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In his influential[1] 1896 essay "A real mahatma: Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa Dev" and his 1899 book Râmakrishna: His Life and Sayings, the German philologist and Orientalist Max Müller portrayed Ramakrishna as "a wonderful mixture of God and man" and as "...a Bhakta, a worshipper or lover of the deity, much more than a Gñânin or a knower."[2][3]

In London and New York in 1896, Swami Vivekanana delivered his famous address on Ramakrishna entitled "My Master." Vivekananda criticized his followers for projecting Ramakrishna as an avatara and miracle-worker.[4][5]

In a letter to Sigmund Freud which would affect Freud's thinking on religion,[6] Romain Rolland described the mystical states achieved by Ramakrishna and other mystics as an "'oceanic' sentiment," one which Rolland had also experienced.[7] Rolland believed that the universal human religious emotion resembled this "oceanic sense."[8] In his 1929 book La vie de Ramakrishna, Rolland distinguished between the feelings of unity and eternity which Ramakrishna experienced in his mystical states and Ramakrishna's interpretation of those feelings as the goddess Kali.[9]

In the 1950s, Indologist Heinrich Zimmer was the first Western scholar to interpret Ramakrishna's worship of the Divine Mother as containing specifically Tantric elements.[10]

Christopher Isherwood's 1965 Ramakrishna and his Disciples introduced Ramakrishna to a Western audience from the perspective of a devotee.[11] In a late interview, Isherwood said of Ramakrishna: "He was completely without any hang-ups, talking about sex-roles, because his thoughts completely transcended physical love-making. He even saw the mating of two dogs on the street as an expression of the eternal male-female principle in the universe."[12][13]

In his 1991 book The Analyst and the Mystic, Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar saw in Ramakrishna's visions a spontaneous capacity for creative experiencing.[14] Kakar also argued that culturally relative concepts of eroticism and gender have contributed to the Western difficulty in comprehending Ramakrishna.[15] Kakar saw Ramakrishna's seemingly bizarre acts as part of a bhakti path to God.[14]

Jeffrey Kripal's controversial Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (1995) argued that Ramakrishna rejected Advaita Vedanta in favor of Shakti Tantra.[16] In this psychoanalytic study of Ramakrishna's life, Kripal portrayed Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences as symptoms of repressed homoeroticism.[17] Some scholars agreed — John Stratton Hawley wrote that Kripal had established that Ramakrishna associated his strong attractions for young men with his mystical experience of Kali.[18] Other scholars, including Huston Smith and Gerald James Larson, disagreed. Larson wrote that Kripal had failed to show a causal relationship between the erotic symbolism and Ramakrishna's religious experiences.[19]

In 1999, postcolonial historian Sumit Sarkar argued that he found in the Kathamrita traces of a binary opposition between unlearned oral wisdom and learned literate knowledge. He argues that all of our information about Ramakrishna, a rustic near-illiterate Brahmin, comes from urban bhadralok devotees, "...whose texts simultaneously illuminate and transform."[20] In 2007, postcolonial literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote that Ramakrishna was a "Bengali bhakta visionary" and that as a bhakta, he turned chiefly towards Kali.[21]

References

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  1. ^ John Rosselli, "Sri Ramakrishna and the educated elite of late nineteenth century" Contributions to Indian Sociology 1978; 12; 195 [1]
  2. ^ Friedrich Max Müller, Râmakrishna: His Life and Sayings, pp.93-94, Longmans, Green, 1898
  3. ^ Neevel, Transformation of Sri Ramakrishna, p.85
  4. ^ A.P.Sen (2006) "Kathamrita and the Calcutta Middle Classes", p.173
  5. ^ John Wolffe (2004). "The Hindu Renaissance and notions of Universal Religion". Religion in History. Manchester University Press. p. 153.
  6. ^ "Oceanic Feeling" by Henri Vermorel and Madeleline Vermoral in International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis [2]
  7. ^ The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism By William Barclay Parsons, Oxford University Press US, 1999 ISBN 0195115082, p 37
  8. ^ page 12 Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy By Marianna Torgovnick University of Chicago Press, 1998
  9. ^ Parsons 1999, 14
  10. ^ Neeval and Hatcher, "Ramakrishna" in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2005 p 7613
  11. ^ Hatcher 2005, p 7614
  12. ^ "Christopher Isherwood: An Interview" Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Christopher Isherwood Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 22, No. 3, Christopher Isherwood Issue (Oct., 1976), pp. 253-263 Published by: Hofstra University
  13. ^ Conversations with Christopher Isherwood, p.142, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2001
  14. ^ a b Parsons, 1999 p 133
  15. ^ Kakar, Sudhir, The Analyst and the Mystic, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.34
  16. ^ Parsons 1999, 135-136
  17. ^ Parsons, William B., "Psychology" in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2005 p. 7479
  18. ^ John Stratton Hawley, Untitled review of Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna by Jeffrey J. Kripal History of Religions, Vol. 37, No. 4. (May, 1998), pp. 403 The University of Chicago Press http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-2710%28199805%2937%3A4%3C401%3AKCTMAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9
  19. ^ "None of the evidence cited in the book supports a cause-effect relation between the erotic and the mystical (or the religious), much less an identity! That erotic symbolism, including to some extent homoerotic symbolism, is clearly present in some, or even many, of the saint's unusual religious experiences, in no way establishes a causal relation between the two. There is a clear correlation, to be sure, possibly even an "elective affinity" in the Weberian sense, but hardly an established causal relation or any kind of identity!" Gerald James Larson, "Polymorphic Sexuality, Homoeroticism, and the Study of Religion" Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 65, No. 3. (Autumn, 1997), p. 660.
  20. ^ Sumit Sarkar, "Post-modernism and the Writing of History" Studies in History 1999; 15; 293
  21. ^ Spivak (2007), Other Asias, p.197
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