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

~ Jeffrey J. Kripal (Author) "RAMAKRISHNA PARAMAHAMSA was a nineteenth-century Bengali mystic who experienced hundreds of ecstatic states and visions, experimented with different religious traditions, including something he called "the..." (more)
Key Phrases: guhya kathá, reversed sexual intercourse, nava states, Ramakrishna's Tantric, Tota Puri, Sri Ramakrishna (more...)

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Product Description

In a book now marked by both critical acclaim and cross-cultural controversy, Jeffrey J. Kripal explores the life and teachings of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a nineteenth-century Bengali saint who played a major role in the creation of modern Hinduism. Through extended textual and symbolic analyses of Ramakrishna's censored "secret talk," Kripal demonstrates that the saint's famous ecstatic and visionary experiences were driven by mystico-erotic energies that he neither fully accepted nor understood. The result is a striking new vision of Ramakrishna as a conflicted, homoerotic Tantric mystic that is as complex as it is clear and as sympathetic to the historical Ramakrishna as it is critical of his traditional portraits.

In a substantial new preface to this second edition, Kripal answers his critics, addresses the controversy the book has generated in India, and traces the genealogy of his work in the history of psychoanalytic discourse on mysticism, Hinduism, and Ramakrishna himself. Kali's Child has already proven to be provocative, groundbreaking, and immensely enjoyable.

"Only a few books make such a major contribution to their field that from the moment of publication things are never quite the same again. Kali's Child is such a book."--John Stratton Hawley, History of Religions

Winner of the American Academy of Religion's History of Religions Prize for the Best First Book of 1995

Product Details

• Paperback: 420 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226453774
• ISBN-13: 978-0226453774
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #249,934 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

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.

25 of 31 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)

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.

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A huge piece of junk, April 13, 2002

By A Customer

One need not waste his time collecting junks. May read something useful...Should one dare to translate a foreign-language book when he can't speak/write/understand a paragraph without the help of a dictionary? It seems, that's not a problem for Mr. Kripal at all! Without knowing Bengali, the author tries to prepare his "thesis" with the help of several books written in Bengali. Outcome is: massive intentional and stupid mis-translations leading to a utterly crazy (NOT scholarly) hypothesis.

My comment:
If Mr. Kripal's translation from his references are correct, then the other frightening possibility is (I happened to carefully read those original Bengali books.):
I must have absolutely forgotten my mother tongue (Bengali), which I hoped to use until I die!