Recent discussion about the rules for commenting on this blog has reminded me that I really should state those rules formally. So I’ve now posted the rules on the site for all to see. I hope that they will allow Love of All Wisdom to continue being an open, welcoming community of people interested in cross-cultural philosophy.
Comment rules posted
12 Sunday Feb 2012
Posted in Blog Admin
Hi Amod,
I’ve greatly been enjoying reading your blog – I was wondering why comments are closed to your earlier entries? I was itching to comment on a few older ones!
Hi Meera – welcome, and good question. It’s entirely about spam. I get dozens of comments coming in a day that are just garbage from advertisers trying to sell stuff. The more posts that are open, the more messages come in. And I have to check them all manually, in case there’s a real comment in there that my system accidentally marked as spam. So allowing comments on older posts would increase the deluge by many times – probably to hundreds of comments a day or more, which I don’t have time to go through. If it were just about honest comments from interested people, I’d happily leave them all open, but unfortunately that’s not the way the Internet works.
If there’s a particular post you’re really itching to comment on, I could reopen it to comments for a week or two.
Hi Amod – Thanks for the reply; makes sense! I was particularly interested in sharing some thoughts on the “How not to defend Hinduism” post.
Alas, I spoke too soon: WordPress doesn’t seem to have a way to reopen comments on a specific post, so I can’t do that. I’d love to hear your comments anyway; you’re welcome to leave them on this post. I’ll include a link to the postso others reading this can figure out what we’re talking about:
https://loveofallwisdom.com/2009/08/how-not-to-defend-hinduism-in-academia/
All right, shall fire away. :) As someone who started out doing a masters in Hinduism (at HDS) and switched, part way through, I’ve spent some time musing about the criticisms of the way Hinduism is studied in academia and the critiques from the Hindutva corner. Such debate isn’t the reason I switched focuses, but I did sometimes find the degree of energy currently focused on questions such as “does Hinduism exist” and “is it a colonial construct tiresome.”
That said, I wonder whether the criticism from Hindus is directed primarily at people who study Sanskritic, Brahmanic, or “mainstream” Hinduism? Kripal in writing about Ramakrishnan is obviously dealing with a modern, vernacular tradition, but overall I haven’t seen much wrath directed toward, say, scholars of bhakti and other vernacular traditions (which was my own area of focus) – or those aspects of the tradition which *are* more explicitly sexual, such as tantric texts or the Kama Sutra, as you reference.
This gets more complex when you are studying something like Chaitanya Vaishnavism because a) you are dealing with a tradition which became very popular in the west and b) many scholars involved in studying these traditions have in fact been ISKCON followers or Krishna bhaktas, though I haven’t seen this fact openly acknowledged in scholarly discourse often. Also, you’re dealing with a tradition which has certain highly erotic components covered with a discourse of spiritual allegory – so *of course* it can’t be taken literally.
Along these lines, I’ve had plenty of Gaudiya Vaishnavas and other Hindus tell me solemnly that of course Radha and Krishna never consummated their relationship, but lived as chastely as brother and sister because theirs was a truly spiritual lover – and insist that there is no evidence otherwise in the tradition. This response extends to things such as tantric texts as well, with the insistence that any sort of sexual reading is really the work of the dirty western mind which sees sex everywhere, while it is perfectly evident to Hindus that all such things are merely spiritual allegories.
I don’t think I would agree with your characterization of where the outrage lies. Much of the Hindu-nationalist outrage has been directed at sexual depictions of the tradition, which often tend to focus on bhakti and vernaculars. Kripal is only the most notorious example; Jim Laine, the other example I referred to in the post, was studying Shivaji. The outrage tends to be very selective – some particular orator raises a furor about one book and people get very upset about it and not about similar books that say similar things. It’s obvious that the majority of these critics don’t read very much, and they seem not to want to. (One of the legislators proposing to ban Kali’s Child said with pride that he hadn’t read it.)
I’ll admit I find it hard to take seriously the view that sexual readings in general are just the product of the “dirty western mind”. People who think that way are going to have a pretty hard time explaining Khajuraho. None of this is to deny that there’s a strong spiritual component to sexual elements of the tradition; Kripal is repeatedly insistent that Ramakrishna was about sexuality and spirituality, that the two were indelibly linked. The idea that Indian texts and traditions referencing sex are “merely” spiritual allegories is no more plausible to me than a similar interpretation of the Song of Songs.
I would suggest that the “Gaudiya” and other Vaishnavas recite and contemplate daily the following verses from Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda and pay particular attention to the last line which annihilates the monastic (Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu) “construct” of the opposition of the erotic and the “spiritual”:
पूर्वम् यत्र समम् त्वया रतिपतेरासादितः सिद्धयः
तस्मिन्नेव निकुङ्जमन्मथमहातीर्थे पुनर्माधवः।
ध्यायंस्त्वामनिशम् जपन्नपि तवैवालापमंत्रावलीम्
भूयस्त्वत्कुचकुंभनिर्भरपरीरंभामृतम् वाङ्छति॥ ५-२
प-छे :- पूर्वम् यत्र समम् त्वया रतिपतेः आसादितः सिद्धयः तस्मिन् एव निकुङ्ज
मन्मथ महा तीर्थे पुनः माधवः ध्यायन् त्वाम् अनिशम् जपन् अपि तव एव
अलाप मंत्रावलीम् भूयः त्वत् कुच कुंभ निर्भर परीरंभ अमृतम् वाङ्छति
5-2. puurvam= earlier; yatra= where; samam [krishnena] tvayaa= along with Krishna, by you; ratipateH aasaaditaH siddhayaH = by Lovegod, reacquired, achievements are; tasmin eva= in there [in that bower, alone]; niku~Nja= bower; which is a; manmatha mahaa tiirthe= Lovegod’s, great, sanctum [bower]; maadhavaH= Krishna; punaH= again; tvaam= about you; anisham= ceaselessly; dhyaayan= meditating; tava eva= your, only; alaapa ma.ntra aavaliim = chatting, chants, strings of; japan api= chanting, even; bhuuyaH= again; tvat kucha ku.mbha= your, bosoms, called pots; nirbhara pari ra.mbha = tight, embrace; amR^itam = called ambrosia, moksha; vaa.ncChati= he is desiring.
“Earlier, where you were with Krishna in a riverine bower that which is a sanctum of Lovegod, on the riverbank of yamuna, where Lovegod once reacquired all his achievements through your conjugation with Krishna, now Krishna is in that bower only, ceaselessly meditating only upon you, by making your words of chat as the strings of his chants, once more desirous of moksha by a tight embrace of your pot-like ambrosial bosoms… [5-2]
Source: http://www.giirvaani.net/giirvaani/gg_utf/gg_5_utf/gg_5_sans_utf.htm