Ramakrishna Order (Ramakrishna Math and Mission)

The Ramakrishna Order is a modern Hindu monastic and philanthropic movement, and its distinctive teaching is that service of human beings is itself a form of the worship of God.

Vivekananda and his teacher

The order was founded by Swami Vivekananda as a memorial to his teacher, the Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna, and organised in the 1890s into two linked bodies, the Ramakrishna Math, a monastic order, and the Ramakrishna Mission, its philanthropic arm. Vivekananda drew from the vision of Ramakrishna, who taught the harmony of religions and the presence of the divine in all beings, a practical conclusion: that the monk should serve the poor, the sick and the ignorant as living images of God, so that social service and contemplation are united rather than opposed. This principle, service to man as service to God, is the charism of the order.

A modern Hindu institution

The order established its headquarters at Belur Math near Kolkata and grew into a widely respected institution running hospitals, schools, colleges and relief work across India, together with centres for the study and practice of Vedanta abroad, the Vedanta Societies that Vivekananda founded in the West being among the earliest organised expressions of Hinduism outside India. The Ramakrishna Order thus represents a reformed and outward-looking Hinduism, monastic in its core but committed to education and welfare, and it has been one of the principal agents in presenting Hindu thought to the modern and the Western world.

Vivekananda organised the monastic vows his fellow disciples had already taken in memory of Ramakrishna into a formal order only after an event that had nothing directly to do with founding an institution: his address to the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 brought him, and by extension his teacher's memory, sudden international recognition, and the following his teaching gained in the West fed directly back into the shape the Ramakrishna Math and Mission took once he returned to India. Rather than build a purely contemplative monastic body on the older Hindu model, Vivekananda deliberately paired the Math, the renunciate monastic order, with the Mission, a philanthropic wing running hospitals, schools and disaster relief, a combination of renunciation and organised social service that had few real precedents in earlier Hindu monasticism and that Vivekananda himself connected, in his own writing, to charitable and missionary structures he had observed operating effectively in the West. That dual structure, monks living under vows while the same order runs hospitals and famine relief, remains the order's most distinctive institutional feature and the clearest mark of Vivekananda's own international experience on a foundation built to honour a teacher who never left Bengal.