of vijñāna
within which Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings on religious pluralism are embedded,
he makes untenable generalizations about Sri Ramakrishna’s views on the
world religions that fail to do justice to their subtlety and sophistication.
Some scholars, including Ninian Smart and R. W. Neufeldt, claim that
Buddhism in particular poses a serious problem for a Vedāntic model of re-
ligious pluralism such as Sri Ramakrishna’s.45 Although Smart lodges this
objection against Swami Vivekananda’s “Neo-Advaitic” harmonizing of reli-
gions, his objection is broad enough to apply to Sri Ramakrishna’s model of
religious pluralism as well. According to Smart, “the ultimate reality is pre-
sented in a substantialist way in Neo-Advaita: this does not seem to square
with Theravādin nirvān ̣a or with Mahāyāna śūnyatā (though the latter some-
times functions a bit like a ghost-substance).”46 Smart rightly notes that a
Vedāntic model of religious pluralism such as Sri Ramakrishna’s presup-
poses a “substantialist” understanding of the ultimate reality as a positive en-
tity or reality, whether that positive reality is conceived as a personal God (by
theists) or as the impersonal Brahman (by Advaita Vedāntins).47 According
to Smart, however, since the Theravāda and Mahāyāna strains of Buddhism
do not subscribe to a substantialist view of the ultimate reality, these Bud-
dhistic schools cannot easily be accommodated within a Vedāntic model
of religious pluralism.
The best way to begin to address Smart’s objection is to consider Sri Ra-
makrishna’s own statements about the Buddha. Regarding the Buddha, Sri
Ramakrishna observes: “He was not an atheist. He simply could not express
the Reality in words. Do you know what ‘Buddha’ means? By meditating on
44
It is worth noting that Sri Ramakrishna’s statement about the bhakta’s realization of the
“nitya sākāra” form of God suggests that Advaitic nirvikalpa samādhi is not necessary for spir-
itual salvation.
45
See R. W. Neufeldt, “The Response of the Ramakrishna Mission,” in Modern Indian Re-
sponses to Religious Pluralism, ed. Harold Coward (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 73; Ninian Smart,
“Models for Understanding the Relations between Religions,” in Ninian Smart on World Reli-
gions: Volume 2, ed. John J. Shepherd (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 268, and “A Contemplation
of Absolutes” in Shepherd, Ninian Smart on World Religions: Volume 2, 257.
46
Smart, “Models for Understanding the Relations between Religions,” 268.
47
In his use of the term “substantialist,” Smart does not mean to imply that the ultimate
reality is conceived as a substance. I take it that Smart uses the term “substantialist” in a very
broad sense to denote any conception of the ultimate reality as a positive entity or reality.
207

