Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna [Hardcover]

Jeffrey J. Kripal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 1995

The nineteenth-century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna played a major role in the development of Hinduism and is regarded as a modern saint. Yet he remains an enigma to followers unable to reconcile his saintly status with his eroticized language and actions.

In this work, Jeffrey J. Kripal attempts to untangle the paradox. He demonstrates that Ramakrishna's famous mystical experiences were driven by erotic energies that he neither fully accepted nor understood; the key to understanding this extraordinary figure, Kripal argues, lies in Tantra and its ritual, symbolic, and doctrinal equation of the mystical and the erotic.

Moving through Ramakrishna's world both chronologically and conceptually, Kali's Child employs two complementary interpretive strategies, a nuanced phenomenological reinterpretation of original Bengali texts and a nonreductive psychoanalytic reading of Ramakrishna's mystical eroticism. Kripal shows how the heterosexual structure of Tantric symbolism, the abusive way its rituals were often forced upon the saint, and Ramakrishna's own homosexual desires all came together to produce in him profound feelings of shame, disgust, and fear. Kripal establishes that the homosexuality of this great, if unwilling, Tantric mystic is linked inextricably to virtually every aspect of his life and teachings.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 408 pages
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press (October 16, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226453758
• ISBN-13: 978-0226453750
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,269,239 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Biased Thesis , Flawed Scholarship, May 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Paperback)

Jeffrey Kripal, starts with the intention of showing Ramakrsihna to be a homsexual. Several of his arguments are flawed because of his lacking of Bengali and because of his over eagerness to bring down the spirituality of Ramakrishna to suppressed sexuality.

1. The supposed difference between Tantra and Vedanta is fictitious and exists only in the western author's minds and not in practicing Hinduism. Millions of South Indian followers of the Vedantic Shankara use Tantric pujas and practice Sri Vidya Upasana a Tantric ritual. In the monasteries associated with the Advaiatic Sankara Tantric pujas are very common. The author should investigate the Smarta sect of Brahmins to discover this. They have often been clubbed with Saivas but this is not true.

2. The strong association between Tantra and sexuality is false. Western authors have a prurient interest in degrading indigenous religious practices to sexual orgies. Yes, Sex is seen as one of the ways to seek divine bliss, but only in one of the tantric sects the left hand path. Tantra in South India and Kashmir is Kaula and part of the righ hand path. Not that there is anything wrong with Sex but Tantra does not necessarily involve sexual connotations.

3. It is a tradition in Hinduism and some other mystical religions for the spiritual seeker whether male or female to approach God as the only maleand himself as female. Several saints including Maniccka Vachagar, Ramalinga Adigal, Arunagirinathar have sung hymns in Nayaki Bhava where they implore the lord to marry them. This does not mean all of these men are homo sexuals. The reason they use this Bhava is the medeival and (biological reality) , female as the receptive and relatively passive element in the Universe. The devotee remains passive and receptive to god.

The problem of such biased scholarship is the suspicion that it creates about genuine scholars and seekers from the west as to their intentions. Several European intellectuals made it a practice to denigrate India and what she represents during colonical rule to seek justification and reassurance of European imeprialism. The Ramakrsihna Math is a neo-Hindu institution and one of the earliest reinterpreters of Hinduism in the face of modernity and on which much of the pride of the modern Hindu rests. Striking at it root , though masked as scholarship and apparent concern for truth, is easily recognizable by any intelligent observer as something less inoccuous.

32 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Kripal Gathers Too Much From Too Little, January 22, 2000

By 

Allan Carpenter (Erie, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Paperback)

While I am a Ramakrishna admirer, I admit I was intrigued by the book at first. Expecting long-supressed secrets about RK, what I got was a very few obscure statements and stories turned into an elaborate Freudian analysis of Tantra. This, along with a meandering hypothesis about what was in RK's subconscious. It's just too shaky, and Kripal is too eager to sniff out a conspiracy. For example, in the book's second edition, Kripal admits that Ram Chandra Datta's book--which he claimed was supressed by the RK establishment--was, to his surprise, published by the Ramakrishna Mission the same summer as the first edition of "Kali's Child"! In the end, Kripal does not convince, and RK remains a mystery.

40 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A white cloth looks green through green eyeglasses, September 14, 2002

By 

CourageToQuestion - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Paperback)

The author uses (misuses) freudian psychoanalysis, which reduces all emotions to sexuality, to formulate his opinions. This is highly reductionist (to say the least). The other problem is that a superficial look at something as complex as culture can yield absurd conclusions. For example, using (misusing) freudian principles, one can say the following thing about chistianity.

Jesus was a filthy, unclean man dressed in rags. He learned some magic tricks from the visiting Persian merchants. The Romans often invited him to perform at their parties, and in exchange, they offered him wine. So he routinely got drunk, tried to be "a notorious womanizer," and was a hobo all his life. Since Jesus' mother was a prostitute, fearing social retribution, she did not want to announce the true identity of his father, and had to make up a fantastic story for the illiterate nomads. Therefore, Mary claimed that Jesus was born without physical intercourse. So all his life, Jesus guarded the myth of his mother's virginity and hid the immoral activities of his father and other customers who visited his mother for sex. When Jesus become politically strong, the Roman commanders got rid of him and played a joke upon Jesus by crucifying him using the cross, symbolizing that the cross was the phallus and dildo which his mother must have used for her sexual gratification when customers weren't available. Thus, his followers today carry a cross as the phallic symbol of his immaculate conception. Jesus was a hopeless drunkard, to escape public scorn for his vice, he started a bizzare and revolting cannibalistic ritual of symbolically sharing wine and said that it was his blood. This revolting ritual is followed even today by mindless christians. It is safe to say that the obsession of the west with sex and alchoholism is a direct result of such prurient beliefs and immorality which pass as religious ritual. No wonder christia countries suffer from teen pregnancies, and drug and alchohol abuse.

How would the above be considered if it were written by a non-Christian academic scholar from a non-chistian culture? Who claims he has "found the true meaning of the christian beliefs?"

The problem with people analysing a culture without being part of it is that only the superficial is visible. And even that is perceived through a conditioning process that is outside the culture. A person not aware of christianity is likely to wonder how come these christians worship a bag of bones nailed to a piece of wood and call it divine? Perhaps their obsession with world domination is linked to their innate sense of shame at the inability of this emaciated, begraggled, bag of bones to face up to his tormentors. Maybe the whole of the west needs to be psychoanlyzed. Perhaps this explains how ruthlessly they treated the trusting and friendly american indians. The christians tranfered their own crisis of self-identity on to the Indians and massacred them.

A christian at a church is not thinking, look how indecent Jesus is, he hardly has any clothes on. Look I can count 4 no 8 bones in his ribs. Gosh! he must stink what with all the blood and sweat. Not to mention the fact that he probably didn't have a bath for days. The fact that christians worship this person surely means that they have no sense of shame, who knows perhaps they are all perverts who wouldn't think twice about torturing and killing people. After all, their senses are dulled by the appalling suffering of the figure they call god.

Do you see how absurd it sounds? This, then is the problem with reductionist thinking. You see everything colored by what preconceptions you have...