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 * Ramakrishna Math
 * Ramakrishna Mission
 * Ramakrishna Math and Mission
 * Ramakrishna Movement

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Ramakrishna Movement
Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission are twin organizations which form the core of a worldwide spiritual movement known as Ramakrishna Movement or Vedanta Movement. Ramakrishna, is considered the first and most important central figure of the movement. The movement aims at the "harmony of religions, harmony of the East and the West, harmony of the ancient and the modern, spiritual fulfillment, all-round development of human faculties, social equality, and peace for all humanity, without any distinctions of creed, caste, race or nationality." The movement's headquarters is located since 1898 at Belur, across the Ganges from Calcutta. The Math and the Mission together have 166 branch centres all over India and in different parts of the world.

Ramakrishna Mission
RAMAKRISHNA MISSION is a registered society in which monks of Ramakrishna Math and lay devotees cooperate in conducting various types of social service mainly in India. It was founded by Ramakrishna's chief disciple, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902).

The Ramakrishna Math and Mission is committed to the promotion of practical service to humanity and a philosophy of a universal religion. The Math is the monastic wing and the Mission is made up of lay supporters. The Movement today has more than 120 branches worldwide. Its headquarters in Belur Math, was established in 1898. The movement is considered as a revitalization movement of India.

Ramakrishna Order
Before his passing in August 1886, he gave monastic vows to a group of young, earnest spiritual seekers. That was the seed of the monastic order which later became known as the Ramakrishna Order. The first monastery (Sanskrit, Math) at Baranagore, a northern suburb of Kolkata, was organized by Ramakrishna’s monastic disciples headed by Swami Vivekananda.

Swami Vivekananda would write that he and the several other young disciples of Ramakrishna who gathered about their beloved Kali priest in a garden house in North Calcutta were in effect founding the Ramakrishna Math in December of 1885.

The Ramakrishna's distribution of ochre cloths and rosaries to eleven young males disciples on an evening in January, 1886; After Ramakrishna's death, eight of the earlier eleven "embraced monasticism by taking the ritual vow of renunciation and changing their original names on a January day in 1887. This is considered as the first Ramakrishna Order.

Ramakrishna Math
RAMAKRISHNA MATH is a monastic organization for men brought into existence by Ramakrishna, a famous mystic of 19th Century India. The Math in every instance is the place of training and residence for monks of the Ramakrishna Order. The presence of Mission is marked by the ministry of teaching and service to the lay public.

The personnel of Math consists only of sannyasins (ordained monks), beginning novitiates, and brahmacharins (initiated novitiates). A mission usually required additional facilities. These may occupy the same grounds with a Math or be entirely separated geographically. Business and professional employees may be part of the personnel, but retain authority and control. Those who look to the monks for religious guidance are, in Indian parlance, devotees. But if they support and share in the work of a Mission as employees, as volunteers, or as beneficiaries, they may join the Mission as lay members. It is the laity who make a movement of what would otherwise be only a monastic order.

It is compared with various models or characteristic religious phenomena such as the revitalization movements described by A.F.C. Wallace. The comparison shows that Ramakrishna movement is typical of the genre that Wallace analyzed. It seeks to restore vitality to languishing traditions in order to use them in inculcating authentic contemporary spirituality and to encourage social reform. Three subordinate traits further identify this particular revitalization movement:
 * 1) Revivalism- which Wallace defines as seeking the recovery of "customs, values, and even aspects of nature" once thought to have been present and constructively functional in culture but now missing.
 * 2) Vitalistic element, which is the inclusion of alien notions calculated to act as a stimulant to-especially in synthesis with-traditional features of the culture.
 * 3) Messianic motif appears in the form of trust that a "a divine savior in human flesh" has been or will be a crucial agent in effecting personal and cultural transformation.

The Ramakrishna Order, together with its Maths and Missions, constitutes a phenomenon properly described as a revivalistic, vitalistic, messianic, revitalization movement.

The Apostle
Ramakrishna provided the requisite impulse or inspiration for a new movement. He had neither the interest not the skill to plan or organize a movement for spreading God-realization. The one destined to play Paul to Ramakrishna as a Hindu Christ was Narendranath Dutta.

Later Ramakrishna said that at their first meeting he saw Vivekananda as "the ancient sage, Nara-the incarnation of Narayana-born on earth to remove the misery of mankind". Also he professed that he had a vision in samadhi, before ever meeting Narendra, where he saw Nara, the sage, in the transcendental realm and knew that he would descend to earth. "No sooner had I seen Narendra", he said, " 'that I recongnized him to be that sage.' ".

Vivekananda said, Metaphysics could not be taught to the masses whose stomachs were so uniformly empty. The only way to go about the task of spreading religion was to precede the teaching of it with practical programs for social improvement. Unlike Ramakrishna, whose fear of defilement by money had become legendary, Vivekananda was eminently practical. He knew that a social program would cost money, and he decided that while his compatriots might have the means and the heart to give for relief, they had neither in an amount sufficient to effect significant social change. That, he concluded, would have to come from the West.

His remarks at the Parliament of Religions were well received and publicized. He stayed on in United States where, except for brief periods in London and on the Continent, he traveled widely, lecturing and writing, founding the original Vedanta Society in New York, and raising money among well-to-do American disciples to underwrite the cost of providing a new Math as headquarters for the Order, not returning to India until early in 1897. News of his popularity in the West preceded him and while its extend was its extent was undoubtedly greatly exaggerated in the minds of his Indian friends, it had its effect in preparing them to give their conqueror of the West and enthusiastic welcome upon his arrival.

