User:Goethean/SRK/Bio/Views/Goethean
Views of Ramakrishna
Since the 1976 publication of Walter Neeval's essay "The Transformation of Ramakrishna", scholars have thought of Ramakrishna's image as going through three discrete transformations. The first transformation, which occurred during Ramakrishna's life, was from a local village madman into a divine avatar. The next transformation, occurring after his death and conducted by his most famous disciple Swami Vivekananda, was from a mystical ecstatic into the founder of a universalistic religious movement. The third transformation, this one also engineered by Vivekananda, was from a quietistic mystic into a social reformer. [1]
Philosopher Arindam Chakrabarti called Ramakrishna "The practically illiterate, faith-bound, emotional, otherworldly esoteric Ramakrishna who prayed to the Goddess: "May my rationalizing intellect be struck by thunder!" And yet in his
...views about the nature of ultimate reality, the relation between the self and the body, ways of knowing truth, moral and social duties of human beings and metatheoretical explanations of why mystics disagree...Ramakrishna was no less a philosopher than Buddha or Socrates.
Chakrabarti then contrasts Ramakrishna's talkativeness with Buddha's reticence, and makes seven comparisons between Ramakrishna and Socrates. He then analyzes a song that Ramakrishna was fond of ("The Dark Mother Flying Kites") and pulls out six philosophical elements: a nondualistic metaphysics, a spiritualistic ethic, the doctrine of karma, a playful goddess, the possibility of moksha, and the theory of psychological causation. [2]