Vivekananda's Hymn on Ramakrishna: Man, God and Om

In a talk given at the Vedanta Society of Southern California, Swami Yogatmananda, who heads the Vedanta Society in Providence, Rhode Island, meditates aloud on the hymn Swami Vivekananda composed in adoration of Sri Ramakrishna, the one chanted every evening in almost all centers of the Ramakrishna Order. His central claim is that Ramakrishna is at once the absolute, unchanging Satchidananda and a human being who was born in a village, fell ill, and talked with people about the ordinary matters of their lives, and that the right way to hold both truths is the way a small girl once did when she was asked whether the master was a man or God: both. From there the talk moves into the purpose of the incarnation, which he says is to break bondage rather than to grant worldly favors, and into Om, the primordial sound that Ramakrishna said holds the essence of every scripture. What follows is a reading of that argument, drawn from the opening portion of the talk, which runs about an hour.

Who Is the Man in the Picture, and Who Is God?

The talk opens with a sung English translation of the hymn, delivered by Atmavikyananda and his group, its lines rising over a drone-like hum of voices. Lines like "words cannot express nor mind conceive of his true nature" and "God of gods expels our fears" set the register: this is praise pitched at the edge of what language can carry. Before the speaker reaches the hymn itself, he sets up the problem it is built to solve.

Swami Yogatmananda describes Vivekananda as the foremost authority on Ramakrishna, a standing he says was certified by Ramakrishna himself, and he distinguishes two ways of speaking about the master. As principle, Ramakrishna is the divine Satchidananda. As a person, he is "a person like you and I," born and raised in a village, subject to disease, and always full of a special divine awareness even while talking about everyday things. The difficulty is that the two descriptions seem to contradict each other, and the speaker says that confusion is not confined to children.

He recounts the moment that resolved it for him. About twenty years earlier, a grandmother brought her granddaughter to the chapel, which was then much smaller and furnished with wooden chairs. The girl pointed to the picture of Ramakrishna and asked, "Is he a man or is he God?" The speaker's reply was to point at one of the chairs and ask whether it was a chair or wood. The girl answered, "Yes, understood both." (Swami Yogatmananda, in the talk, around 10:20.) The analogy is simple and exact. A chair is wood in the shape and function of a chair, and it loses none of its woodness by appearing as a chair. "Sri Ramakrishna without losing any of the divinity appears as human being," he says. That, for the speaker, is how Vivekananda looks at him.

Why Does the Hymn Say Ramakrishna Came to Break Bondage?

The arati song that Vivekananda wrote for the evening service opens by stating the purpose of the incarnation: the master appears as a man to break the bondage of samsara, the changing world in which we are caught. The speaker treats this as the interpretive key to everything that follows, and he draws a sharp line between liberation and the wish for worldly results. Praying to Ramakrishna for a particular outcome, he argues, does not release anyone from samsara. It makes the bondage stronger.

To make the point concrete, he tells a story his predecessor, Swami Sarvagatananda, once related. A woman asked that prayers be offered to Ramakrishna so that she would pass her driving test. Sarvagatananda's reply, as Swami Yogatmananda repeats it, was that Ramakrishna never had a driving license, so there was no point in praying to him for that purpose. The laughter in the room is audible in the recording, and the joke carries a serious claim. The master's gift is not the fulfillment of wishes but what the speaker calls the breaking of "the bondage of our worldliness." The Sanskrit phrase in the hymn, khandana bhava bandhana, names exactly that work.

For a listener, the practical implication is an inversion of the usual devotional transaction. Devotion is not a request form. It is a way of loosening attachment to the very things we ask for.

Why Is Om the Key to the Hymn?

The hymn begins with Om, and the speaker spends a long stretch on it. Om is "the primordial sound," and he relays Ramakrishna's teaching that all the Vedas are condensed in the Gayatri mantra and the Gayatri is condensed in Om, so that the whole essence of scripture is contained in that single syllable. "So whole universe is actually in Om," he says. He asks the listeners to try to feel it: everything is a manifestation of Om, and everything returns to that sound. He also cites Swami Atishwarananda, who, in the speaker's paraphrase, calls the same idea what the Western world knows as the music of the spheres.

What makes this more than a poetic gesture is the speaker's account of how sounds carry meaning. Om, he says, indicates Brahman: the absolute, unchanging, ever-present, ever-blissful principle. The syllable is a designation, and the speaker wants his audience to see that designations work the same way in ordinary life.

How Do Names Work as Designations?

Here the talk becomes practical. A name is a symbol that points to something larger than its sound. When we say a person's name, the name stands for them, and the speaker uses a disciple's name to show how much a single word can carry. Hear the name and a whole life comes with it. The point, applied to Om, is that the syllable is not a label for a remote deity but a handle on the reality it designates. If one understands what the word points to, one understands a great deal, and the sound becomes an entry into the principle rather than a decorative chant.

This connects to the speaker's wider concern with how the hymn is supposed to work on the person who sings it. Meditation on the hymn is not a matter of reciting something beautiful. It is supposed to change the one who recites, and the designation of the sound is the means.

Why Does Desire Keep Scorching Us?

Around the forty-fourth minute, the talk turns to desire, and the transcript here is fragmentary. The speaker asks how something can remove lust, then works toward the answer that unchecked desire keeps burning. The fire image recurs as a warning rather than a metaphor: what is fed does not go out. Because the surviving transcript breaks off in this section, the fuller argument is best heard in the talk itself, where the speaker can develop the connection between the hymn's call to liberation and the hold that appetite has on us.

How Is the Hymn Built?

Toward the end of the material available, around the fifty-sixth minute, Swami Yogatmananda turns to the hymn's literary features, noting that its construction is part of what makes it work. He also returns to the matter of meditation on the evening hymn to Ramakrishna, which he frames as the practice the whole talk has been preparing. The transcript is cut off in these passages, so the specific verse-by-verse design is not recoverable here.

What the available portion does establish is a method. The speaker begins with the sung text, insists that the master is both man and God, reads the arati's statement of purpose as the hymn's core, and then uses a sacred syllable to show how the whole can be contained in a part. The talk is less a commentary on words than an instruction in how to hear them.

Where to go from here

The most direct next step is the full talk, which runs one hour and five minutes and includes the hymn's sung text, the speaker's discussion of Om, and the material on desire and literary structure that this article could only touch on. Swami Yogatmananda mentions that the lives and sayings of Ramakrishna are recorded in Sarat Chandra Chakravarty's book about him, which the speaker cites as the source for much of what Vivekananda said about his teacher in conversation and letters. For the arati song that closes the evening service, which the speaker says was also composed by Vivekananda and which states the purpose of the incarnation, listen for the opening lines in the talk itself. And for the chair, the girl, and her answer, the best way to test the idea is the one the speaker suggests: look at something ordinary, ask whether it is one thing or the other, and notice that it can be both.