one’s own Bodha Svarūpa [one’s true nature as Pure Consciousness], one be-
comes that Bodha Svarūpa. . . . Why should Buddha be called an atheist? When
one realizes one’s Svarūpa [the true nature of one’s Self], one attains a state
that is something between asti [is] and nāsti [is-not]” (1028/947–48). Sri Ra-
makrishna explains the Buddha’s enlightenment in Advaitic terms as the re-
alization of his own true Self, which is of the nature of Pure Consciousness
(Bodha). Of course, he was aware that the Buddha himself did not explain
his enlightenment experience as the realization of the Supreme Ātman.
Nonetheless, he implies that what the Buddha called “nibbāna” is a negative
term denoting the realization of the ineffable Ātman.48
From Smart’s perspective, Sri Ramakrishna unjustifiably Vedāntizes Bud-
dhism by interpreting the Buddha’s enlightenment experience in substan-
tialist terms as the realization of one’s “Svarūpa.” According to Smart, the
Theravāda and Mahāyāna schools of Buddhism deny such a substantialist un-
derstanding of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Thus, it seems as if Sri Rama-
krishna is only able to accommodate Buddhism within his model of religious
pluralism by assimilating Buddhism to Advaita Vedānta. While Smart is cor-
rect that most Theravādins do take the Buddha to have denied the reality of
the Vedāntic Ātman, there is lively scholarly controversy regarding whether
the Buddha himself denied the reality of the Vedāntic Ātman. Numerous
scholars, including C. A. F. Rhys Davids, Georg Grimm, Edward Conze,
Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, I. B. Horner, and Perry Schmidt-Leukel, have ar-
gued that the Buddha’s teaching of anattā (“non-self ”; Sanskrit, anātman)
was meant to deny the reality of the empirical-personal self rather than of
the impersonal Vedāntic Ātman.49 As Bhattacharya puts it, “the Buddha does
not deny the Upaniṣadic ātman; on the contrary, he indirectly affirms it, in
denying that which is falsely believed to be the ātman.”50 These scholars find sup-
port for their interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings in numerous passages
̣ 51 For instance, in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, Vacchagotta asks
from the Pāli Tipitaka.
48
See Sri Ramakrishna’s similar remark about the Buddha at 430/430.
49
See C. A. F. Rhys Davids, Outlines of Buddhism (London: Methuen, 1934); Ananda Cooma-
raswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 199–221; Kamaleswar
Bhattacharya, L’ātman-brahman dans le bouddhisme ancien (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient,
1973); Georg Grimm, The Doctrine of the Buddha (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958); Hajime
Nakamura, Indian Buddhism (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987), 64; J. G. Jennings, The Vedāntic
Buddhism of the Buddha (London: Oxford University Press, 1948); David and Nancy Reigle,
“Ātman/Anātman in Buddhism and Its Implication for the Wisdom Tradition,” in Studies in the Wis-
dom Tradition (Cotopaxi, CO: Eastern School Press, 2015); Edward Conze, Buddhist Thought in In-
dia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962), 129–34; Miri Albahari, “Against No-Ātman Theories of
Anattā,” Asian Philosophy 12, no. 1 (2002): 5–20; David Reigle, “The Ātman-Brahman in Ancient
Buddhism,” in Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, The Ātman-Brahman in Ancient Buddhism (Cotopaxi, CO:
Canon, 2015), ix–xviii; Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Understanding Buddhism (Delhi: Pentagon, 2007); Rose
Drew, Buddhist and Christian? An Exploration of Dual Belonging (New York: Routledge, 2011), 57–61.
50
Bhattacharya, L’ātman-brahman dans le bouddhisme ancien, 1; translation mine.
51
An anonymous referee has pointed out that since the Tipitaka ̣ was “codified over 200
years after the Buddha’s death . . . it is best not to imply that by careful reading of the Pāli
Canon, we can understand with certainty what the historical Buddha believed.” I agree that
208

the Buddha, “Is there a self ?” and the Buddha remains silent. Vacchagotta then
asks the Buddha, “Then is there no self?” and the Buddha remains silent
again.52 The Buddha’s telling silence on the question of whether a self exists
could easily be taken to support Sri Ramakrishna’s position that the Buddha re-
alized his true essence as Pure Consciousness but “could not express the Real-
ity in words.” Moreover, in a well-known passage from the Khuddaka Nikāya,
the Buddha seems to describe nirvān ̣a as an ineffable transempirical Reality:
“Monks, there is a not-born, a not-become, a not-made, a not-compounded.
Monks, if that unborn, not-become, not-made, not-compounded were not,
there would be apparent no escape from this here that is born, become,
made, compounded.”53 According to Schmidt-Leukel, “this passage does not
only emphasise that ‘there is’ a transcendent reality. It also underlines its
genuine transcendence in the most explicit way by distinguishing it onto-
logically from the major features of the saṃ sāric world.”54 Such passages from
̣
the Tipitaka arguably lend support to Sri Ramakrishna’s substantialist inter-
pretation of the Buddha’s enlightenment experience.
Moreover, Smart’s assumption that Mahāyāna Buddhism interprets the
Buddha’s anattā doctrine in nonsubstantialist terms is also a highly tenden-
tious one, since there are numerous interpretations of the Mahāyāna school,
some of which are substantialist and others which are nonsubstantialist. In
his classic 1955 study The Central Philosophy of Buddhism , T. R. V. Murti argues
that Nāgārjuna’s Śūnyata denotes a positive ineffable Reality that can neither
be said to exist nor not to exist.55 In support of his interpretation, Murti cites
̣
a striking passage from the Mahāyāna text, Ratna-Kūta-Sūtra: “‘that ātman is’
is one end; ‘that ātman is not’ is another; but the middle between the ātma
and nairātmya views is the Inexpressible. . . . It is the reflective review of
things.”56 This passage could easily be taken to support Sri Ramakrishna’s
view that the Buddha realized the ineffable Reality that is “between asti
and nāsti.” More recently, David Reigle has argued that major Mahāyāna
thinkers such as Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, and Candrakīrti “thought that
the Buddha’s anātman teaching was directed against a permanent personal
ātman” rather than against the Upaniṣadic Ātman.57 Reigle further sug-
we should reject the facile assumption that the teachings contained in the Tipitaka ̣ coincide
̣ is a valua-
exactly with the historical Buddha’s teachings. Nonetheless, I believe that the Tipitaka
ble—though fallible—textual source that gives at least some insight into what the historical Bud-
dha might have taught.
52
Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Saṃyutta
Nikāya (Boston: Wisdom, 2000), 1393–94.
53
Frank Woodward, trans., The Minor Anthologies of the Pali Canon (London: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1948), 97–98.
54
Schmidt-Leukel, Understanding Buddhism, 72.
55
T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism: A Study of the Mādhyamika System (Lon-
don: Allen & Unwin, 1955), 329–31.
56
Cited in Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 27–28.
57
Reigle, “The Ātman-Brahman in Ancient Buddhism,” ix.
209

