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Thibetan medicine is about 2500 years old. And some of its elements are even older, about 5000 years or more. The author had a cancer treatment with serious and chronic side effects, and turned to alternative medicine for help.
Scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal explores the life and teachings of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a 19th-century Bengali saint who played a major role in the creation of modern Hinduism. The work is now marked by both critical acclaim and cross-cultural controversy. In a substantial new Preface to this second edition, Kripal answers his critics and addresses the controversy.
Sri Ramakrishna is an ocean in whose heart the universe is nestled like an island. Awed by the expanse of infinite depth around, we in the universe constantly try to perceive this personality in our own way. Our perception is unique every time as is the knowledge we obtain thereby. Approaching Ramakrishna becomes our prayer to the supreme reality. Published by Advaita Ashrama, a publication house of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math, India in commemoration of the 175th Birth Anniversary of Sri Ramakrishna.
During the long tenure of his spiritual ministry, Swami Bhuteshananda, the 12th President of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, delivered discourses at various places both in India and abroad in response to the earnest requests of spiritual seekers. Published by Advaita Ashrama, a publication house of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math, this book is a compilation of forty-one of these discourses classified under the following major headings: - Sri Ramakrishna - Vedanta and Spiritual Life - Religion - Miscellaneous - Reminiscences
Despite Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṁsa’s (1836-86) reputation as a Tāntrika in view of his being a priest of the Kālī temple at the village of Dakshineshvar in the northern suburb of Calcutta, this study posits that his piety had deep roots in Bengal Vaiṣṇavism (cult of Viṣṇu) at large and in the devotional tradition of his family. His family deity Lord Raghuvῑra (Lord Rāma) was considered as an incarnation of the Vedic-Purāṇic God Viṣṇu and thus a Vaiṣṇava deity by extension. This counter thesis on the saint’s religious identity is supported by an analysis of his emphasis on bhakti [devotion] for and biśvās [faith] in God. My analysis is predicated on a comparison of Rāmakṛṣṇa with two religious reformers of the sixteenth century: the Bengali saint Śrīcaitanya (1486-1533), founder of bhakti movement in Bengal and the German monk Martin Luther (1483-1546), the intellectual child of the twin movements of Humanism and Devotio Moderna, and the progenitor of the so-called Protestant movement that foregrounded fiducia [faith] as the highway to divine grace. Rāmakṛṣṇa’s imitation of Caitanyite Vaiṣṇavism, and thus his reliance on devotion and faith appear almost similar to Luther’s reliance on a merciful and yet a just God through fides [turst or biśvās]. Such a cross-cultural comparative study has not been attempted by any other scholar. Rāmakṛṣṇa’s Vaiṣṇava orientation also helps us understand his sexuality. The currently influential construction of a homoerotic Tāntrika Rāmakṛṣṇa is countered by exploring the fundamental convergence between the Hindu concept of prema and the Christian concept of agape or caritas—both standing for love for, as well as love of, God. Admittedly, there are marked differences among the three religious personalities, particularly between Rāmakṛṣṇa and Luther. Both are radically different personalities in respect of their cultural background, social outlook, and theological consciousness, especially in their understanding of human-divine relationship. Luther’s Judeo-Christian conception of God as an absolutely sovereign and yet a merciful deity is markedly different from Rāmakṛṣṇa’s Vaiṣṇavic image of God as a loving and playful companion of the devotee. Yet their spiritual experiences in their quest for the divine show a similar reliance on faith and devotion. I also discuss the interface between sexual and spiritual consciousness in Rāmakṛṣṅa’s life and teachings, especially because of his Tāntrika identity in the West. The understanding of Tantra as an esoteric cult indulging in clandestine carnal orgies has dovetailed into the saint’s imagined “unconscious” homoerotic desires and behaviors. This comparative exercise thus seeks to achieve the author’s dual objective of foregrounding Rāmakṛṣṇa’s innate Vaiṣṇavic consciousness that is close to Luther’s Protestant faith and to deconstruct the former’s homoerotic profile by interpreting his sexuality in the context of his culture and creed. Needless to mention, I use vernacular sources on Rāmakṣṇa throughout with my own translation. This has the unique advantage of getting at the facts as recorded by the actors personally or perceived and experienced by the contemporaries and eyewitnesses directly.
