The contrast in personality between the two great Bengali spiritual giants of the last century, Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, becomes all the more striking when one takes into account the fact that the two complemented and relied upon each other in a remarkably unusual way, in a manner that has been described as "symphonic".
Bhagavan Sri Ramakrishna, when he goes into Nirvikalpa Samadhi as he often did, gets totally out of this world, trembling in ecstasy, knowing no distinction of knower, known and knowledge, experiencing no awareness of objects around, totally absorbed in that bliss which Romain Rolland described as 'oceanic joy'. Even when not in Samadhi, Ramakrishna was a mirthful child, full of play and tricks, ever laughing and teasing. Vivekananda on the other hand is always sombre, intense and passionate, rearing to go charging, brimming with vibrant physical vitality, ever productive of the most pungent rhetoric, quick to condemn what he disapproves, eager to invoke the Greek (is it also not quite Indian?) virtue of manliness, ''a cyclone in a monk's garb'' as Rajiv Gandhi put it. (Broadcast talk on the 125th anniversary of Vivekananda's birth -- 12th January 1988). Sri Ramakrishna Was all laughter and parables; gentle digs that prick bubbles of vanity, little tales that teach more than tomes. Vivekananda was, on the other hand, all fire and thunder, shouting to the masses in the same breath: ''Renounce and sacrifice'' as well as ''Stand up and strike!"
And yet they seemed really and deeply to need each other; Sri Ramakrishna yearned for that bundle of energy, Narendra, to be always by his side, often showing great anguish when the young superpackage of vitality failed to show up for a long time. As for Vivekananda his words about the Master have always a touching humility often not so evident in his ebullient personality: "I am the servant of a man who has passed away. I am only the messenger"; or again, "If there has been a word of truth, a word of spirituality, that I have spoken anywhere in the world, I owe it to my master; only the mistakes are mine.
I wish to submit that if we are to seek for a message for the Twenty-first century, we should seek it from this ''Symphonic Twain" and not from one of them alone. Sri Ramakrishna felt that he needed Vivekananda to spread his ideas; there need be no doubt both that Vivekananda would have been almost nothing special without the Master, and that the Master's profound personality could not have found its way into western consciousness without the persuasive mediation of Vivekananda, who put his own stamp on the Master's teaching.
Vivekananda had the unusual capacity to pick up some of the better ideas from western thought: the idea that the worker or the poor Sudra as the oppressed class to whom social liberation has to come first; the simple affirmations of a theory of class domination in all cultures, an unsophisticated socialism; the democratic ideal and so on. Like Gandhi, the Swami sought to root these ideas in the Indian tradition. But he was way ahead of his time. There need not be any doubt that both Gandhi and Nehru were deeply influenced by him. As Nehru himself put it:
"I can tell you that many of my generation were very powerfully influenced by him (Swami Vivekananda) and I think that it would do a great deal of good to the present generation if they also went through Swami Vivekananda's speeches and writings, and they would learn much from them....He was no politician in the ordinary sense on the word and yet he was, I think, one of the great founders...of the national modern movement of India, and a great number of people who took more or less an active part in that movement at a later date drew their inspiration from Swami Vivekananda. Directly or indirectly he has powerfully influenced the India of today."
Mahatma Gandhi too took many cues from Vivekananda. Where the Swami spoke of the Sudra as the oppressed, the Mahatma spoke of the cast-out castes, once called the untouchables, the harijans or Dalits of today. Gandhi developed the concept of Sarvodaya out of the inspiration given by the Swami, as also his frequent use of the Puranic concept of Daridranarayana. The grasp of truth and the finality of love are ideas which Gandhi may have found elsewhere, but they were so evident in Vivekananda, and there is no doubt that the convictions took such a grip on Gandhi, because he had read Vivekananda.
I want here to highlight just one fundamental perception of this insuperable twain, apropos the mutual relation of God, humanity and world, which may lead us to some of our own revised perceptions of that basic relationship, as a message of the Twain for the Twenty-first century.
The God-Humanity-World Unity
There can, for us humans, be only three realities, if they are three at al1: the knowing self (humanity), the known universe, and the Reality that upholds both; God, world and Man, for those who can accept that terminology. Most people with some knowledge of modern philosophy of science would say that it is not possible any longer to conceive the subject and the object, or man and world, as two separate realities; they constitute one inseparable whole. The environmentalist would insist on that inseparability, for the sake of human survival, if not for philosophical reasons. The relation of Ultimate Reality to that inseparable whole is seldom debated in our secularized societies, for modern science has enforced its taboo on any God-talk in science. And modern science continues to be the prevailing dogmatic system of our time.
Swami Vivekananda, rooted in the ancient Sankhya tradition, (probably pre-vedic, reflected not only in the Vedas and the Upanishads as well as in Ramayana and Mahabharata, including in the Bhagavadgita, but also in Jaina and Buddhist Scriptures) has a noble and dynamic vision of that inseparable unit, the universe, which of course includes humanity. For him, it is prakriti, which is by no means what the West calls Nature, or Phusis in Greek. Prakrti is primeval matter-energy or the stuff of mind-matter in perfect equilibrium, always existent, going through rhythmic pulses of pralaya-vilaya, the unmanifest manifesting itself through that process, as Mahat, the manifest universe, of which only the more sthula elements are open to our senses.
Out of this Mahat, which is the vivarta form of prakriti, comes the three modes of vibration, the satva, the rajas and the tamas, and ahankara which is the source of the world we perceive, composed of tanmatras or the infinitesimal energy waves, which an turn give rise to both the perceiving subjectivity (composed of external and internal senses and man's, buddhi etc), and the perceived subtle and gross qualities of matter-energy which we perceive as the objective world.
According to Samkhya, what human beings perceive or conceive as God in their ordinary consciousness is nothing more than Prakrti, the unmanifest aspect of Mahat. Because that ordinary consciousness itself is only an aspect of Mahat, the manifest aspect of prakriti. Beyond prakriti is Purusha, the unwitting and unchanging cause of all that changes . Purusha is neither intelligence nor will . It is simple. pure, perfect.