Vivekananda had made his presence felt with his brother monks, even from a distance, by a steady stream of letters explaining and justifying the program of action he expected to launch from the new Math. He had even formulated a set of rules for the Order, presupposing a movement of the size and scope it possesses today but which them seemed utterly visionary. While other brothers wished nothing more than to emulate Ramakrishna's mission of a purely religious or spiritual life, Swami Akhandananda had responded to Vivekananda's letters and undertaken practical work related to education for the poor in a community of western India for a brief period in 1895. The others remained conventional except for agreeing in 1897 to found the Ramakrishna Mission as an organization coordinate with the Math.

Money raised in America secured property in Belur for new and permanent central headquarters for both Maht and Mission. Leadership was contributed for the task of halting an epidemic of plague in Calcutta. A new ashram was begun at Mayavati in the Himalayas as a retreat for the practice or pure Advaita Vedanta, and as the publication office for the oldest journal of the Order, Prabuddha Bharata (Awakened India). The central Math also launched a local Bengali journal, Udbodhan (Awakening). After setting the soundations, Vivekananda made a second visit to the west to found new centers on both American coasts and to lecture and travel in Europe. After his return new centers were established in northern cities.

The place Vivekananda gave Ramakrishna in this scheme provided the notion of the divine deliverer so that the messianism was combined with revivalism in the revitalization movement he envisaged.

The Alien, Vitalistic Ingredient
Arriving in the United States from India in July, 1893, he was commenting, in letters home, upon India's lack of organizational statergy for pursuing its spiritual ideals. "As regards spirituality, the Americans are far inferior to us," he wrote, "We will teach them our spirituality, and assimilate what is best in their society.". Referring to Westerners as "these children of liberty, self-help, and brotherly love," he declared, "The secret of [their] success ... is the power of organisation and combination." It is reported that this observation of Vivekananda played an important role in the formation of the mission. He further formulated and sent a detailed list of suggested rules for the management of the Math--which still had practically no organizational structure. Containing advice about minor matters of personal monastic lifestyle as well as major questions of corporate government, doctrine and programmatic activities, the list shows how well the observant Vivekananda had learned his lesson sin Western pragmatism. He urged that Brahmananda should be elected the first President.

Vivekananda has also dictated a second more detailed set of rules for the Math, to match those of teh Mission in their specificity. But the fact that both Math and Mission had the same president and one common site as headquarters made it virtually impossible for anyone to remember that Math and Mission were, on paper, two different agencies. This, then was somewhat less than tidy structure of the movement that obtained during Vivekananda's second trip to the West.

After his return, Vivekananda made Brahmananda the "virtual executive head of the Order" and turned his attention to defining more clearly the Order's ends, means, and dual organizational structure which all this monastic brothers endorsed and supported. Later a Trust Deed was executed providing for both the creation of a Board of Trustees and the transfer to this Board of the property and his previous authority over it. Then, vacating the presidency, he left to the eleven new Trustees the election of this successor, and Brahmananda was chosen on February 12, 1902, and Vivekananda who was showing strains of constant labor expired eighteen months later.

If to Vivekananda was given the vision of what to create and how to create it, to Brahmananda had been given the quiet reasonableness and sturdy character which would compel respect for this judgment and authority. By 1937, the structure essentially obtaineing today had been devised, and only minor revisions and amendments have since been needed. The training of monastic recruits was made more rigorous and systematic. The central authorities were given power to monitor the training standards and performances of the local maths. Eight years of training were made mandatory for the eventual Sannyasin, with two of the first four to be spent at Belur.

The work: medical service, education, work for women, rural uplift and work among the labouring and backward classes, relief, foregin work, spiritual and cultural activities. The centers also observe annual birthdays of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Sarada Devi and other monastic disciples. Also, the annual pujas for Hindu gods and goddesses are held according to whatever fashion is traditional in any given region of the country, and the celebration of Christmas is common. 

The Ramakrishna Math and Mission : A Case Study of a Revitalization Movement. By, Cyrus R. Pangborn.

Activities
The Ramakrishna Mission has its own hospitals, charitable dispensaries, maternity clinics, tuberculosis clinics, and mobile dispensaries. It also maintains training centers for nurses. Orphanages and homes for the elderly are included in the Mission's field of activities, along with rural and tribal welfare work.

In educational activities, the Ramakrishna Mission has established some the renowned educational institutions in India, having its own colleges, vocational training centers, high schools and primary schools, teacher's training institutes, as well as schools for the visually handicapped.

The Ramakrishna Mission has also involved in disaster relief operations during famine, epidemic, fire, flood, earthquake, cyclone and communal disturbances.

Sarada Math and Ramakrishna Sarada Mission
At the time of the founding of the Ramakrishna Order in India, Swami Vivekananda had the idea of starting a similar order of women who would dedicated themselves to the ideals of spirituality and service. A half century after Swami Vivekananda's death, his dream became a reality when in 1954, Sarada Math, India's monastic order for women, was founded. Like the Ramakrishna Order, Sarada Math emphasizes both spiritual development and social welfare programs. Sarala Devi became the first President of the Sri Sarada Math with the name Pravrajika Bharatiprana.

Misc
Y.M.C.A leader K.T.Paul see Ramakrishna Movement the most living as well as the most characteristic expression of Indian nationalism. Truly centred on the Brahma Sutras, faithful also to the interpretation of Sankara, the Ramakrishna Order has still taken a clear step forward, by reading into Karma Yoga selfless service in the most human sense of the term."

The Ramakrishna Math and Mission has been called the "greatest spiritual force in modern India." By rejuvenating India, stimulating nationalism, and engaging in social service, Vivekananda and the Ramakrishna Mission have contributed to the formation of the secular state.

Activities

 * with UNESCO, rural development

Vedanta Society
formation of vedanta society