Hinduism is a polytheistic religion. For the Hindus, Goddess Kali is the only austere, down-to-earth deity who believes in absolute simplicity and openness. She does not hide her body; she is naked with her private parts covered by a garland of severed hands of demons slain by her. Her mind is overt as she sticks out her tongue representing her thirst for the blood of evil people whom she is determined to overpower and also her feeling of shame. Her soul yearns for pure and authentic love. She is unlike other Hindu goddesses who are opulently dressed and majestically ornamented. Kali’s child, God incarnate Sri Sri Ramakrishna, like his mother goddess is casual not only about his dress but also about his worshipping habits. This book looks at Ramakrishna, his method of devotion, his yearning for the goddess, and his value system and entire philosophy. It analyses the Hindu Saint’s soul and its slices that he had shared and still continues to share, even today—long after he left this planet, with those who understand him thoroughly and are meant to propagate his message. The author’s method of analysis and treatment of the subject are unique as no other Kali or Ramakrishna scholar had used for their probes earlier.
An indispensable memoir by one of the most prominent writers of his generation Originally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life—from 1928, when Christopher Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels—and who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret. What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood's greatest achievements.
This book is a short life and select teachings of modern Indian prophet Sri Ramakrishna whose life is a story of religion in practice that enables us to see God face to face. His life was one of constant communion with the divine. The author has presented in an original and striking way a biographical narrative of Sri Ramakrishna, interspersing it with detailed analysis of his deep spiritual states. The book, therefore, serves as an excellent interpretation of the life and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, for both devotees and scholars.
Sri Ramakrishna is widely known as a nineteenth-century Indian mystic who affirmed the harmony of all religions on the basis of his richly varied spiritual experiences and eclectic religious practices, both Hindu and non-Hindu. In Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality, Ayon Maharaj argues that Sri Ramakrishna was also a sophisticated philosopher of great contemporary relevance. Through a careful study of Sri Ramakrishna's recorded oral teachings in the original Bengali, Maharaj reconstructs his philosophical positions and analyzes them from a cross-cultural perspective. Sri Ramakrishna's spiritual journey culminated in the exalted state of "vijñana," his term for the "intimate knowledge" of God as the Infinite Reality that is both personal and impersonal, with and without form, immanent in the universe and beyond it. This expansive spiritual standpoint of vijñana, Maharaj contends, opens up a new paradigm for addressing central issues in cross-cultural philosophy of religion, including divine infinitude, religious pluralism, mystical experience, and the problem of evil. Sri Ramakrishna's vijñana-based religious pluralism--when grasped in all its subtlety--proves to have major philosophical advantages over dominant Western models. Moreover, his mystical testimony and teachings not only cut across long-standing debates about the nature of mystical experience but also bolster recent defenses of its epistemic value. Maharaj further demonstrates that Sri Ramakrishna's unique response to the problem of evil resonates strongly with Western "soul-making" theodicies and contemporary theories of skeptical theism. A pioneering interdisciplinary study of one of India's most important philosopher-mystics, Maharaj's book is essential reading for scholars and students in philosophy of religion, theology, religious studies, and Hindu studies.
This is a collection of careful, objective, historically sensitive studies of modern commentators on the Bhagavadgita, one of the basic scriptures of Hinduism, and one which has been widely read in the modern West. Experts on modern Indian religious thought show how Ghandi, Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, Bhaktivedanta, Aurobindo, Tilak, Bhave, Sivananda, the Theosophists, and Bhankim read, used and interpreted the Gita. Collectively, the essays display the different backgrounds and orientations of the major Indian thinkers of our time. An Introduction and a Conclusion provide a perspective on the thinkers and identify common themes which are part of modern emphases.