Sri Ramakrishna on Himself, continued...

Hence the book has a kind of biographical time frame, beginning from Sri Ramakrishna’s experiences at the temple garden (1855 onwards), his significant interactions with pundits and sadhakas of the time, the many moments of the consummation of his mature philosophy, and closing with the rich variety of his numerous interactions with sannyasi (Tarak, Kali, Sharat and Sashi, among others) and householder devotees like  Adhar Lal Sen, Girish Chandra Ghosh, Devendranath Mazumdar among others. In the process, not only does the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita and the Lilaprasanga (recent English translation  by Swami Chetanananda) get located in time, but also  create multiple resonances at the levels of  philosophical enquiry and exegesis,  aesthetic theories (the nine rasas) and their application to the organization of spiritual states, musical traditions of both singing and instrument playing in Bengal, and very importantly, at the level of History, whereby a gallery of important historical personalities, acquire immediacy through their interactions with Sri Ramakrishna or his with them. Sri Ramakrishna on Himself succeeds in giving the reader the range and amplitude of the Kathmarita particularly, through an intelligent selection that make this  many splendored text, come alive to us, within a much shorter scope. In Swami Ranganathananda’s exegesis of the Gita (The Universal Message of the Bhagavad Gita), the Swami at one point, refers to Thakur’s interchanges with devotees, as having the extraordinary power and vitality of the dialogues of Socrates!