Consider the following statements: Ramakrishna Paramahansa emphasised ...
Ramakrishna Parmahamsa (1834–86) was a saintly person who sought religious salvation in the traditional ways of renunciation, meditation and devotion (Bhakti). In his search for religious truth or the realization of God, he lived with mystics of other faiths, Muslims and Christians. He again and again emphasised that there were many roads to God and salvation, and that the service of man was the service of God, for man was the embodiment of God. It was his great disciple, Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), who popularized his religious message and who tried to put it in a form that would suit the needs of the contemporary Indian society.
Above all, Vivekananda stressed social action. Knowledge, unaccompanied by action in the actual world in which we live, was useless‘, he said. He too, like his Guru, proclaimed the essential oneness of all religions and condemned any narrowness in religious matters. Thus, he wrote in 1898 : For our own motherland a junction of the two great systems, Hinduism and Islam is the only hope‖. At the same time, he was convinced of the superior approach of the Indian philosophical tradition. He himself subscribed to Vedanta, which he declared to be a fully rational system. Vivekananda criticized the Indians for having lost touch with the rest of the world, and become stagnant and mummified.
He wrote, Motion is the sign of life.‘ He condemned the caste system and the current Hindu emphasis on rituals and superstitions, and urged the people to imbibe the spirit of liberty, equality and free-thinking. He was shocked by the poverty, misery and suffering of the common people of the country.
In 1897, Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission to carry on humanitarian relief and social work. The Mission had many branches in different parts of the country and carried on social service by opening schools, hospitals and dispensaries, orphanages, libraries, etc. It, thus, laid emphasis not on personal salvation, but on social good or social service.