THE MASTER'S YEARNING FOR HIS OWN DEVOTEES
Contact with the Brahmos increased Sri Ramakrishna's longing to encounter
aspirants who would be able to follow his teachings in their purest
form. "There was no limit", he once declared, "to the longing I felt at that
time. During the day-time I somehow managed to control it. The secular
talk of the worldly-minded was galling to me, and I would look wistfully
to the day when my own beloved companions would come. I hoped to find
solace in conversing with them and relating to them my own realizations.
Every little incident would remind me of them, and thoughts of them
wholly engrossed me. I was already arranging in my mind what I should say
to one and give to another, and so on. But when the day would come to a
close I would not be able to curb my feelings. The thought that another
day had gone by, and they had not come, oppressed me. When, during the
evening service, the temples rang with the sound of bells and conch-shells,
I would climb to the roof of the kuthi in the garden and, writhing in anguish
of heart, cry at the top of my voice: 'Come, my children! Oh, where are
you? I cannot bear to live without you.' A mother never longed so intensely
for the sight of her child, nor a friend for his companions, nor a lover for
his sweetheart, as I longed for them. Oh, it was indescribable! Shortly after
this period of yearning the
devotees1
began to come."
In the year 1879 occasional writings about Sri Ramakrishna by the Brahmos,
in the Brahmo magazines, began to attract his future disciples from
the educated middle-class Bengalis, and they continued to come till 1884.
But others, too, came, feeling the subtle power of his attraction. They were
an ever shifting crowd of people of all castes and creeds: Hindus and
Brahmos, Vaishnavas and Saktas, the educated with university degrees and
the illiterate, old and young, maharajas and beggars, journalists and artists,
pundits and devotees, philosophers and the worldly-minded, jnanis and yogis,
men of action and men of faith, virtuous women and prostitutes, office-holders
and vagabonds, philanthropists and self-seekers, dramatists and
drunkards, builders-up and pullers-down. He gave to them all, without stint,
from his illimitable store of realization. No one went away empty-handed.
He taught them the lofty .knowledge of the Vedanta and the soul-melting
love of the Purana. Twenty hours out of twenty-four he would speak without
out rest or respite. He gave to all his sympathy and enlightenment, and he
touched them with that strange power of the soul which could not but melt
even the most hardened. And people understood him according to their
powers of comprehension.