Sri Sarada Devi

The full-length study of this teacher is still being written. What is below is the complete short life, and it is accurate as far as it goes.

The life

Jayrāmbāṭī, where she was born on 22 December 1853, adjoins Kāmārpukur — the two villages are a walk apart in the flat rice country of what is now West Bengal, and the marriage that joined them was arranged when she was very young, as marriages were. What she made of an almost impossible position is the whole point. Her husband had become a man consumed by worship; she joined him at Dakṣiṇeśvar as a young woman and lived beside him as a disciple rather than a wife, in a small room off the temple courtyard, cooking for him and for the stream of visitors, practising quietly, saying very little. In 1872 he worshipped her formally as the Divine Mother in the Ṣoḍaśī Pūjā, and the relation was fixed from then on. After 1886 she became the authority the young order rested on, for thirty-four years. She gave initiation herself. She divided her time between Jayrāmbāṭī, Kāmārpukur and the house at Bagbazar in Calcutta built so that she would have somewhere to live, and she supported the education of girls at a time when very few would. Her own dealings were entirely undramatic and entirely unyielding on one point: she refused to turn anyone away, including people the respectable world had finished with. Her recorded counsel is short and domestic and hard to improve on. She died in 1920.

The turn it rests on

Ramakrishna worshipped her as the Divine Mother in the Ṣoḍaśī Pūjā, and thereafter she was the Order's mother in fact.

What was taught

Taught almost entirely through conduct: make the whole world your own, no one is a stranger.