Ramakrishna Math and Mission was founded by Swami Vivekananda in the year 1897. The inspiration behind this is one whom Swami Vivekananda called as “Avatara Varishta” - Shri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.

At the time Shri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was born, Hindu society in the eighteenth century was passing through a period of decadence. It was the twilight of Mughal rule. The 22 British rule was already founded. In the wake of the British merchants came the English Educators, social reformers and Christian missionaries – all bearing a culture very alien to the Hindu mind. The Hindu young men were offered the heady wine of Western culture of late eighteenth century and they drank it to the very dregs.

While large parts of Hindu life was dominated by superstitious practices and religious dogmas, the first effects of the draught was a complete effacement from the minds of young Hindus of time honored beliefs and traditions. The world perceived of senses was all that existed. God and religion were illusions of untutored mind. So atheism and agnosticism became the fashion of the day.

This does not look very different from India today. Due to the advancement of Information Technology, all nations have come close. Watching the developed nations at such a close quarters, one wonders if the Western style of life is the right one? The Western lifestyle is tuned towards enjoyment while Hindu way of life is tuned towards “renunciation”. Western style is to believe that one is responsible for one’s destiny, whereas common people in India believe God makes our destiny. The West is all about being “go getters” while Hindu way is “there is nothing much in this existence to go after”

Is there any truth in the Hindu way of life, as it looks to common people? Or is the western way the correct one? While the traditional Hindu mind has been taught to “Bear and forbear, the evanescence of the sensory world; a reality beyond this world of sense perception; one wonders if all that is true. Why not just live and enjoy like how western people do? Why should one worry about the world beyond? These are the questions that assail us even today. Knowing that the country would be at such crossroads, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa came down to earth. He lived the life to show to the world, what living was all about, what the aim of human existence was. Out of his immense sympathy he left his illustrious disciple Swami Vivekananda to carry forward his teaching.

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa knew very well that the world needed answers to these questions. He trained his disciple so that his disciple could scatter these precious truths to the world at large – scatter the truth that both East and West ought to learn. “You are seeking such an insignificant thing” Said Sri Ramakrishna to Swami Vivekananda when the latter said that he would like to be immersed in Samadhi for days and come out only for a morsel of food. “There is a state higher than that even. Is it not you who sing, ‘Thou art all that exists?’ I thought you would be like a banyan, sheltering thousands from the scorching misery of the world. But now I see you seek your own liberation.” A few days later, however, Shri Ramakrishna blessed him with the experience of Nirvikalpa Samadhi. When the beloved disciple came back from that state, the Master said: “Now, then the Mother has shown you everything. Just as a treasure is locked in a box, so will this realization be hidden from you and the key shall remain with me. You have work to do. When you have finished it, the treasure will be unlocked again, and you will know everything then just as you do now.” And, thus, the beloved disciple of the Master worked on incessantly for the next 16 years with a zeal that one rarely sees, surmounting mountain high and unthinkable obstacles, not even caring for his own liberation on the way, till his body broke down under the stress of intense work at the relatively young age of 39 years and five months. And a work was set into motion that laid a strong foundation once more for Hinduism to stand on a firm footing this time against the onslaught of narrow-mindedness and sectarianism and bigotry on 23 the one hand and western and modern science on the other hand - and thereby vindicating Sri Krishna’s teaching that the Lord manifests his power again and again to protect the Eternal Religion!

After passing away of the beloved Guru in 1886, swami Vivekananda brought all the young disciples together at Baranagore math. He had experienced “Nirvikalpa Samadhi”. He was clear on what he needed to do . He had scorned a life of riches, name and fame that his brilliant intellect would have brought him. He walked out of his fatherless family for whom he was the eldest son. That was not an easy sacrifice. But he said, “In a larger interest, what if one son is sacrificed or if one family is on streets?” He practiced severe tapas along with his brother disciples in Baranagore math. In 1888, he left the monastery to wander alone as a penniless monk.

Between the closing of 1888, when Narendranath first left on his temporary excursions, and the year 1891, when he parted from his brethren alone and as an unknown beggar, “to be swallowed up in the immensity of India”, there came over him a remarkable change in outlook. When he first left in 1888, it was mainly to fulfill the natural desire of an Indian monk for a life of solitude. But when he left the monastery in 1891, it was to fulfill a great destiny. By then he had realized that his was not to be the life of an ordinary recluse struggling for personal salvation. Many times he had tried it: he had entered the deepest of Himalayan forests to lose himself in the silent meditation of the Absolute. Every time he had failed. Something or other brought him back from the depths of meditation to the midst of the suffering masses, beset with a thousand and one miseries. The sickness of a brother monk, or the death of a devotee, or the poverty at the Baranagore monastery, was enough to disturb him. More than all, the fever of the age, the misery of the time, and the mute appeal issuing from the millions in oppressed and downtrodden India pained his heart. He lived in anguish during that period, in a seething cauldron as it were, and carried within himself a soul on fire whose embers took years to cool down. As he moved from place to place in the north, and later on in the south, studying closely the life of the people in all strata of society, he was deeply moved. He wept to see the stagnant life of the Indian masses crushed down by ignorance and poverty, and the spell of materialistic ideas among the educated who blindly imitated the glamour of the West but who never felt that they were the cause of India’s degeneration and downfall. Spirituality was at a low discount in the very land of its birth. The picture of ancient India, once the envy of the world, came before his eyes vividly in all its grandeur and glory. The contrast was unbearable. Things should not be allowed to drift in this way. He visualized that India must become dynamic in all spheres of human activity and effect the spiritual conquest of the world, and he felt that he was the instrument chosen by the Lord to do it. He had heard about the parliament of religions being held in Chicago from Thakore saheb Jaswant Singhji of Limbdi who was the Prince of the State. The Thakore Saheb was a man or progressive views and had himself been to America and England few years before.