gests that the “Buddha Nature” (Buddha-dhātu) mentioned in the Mahāyāna

Tathāgatagarbhasūtras bears a strong resemblance to the Vedāntic Ātman.58
Obviously, this is not the place to defend a Vedāntic or quasi-Vedāntic
interpretation of Buddhism. For present purposes, I hope only to have estab-
lished that the Vedāntic interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings favored by
Sri Ramakrishna continues to be supported by a number of scholars and
is thus not wildly implausible or flagrantly eisegetic. While Smart is correct
that a Vedāntic model of religious pluralism such as Sri Ramakrishna’s can-
not accommodate the nonsubstantialist understanding of the anattā doc-
trine championed by certain Buddhist schools such as Theravāda, this fact
does not have the damaging consequences that Smart seems to think it does.
Sri Ramakrishna does not so much “Vedāntize” Buddhism as endorse a sub-
stantialist interpretation of Buddhism that arguably finds support in numer-
̣
ous passages from the Pāli Tipitaka and certain Mahāyāna texts. Since both
substantialist and nonsubstantialist interpretations of Buddhism are contro-
versial, Sri Ramakrishna is perfectly entitled to take a stand on this issue and
interpret Buddhism in substantialist terms.
In an interesting essay on religious pluralism in the teachings of Sri
Ramakrishna and the Swamis of the Ramakrishna Mission, R.W. Neufeldt
argues that Sri Ramakrishna’s views on world religions are more inclusivist
than pluralist because they presuppose vijñāna as the highest truth. Accord-
ing to Neufeldt, Sri Ramakrishna insists that all religions must accept the
standpoint of vijñāna, the “belief-cum-experience that all is God.”59 All reli-
gions, as Neufeldt puts it, “must be informed by the belief that God is all, or
all is God and must end in the direct vision or experience of this belief.”60
However, Neufeldt misunderstands how vijñāna informs Sri Ramakrishna’s
teachings on religious pluralism. On the basis of his own spiritual experience
of vijñāna, Sri Ramakrishna realized that God is both nirgun ̣a and sagun ̣a
and hence that all genuine religions and spiritual philosophies capture dif-
ferent aspects of one and the same Infinite Divine Reality. Hence, the spiri-
tual standpoint of vijñāna provided Sri Ramakrishna with a capacious philo-
sophical framework for explaining how all religions are salvifically efficacious
paths to the common goal of God-realization. Instead of taking vijñāna as the
philosophical framework underlying Sri Ramakrishna’s religious pluralism,
Neufeldt makes the unjustified assumption that Sri Ramakrishna injects the
“belief-cum-experience” of vijñāna into the doctrinal content of all religions.
Neufeldt’s interpretation of Sri Ramakrishna suffers from three major
flaws. First, no passages in the Kathāmrta ̣ support Neufeldt’s view that Sri
Ramakrishna imposed the vijñāna doctrine that “God is all” onto all the
world religions. In fact, Sri Ramakrishna taught that every religion is enti-
58
Ibid., xvi–xvii.
59
Neufeldt, “The Response of the Ramakrishna Mission,” 73.
60
Ibid., 72. For a similar claim, see Devdas, Sri Ramakrishna, 113–14.
210

