The claim that made Ramakrishna a figure of more than local significance is that he did not stay inside one tradition. The accounts describe him taking up in turn Vaishnava devotion in several of its classical moods, tantric practice, Advaita, and then, deliberately, disciplines outside Hinduism altogether: a period of Islamic practice under a Sufi, and a period following Christ after hearing the Bible read. In each case, on his own report, the same goal was reached. His formulation of the conclusion, that there are as many paths as there are faiths, became one of the most quoted sentences in modern Indian religion.
Everything known about him comes through others, and the sources are unusually good for a nineteenth century holy man. Mahendranath Gupta, a schoolteacher, kept a detailed diary of his conversations over several years and published it as the Kathamrita, which records ordinary sessions with dates and names and includes material a hagiographer would have removed.
Interpretation of him has been contested from the beginning, and the atlas records that rather than choosing. He has been read as a Bengali devotee of Kali whose universalism was overstated by his English speaking followers, as the Vedantic teacher his order presents, and, in some late twentieth century Western scholarship, through psychoanalytic frames that provoked considerable anger in India. The disagreement is real and is about how to read the same evidence.