Belur Math — Ramakrishna Mission HQ

Belur Math

The Math on the Hooghly, and what its founder is doing there

Belur Math, on the west bank of the Hooghly in Howrah district, West Bengal, is the headquarters of the Ramakrishna Order and the shrine of Śrī Rāmakrṣṇa. The central temple, built in the 1930s and consecrated in 1938, holds a portion of Rāmakrṣṇa's relics and a relic of his hands, and the adjacent shrine of Śrī Śaradā Devī holds the Holy Mother's; the Darśan of both is the daily life of the Math. The site was chosen and the Darśan inaugurated in 1904, and the Math grew out of a movement that began not in a temple but at a Dakshineswar bāṭo temple on the Hooghly in 1881, where a Bengali priest, Rāmakrṣṇa Chattopādhyāy (1836–1886), was devoted to a handful of gods — Rāmakrṣṇa, Bhavānī, Kālī, Sarasvatī, Śiva, Gāṇeśa — and was a devotee, not a founder, of a new religion. The distinction matters, and the Math's own documents are careful about it: he claimed no revelation and no new teaching, and the Order is a sampradāya built on his memory and his followers.

The second founder is Swāmī Vivekānanda (Narendranātha Datta, 1863–1902), who met Rāmakrṣṇa at Dakshineswar in 1881, and whose 1893 appearance at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago made him the Order's first international face. The Order was constituted at Belur in 1897 on the anniversary of Rāmakrṣṇa's death (Shraddhanjali Tirtha), and its two streams — the monastic math and the lay śramaṇa lay service — were established then. The 1896 cyclone relief campaign in Odisha is the concrete case the Order points to for its social ethic, and the phrase attributed to Vivekānanda, "Daridra Narāyaṇa" — God as the poor man — is the summary the Order uses of itself. The Math's regular observances are the Sunday bhajana, the Darśan, and the utsav cycle of Rāmakrṣṇa's birthdays, the tālā (Spring Festival), and the Sarada-jayanti.

Two cautions for a reader. The Order's institutional figures — number of monasteries, branches and members worldwide — are the Order's own published numbers and change year to year; they should be cited from the Order's publications and dated. And the Math is a shrine in the Hindu sense as well as a missionary order: the ritual is temple ritual, and an entry that presents it only as a "monastery" loses half of what it is.

Sources and what is still unverified

• The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by M — a direct contemporary record of Rāmakrṣṇa's sayings, and the primary source; cited at work level.
• Rāmakrṣṇa: The Great Master by Svāmī Saradānanda; and the Ramakrishna Order's own publications on the Math's history.
• Howrah District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series) — for the site.
• Unverified: the frontmatter's "150+ countries" figure, the temple's construction dates as given, and any festival date not in the Order's own calendar.