Views on Ramakrishna

In each of these four areas, Maharaj both advances an original interpretive thesis and brings Ramakrishna into a dialogue with comparative philosophy and religious practice.

[14] Francis X Clooney, a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Society of Jesus, writes that Ramakrishna's vision of Christ, "shows Christians like myself a way to respond to the mystery, beauty and holiness of non-Christian religious experiences".

"[21] After three days of practice he had a vision of a "radiant personage with grave countenance and white beard resembling the Prophet and merging with his body".

Tyeb notes that Ramakrishna's sadhana of meditating alone at night in the forest for several days is similar to the 19th century mystic, Sayed Sah Murshid Ali Quaderi.

[23] Tyeb writes that Ramakrishna's prayer to the goddess Kali is similar to that of Rabia, who is described as 'a woman who lost herself in union with the Divine'.

And he carried it out in his life.Speaking briefly about Sri Ramakrishna at the end of his talk - 'The Sages of India',[30] he said There he lived, without any book-learning whatsoever; this great intellect never learnt even to write his own name, but the most graduates of our university found in him an intellectual giant.

Schneiderman argues that Ramakrishna's trances and other dramatic manifestations, including perhaps, even his psychotic behaviour, were not truly aberrations from the standpoint of the non-Sanskritic popular culture.

The first—the transformation of the "madman" of the early years to the benign, saintly figure of the later years—appears to have been brought about more by shifting public opinion than personal spiritual progression.

[35] According to Neevel, the second and third transformations reflect not historically verifiable ideas or events in the life of the saint but myth-making and misrepresentation, often by his most intimate followers and disciples.

Neevel does not place the ascriptions of Ramakrishna as an advaitin or vedantin in the historical context of Indian philosophy, as did Western-educated intelligentsia like Ram Mohan Roy.

Sen further writes that "Vivekananda derived the social service gospel under direct inspiration from Ramakrishna rests very substantially on the liminal quality of the Master's message".

In addition to his mystical experiences, much attention has been paid to his attitudes towards sexuality and the role of sex in his philosophical and religious views.

[43][44] Roland decries the facile decoding of Hindu symbols, such as Kali's sword and Krishna's flute, into Western sexual metaphors—thereby reducing Ramakrishna's spiritual aspiration to the basest psychopathology.

[45] The conflation of Ramakrishna's spiritual ecstasy, or samādhi, with unconscious dissociated states due to repressed homoerotic feelings is not based on common psychoanalytic definitions of these two different motivations, according to Roland.

[46] Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in 1997, took the example of a "dvaita" gaze of a "boy looking up obliquely at the clay and wattle frame of the image of Durga", writing that when we read the photo through Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis it would be wrongly diagnosed as "double anxiety of castration and decapitation."

[48] John Stratton Hawley, Professor of Religion at Barnard College, in his 2004 paper The Damage of Separation: Krishna's Loves and Kali's Child[50] examines the following: In this study, J.S.

Raab argues that,[52] In 1991, Sudhir Kakar wrote "The Analyst and the Mystic" [53] Gerald James Larson wrote, "Indeed, Sudhir Kakar...indicates that there would be little doubt that from a psychoanalytic point of view Ramakrishna could be diagnosed as a secondary transsexual.... For anyone even casually acquainted with Bengali spirituality and cultural life many of the symbolic visions and fantasies of Ramakrishna, which appear bizarre and even pathological when construed only in isolation or individually, become much less so when one relates the visions and fantasies to nineteenth-century Bengal.

[59] Sil's theory has been disputed as reductive by William B. Parsons, who has called for an increased empathetic dialogue between the classical/adaptive/transformative schools and the mystical traditions for an enhanced understanding of Ramakrishna's life and experiences.

Hawley[51] and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak[70] argue that Western psychoanalysis of Southeast Asian subjects is unreliable and Ramakrishna's religious practices were in line with Bengali tradition.

[71] In 1997 Swami Atmajnanananda wrote, "Scandals, cover-ups, and other imagined occurrences in the life of Ramakrishna: An examination of Jeffrey Kripal's Kali's child".

[77][78]In addition, Isherwood wrote in his autobiographical book, My Guru and his Disciple, I couldn't honestly claim him as a homosexual, even a sublimated one, much as I would have liked to be able to do so.

[79]June McDaniel in Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies wrote, ...to understand other cultures instead of getting into conflicts with them, greater empathy and clearer sight are needed.

Interpreting Ramakrishna brings out some of the best of each side; it mixes the idealism and dedication of a meditative path with the critical scholarship and historical analysis of academia.

[80]Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali's Child Revisited is a book authored by Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana, published by Motilal Banarsidass in 2010.

The authors of Interpreting Ramakrishna write that the conclusions arrived at by Kali's Child involve methodological problems including "mistranslation", "speculation" and "misdocumentation and context-tampering".

[84] The authors also discuss the history of Ramakrishna scholarship from 20th century to the present, dealing with scholars like Max Muller, Romain Rolland, Christopher Isherwood, Malcolm McLean, June McDaniel, Carl Oslon, Narasingha Sil, Jeffery Kripal, Sudhir Kakar and other interpreters.

The Tantra sadhana consisted of the "right-handed path" consisting of Kularnava, Mahanirvana and Kamalakala Vilasa involving celibate vegetarian lifestyle,[88] japa, breath control, concentration, meditation[89] and a set of heterodox practices which include but are not limited to the Vamachara—termed as "left-handed path", which involves drinking wine, eating meat, and sexual intercourse.

[89] Christopher Isherwood writes that the object of the tantrik disciplines is "to see, behind all phenomena, the presence of God and to overcome the obstacles to this insight — attraction and aversion".

[91] Further Isherwood argues that words which normally carry sensual associations suggested higher meanings to Ramakrishna in his exalted state.

"[97] Amiya P. Sen writes that "it is really difficult to separate the Tantrik Ramakrishna from the Vedantic", since Vedanta and Tantra "may appear to be differ in some respects", but they also "share some important postulates between them".