Jeffrey J. Kripal

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Jeffrey J. Kripal (Ph. D., University of Chicago, 1993) is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University, Houston, Texas. His areas of interest include the comparative erotics and ethics of mystical literature, American countercultural translations of Asian religions, and the history of Western esotericism from ancient gnosticism to the New Age.^{[citation needed]}

Kripal's 1995 book Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna was a psychoanalytic study of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna. He argues that "Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences...were in actual fact profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic."^[1] The book Kali's Child got mixed reception among scholars, and caused intense controversy among both Western and Indian audiences which still persists unresolved.^[2][3][4] In 2004, Hawley revisited the controversy, and wrote in his study The Damage of Separation, that neither the gopis’ torment nor Ramakrishna's must be allowed to devolve to a bodily level.^[5] Hawley further wrote that communities of people who respond to different sexual orientations should not indiscriminately impose their thoughts on religious communities.^[5] The deductions of the book Kali's Child have been disputed and argued to have been built on mistranslations, distortion of sources, misuse of tantra, misuse of psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics.^[6] A 173 page rebuttal written by Swami Tyagananda titled Kali's Child Revisited: Didn't Anyone Check the Documentation? provides a detailed analysis of the translation errors and calls into question if anyone at the University of Chicago Press who peer-reviewed Kali’s Child prior to publication spoke Bengali or had knowledge of 19th century Bengal culture and checked the translations and assumptions. ^[7]

In 2003, Kripal wrote a foreword to The Knee of Listening, a book by American guru Adi Da. In it he said, referring to Da's writings:

In my opinion, this latter total corpus constitutes the most doctrinally thorough, the most philosophically sophisticated, the most culturally challenging, and the most creatively original literature currently available in the English language.^[8]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, p. 2
2. ^ Urban, Hugh B (Apr., 1998). "Reviewed work(s): Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna by Jeffrey J. Kripal". The Journal of Religion (The University of Chicago Press) 78 (2): pp. 318-320. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1205982. 
3. ^ Roland, Alan (March, 1998). "Ramakrishna: Mystical, Erotic, or Both?". Journal of Religion and Health (Springer Netherlands) 37 (1): pp. 31-36. doi:10.1023/A:1022956932676. http://www.springerlink.com/content/hu55hq066jh60241/?p=9568dbec04cb4ae387947dfe3d2c33a3&pi=1. ""... Kali's Child still swirls around in controversy"". 
4. ^ J. S. Hawley, The Damage of Separation: Krishna’s Loves and Kali’s Child, 2004
5. ^ ^{a b} Hawley, John Stratton (June 2004). "The Damage of Separation: Krishna's Loves and Kali's Child". Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72 (2): pp.369-393. doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfh034. http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/72/2/369. "neither the gopis’ torment nor Ramakrishna's must be allowed to devolve to a bodily level that could be indiscriminately shared—either between religious communities, or between the erstwhile colonizers and their erstwhile colonial victims, or between communities of people who respond to different sexual orientations. Eros is too dangerous.". 
6. ^ Nicolas, Antonio de; Krishnan Ramaswamy, Aditi Banerjee (2007). "Targeting Sri Ramakrishna". Invading the Sacred. Rupa & Co. pp. 27-41. http://invadingthesacred.com/content/view/22/36/. 
7. ^ Tyagananda, Swami. Kali's Child Revisited: Did Anyone Check the Documentation. http://www.gemstone-av.com/KCR3b.pdf. 
8. ^ Foreword by Jeffrey Kripal

[edit] Works

• Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago, 2007) ISBN 9780226453705
• On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture edited with Glenn Shuck (Indiana, 2005) ISBN 9780253345561
• Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West edited with Rachel Fell McDermott (California, 2003) ISBN 9780520232402
• Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of Mysticism edited with G. William Barnard (Seven Bridges, 2002) ISBN 9781889119250
• Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago, 2001) ISBN 9780226453798
• Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism edited with T.G. Vaidyanathan (Oxford, 1999) ISBN 9780195658354
• Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago, 1995, 1998) ISBN 9780226453774
• The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006) ISBN 9780226453811

[edit] External links

• An excerpt from Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.