Born: 18 February 1836, Kamarpukur
Died: 16 August 1886, Cossipore, Kolkata
Spouse: Sarada Devi (m. 1859–1886)
Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyaya, was an Indian Hindu mystic, saint, and religious leader in 19th century Bengal
Ramakrishna experienced spiritual ecstasies from a young age, and was influenced by several religious traditions, including devotion toward the Goddess Kali, Tantra, Bhakti and Advaita Vedanta.

As a priest at the Dakshineshwar Kali Temple, his mystical temperament and ecstasies gradually gained him widespread acknowledgement, attracting to him various spiritual teachers, social leaders, and lay followers; he eventually taught disciples, who would later form the monastic Ramakrishna Order. He was generally revered by Bengali elites and within religious circles, which led to his chief disciple Swami Vivekananda founding the Ramakrishna Math, which provides spiritual training for monastics and householder devotees and the Ramakrishna Mission to provide charity, social work and education.
Sri Ramakrishna was born in the village of Kamarpukur, in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, India, into a very poor, pious, and orthodox Brahmin family. Although Ramakrishna attended a village school with some regularity for 12 years, he later rejected the traditional schooling saying that he was not interested in a “bread-winning education”. Kamarpukur, being a transit-point in well-established pilgrimage routes to Puri, brought him into contact with renunciates and holy men. He became well-versed in the Puranas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavata Purana, hearing them from wandering monks and the Kathaks—a class of men in ancient India who preached and sang the Purāṇas. Ramakrishna describes his first spiritual ecstasy at the age of six: while walking along the paddy fields, a flock of white cranes flying against a backdrop of dark thunder clouds caught his vision. The trances became common, and by the final years of his life, Ramakrishna’s samādhi periods occurred almost daily. Ramakrishna moved to Kolkata in 1852 with Ramkumar to assist in the priestly work. In 1855 Ramakrishna was appointed as the priest of Dakshineswar Kali Temple, built by Rani Rashmoni—a wealthy female zamindar of Kolkata, Ramakrishna, along with his nephew Hriday, became assistants to Ramkumar, with Ramakrishna given the task of decorating the deity. When Ramkumar ,Ramakrishna became priest himself. He began to look upon the image of the goddess Kali as his mother and the mother of the universe, and became desperate for a vision of her. After many days of meditation, wherein he failed to receive a vision, he reportedly came to a point of such anguish that he impulsively decided to end his life. Seeing a sword hanging in a nearby room in the temple, he ran for it and was just about to reach it when he suddenly had a vision of the goddess Kali as the Universal Mother.