Kali's Child Part 3

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Kali's Child Revisited or Didn't Anyone Check the Documentation? by Swami Tyagananda*
2000 by Swami Tyagananda Part 3 of 4 (86) KC p. 103: Haladhari refuses to ennoble Ramakrishna's madness by comparing it to a classical bhava. Rather, he sees only his crazy cousin peeing from the trees of the Panchavati (LP 2.8.14). For Haladhari, wearing a cloth tail, jumping around on all fours, and peeing from trees has nothing to do with devotion. It is madness, pure and simple. Response: At LP 2.8.14 there is no indication whatsoever that what Haladhari saw is connected with the Hanuman bhava episode of Ramakrishna's life. Kripal's sentence beginning with "For Haladhari" is completely his own invention; nowhere in the Lilaprasanga is there any passage connecting Haladhari with Ramakrishna "wearing a cloth tail, jumping around on all fours." Unfortunately, unless the reader can check the Lilaprasanga, he or she won't know that the documentation is deceptive. (87) KC pp. 103-4: Kripal transposes two passages which have no connection with one another. He makes two assumptions, unsupported by any text: (1) By wearing a silk cloth for worship, Ramakrishna is wearing women's clothes and this constitutes cross-dressing, and (2) this happened when he was practicing sakhi-bhava in Mathur's household. Response: Kripal quotes from KA 2.154-55 about Ramakrishna's sakhi-bhava sadhana and provides an endnote (#30, p. 347), in which he says: The tone of KA 3.83 suggests a certain anxious necessity in Ramakrishna's becoming a Handmaid: "I used to say over and over, 'I am a Female Servant of the Blissful Mother!'" At KA 3.83 we see nothing equivalent to Kripal's "over and over." There we simply have, ami boltam, "I used to say." Kripal deliberately inserts "over and over" to support the "anxious necessity" theory. (88) KC p. 104: Here we see the same worship context and the same silken clothes, but here Ramakrishna becomes a "Handmaid of the Mother," not to live with Mathur and his household but to conquer his sexual desire for his wife back at the temple (KA 5.140).

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