tled to hold different views on the nature of God, since God Himself is in-
finite and illimitable. Second, Neufeldt is mistaken in assuming that Sri
Ramakrishna takes the spiritual experience of vijñāna to be the salvific goal
of all religions. As I have argued in Section I, Sri Ramakrishna’s understand-
ing of the shared goal of God-realization is maximally capacious: far from
claiming that all religions must culminate in the spiritual experience of vijñāna,
Sri Ramakrishna claims that God can be realized in numerous ways and
in any of his innumerable aspects. For instance, while the Advaitin realizes
the nirgun ̣a aspect of God in nirvikalpa samādhi, bhaktas realize various as-
pects and forms of the sagun ̣a aspect of God. Third, Neufeldt overlooks
the many passages in the Kathāmrta ̣ where Sri Ramakrishna indicates that
the vast majority of people cannot attain the realization of vijñāna, since this
rarefied experience is reserved only for “īśvarakotis,” ̣ a spiritual elite consist-
ing of incarnations of God and their inner circle. Hence, it would be implau-
sible in the extreme to attribute to Sri Ramakrishna the view that such a rar-
efied state of vijñāna is the salvific goal of all religions. Contrary to Neufeldt,
then, the standpoint of vijñāna allows Sri Ramakrishna to leave intact both
the respective doctrinal beliefs and the respective salvific goals of the various
religions.
Finally, I wish to consider the possible objection that there is a performa-
tive contradiction between Sri Ramakrishna’s religious pluralist position
and his attempt to impose his pluralistic views onto others. This objection
is invalid because Sri Ramakrishna never tried to compel anyone to accept
his own doctrine of religious pluralism. Addressing religious exclusivists,
Sri Ramakrishna remarks: “What I mean is that dogmatism is not good.
It is not good to feel that my religion alone is true and other religions are
false. The correct attitude is this: My religion is right, but I do not know
whether other religions are right or wrong, true or false” (576 –77/558).
Since Sri Ramakrishna recognizes that exclusivist religious practitioners
would likely be unsympathetic to a pluralist view, he provides an internal cri-
tique of the exclusivist position itself: he argues that it is unreasonable for
exclusivists to assume that all religions other than their own are not salvifically
efficacious. From Sri Ramakrishna’s perspective, one can only be in a position
to judge the salvific efficacy of a religion after understanding it thoroughly
and sincerely practicing it. Hence, the exclusivist’s a priori rejection of the sal-
vific efficacy of all religions other than his or her own amounts to sheer “dog-
matism.” Sri Ramakrishna encourages exclusivists to repudiate their “dogma-
tism” and to adopt instead the “correct attitude” of humility and agnosticism
by suspending judgment about whether religions other than their own are
salvifically efficacious.
As we have seen, however, Sri Ramakrishna himself did practice religions
other than his own—including Christianity and Islam—and found them to
be as salvifically efficacious as Hinduism. As he puts it, “I had to practice
every religion [sab dharma] for a time—Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, as
211

well as the paths of Śāktism, Vaiṣṇ avism, and [Advaita] Vedānta. I realized
that there is only one God [ek īśvar] toward whom all are travelling; but the
paths are different” (77/129). On the basis of his own direct spiritual ex-
perience of the “one God” through the practice of Hindu, Christian, and
Islamic religious paths, Sri Ramakrishna feels justified in going beyond a
position of mere agnosticism about other religions to the full-blown plural-
ist view that all genuine religions are different salvifically efficacious paths
to God. Crucially, however, instead of trying to impose his own pluralist
view onto those who are inclined to religious exclusivism, Sri Ramakrishna
urges exclusivists to be agnostic about whether other religions are as sal-
vifically efficacious as their own.
I V . T O WA R D A C R O S S - C U LT U R A L D I S C O U R S E
ON RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
This article is the first of two chapters devoted to the issue of religious plu-
ralism from a larger ongoing book project, tentatively titled “God’s Infin-
itude: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion.” In the
second chapter, I bring Sri Ramakrishna’s model of religious pluralism
into dialogue with the pluralist views of Hick. I argue that between 1970
and 1974, the early Hick espoused a Vedāntic theory of religious plural-
ism—based explicitly on Sri Aurobindo’s “logic of the infinite”—that
comes remarkably close to Sri Ramakrishna’s vijñāna-based model of reli-
gious pluralism.61 According to the early Hick, each of the great world re-
ligions captures a real aspect of the Infinite Divine Reality, which is both
personal and nonpersonal.62 By 1976, Hick abandoned this Vedāntic line
of thought in favor of his now well-known quasi-Kantian theory of religious
pluralism, according to which the personal and nonpersonal ultimates of
the various world religions are different phenomenal manifestations of the
same unknowable “Real an sich.”63 However, as numerous critics have pointed
out, Hick’s quasi-Kantian model does violence to the self-understanding of
most religious practitioners, who take their respective ultimates to be literally
and not merely phenomenally true. Since Sri Ramakrishna grants robust on-
tological reality to the personal and nonpersonal ultimates of the various
religions, I argue that Sri Ramakrishna’s model of religious pluralism is more
genuinely pluralistic than Hick’s quasi-Kantian model. On this basis, I suggest
that the Vedāntic road not taken by Hick is the road he should have taken—or,
at the very least, more fully explored.
61
See John Hick, Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973),
128.
62
See John Hick, God and the Universe of Faiths (Oxford: One World, 1973), 139.
See John Hick’s 1976 conference paper, “Mystical Experience as Cognition,” published
63
in Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 415–21.
212

Almost daily, we hear of atrocities committed in the name of religion in

various parts of the world. In this contemporary climate, it is more neces-
sary than ever for us to work collectively toward developing a strong foun-
dation for interreligious dialogue and understanding. While the recent
burgeoning interest in religious pluralism among theologians and philos-
ophers of religion is no doubt a promising development, the vast majority
of pluralist theories remain rooted in Christian theological paradigms.
What is urgently needed now is a broader cross-cultural approach to reli-
gious pluralism that takes seriously the pluralist views developed in both
Western and non-Western religious traditions. Sri Ramakrishna’s timely
and sophisticated teachings on the harmony of religions can play a crucial
role in this cross-cultural endeavor.
213


God Is Infinite: Ayan Maharaj

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God Is Infinite: Ayan Maharaj

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“God Is Infinite, and the Paths to God

Are Infinite”: A Reconstruction and

Contemporary theologians have discussed a wide range of theories of reli-

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personal and impersonal. As Swami Tapasyananda puts it, Sri Ramakrishna

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I. A RECONSTRUCTION OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA’S MODEL

Crucially, Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings on religious pluralism are based on

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in an overwhelming vision of Jesus, who approached him and finally merged

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on the experiential basis of vijñāna. Since God’s infinite nature cannot be

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ciently dynamic and flexible to accommodate new religious movements

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immoral behavior of a monk who tries to give an Advaitic justification for

Sri Ramakrishna does not consider the pseudo-Vedānta practiced by this

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(1) Exclusivism: Salvific knowledge of a transcendent reality is mediated

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Sri Ramakrishna is clearly a religious pluralist in Schmidt-Leukel’s sense

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II. SRI RAMAKRISHNA’S RESPONSE TO THE PROBLEM

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nuanced response to the problem of conflicting religious truth claims, I

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M A S T E R : It is enough to believe that all is possible in God’s creation. Never allow

Sri Ramakrishna reassures Gupta that his skepticism about reincarnation

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According to Sri Ramakrishna, ordinary people can learn to cultivate bhakti

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III. ADDRESSING MAJOR OBJECTIONS TO SRI RAMAKRISHNA’S

We are now in a position to consider some of the most serious objections

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mountains—each representing a radically different idea of what is the Absolute.

According to Morales, different religious conceptions of the Absolute are

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form and personality” (nitya sākāra) (152/191).44 Elsewhere, Sri Ramakrishna

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gests that the “Buddha Nature” (Buddha-dhātu) mentioned in the Mahāyāna

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Almost daily, we hear of atrocities committed in the name of religion in

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