Ramakrishna/Reception

In his influential 1896 essay "A real mahatma: Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa Dev" and his 1899 book Râmakrishna: His Life and Sayings, the German philologist and Orientalist Max Müller potrayed Ramakrishna as "a wonderful mixture of God and man" and as "...a Bhakta, a worshipper or lover of the deity, much more than a Gñânin or a knower."

In London and New York in 1896, Swami Vivekanana delivered his famous address on Ramakrishna entitled "My Master." Vivekananda criticized his followers for projecting Ramakrishna as an avatara and miracle-worker.

In a letter to Sigmund Freud which would affect Freud's thinking on religion, Romain Rolland described the mystical states achieved by Ramakrishna and other mystics as an "'oceanic' sentiment," one which Rolland had also experienced. Rolland believed that the universal human religious emotion resembled this "oceanic sense." In his 1929 book La vie de Ramakrishna, Rolland distinguished between the feelings of unity and eternity which Ramakrishna experienced in his mystical states and Ramakrishna's interpretation of those feelings as the goddess Kali.

In the 1950s, Indologist Heinrich Zimmer was the first Western scholar to interpret Ramakrishna's worship of the Divine Mother as containing specifically Tantric elements.

Christopher Isherwood's 1965 Ramakrishna and his Disciples introduced Ramakrishna to a Western audience from the perspective of a devotee. In a late interview, Isherwood said of Ramakrishna: "He was completely without any hang-ups, talking about [...]-roles, because his thoughts completely transcended physical love-making. He even saw the mating of two dogs on the street as an expression of the eternal male-female principle in the universe."

In his 1991 book The Analyst and the Mystic, Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar saw in Ramakrishna's visions a spontaneous capacity for creative experiencing. Kakar also argued that culturally relative concepts of eroticism and gender have contributed to the Western difficulty in comprehending Ramakrishna. Kakar saw Ramakrishna's seemingly bizarre acts as part of a bhakti path to God.

Jeffrey Kripal's controversial Kali's Child: The Mystical and the [...] in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (1995) argued that Ramakrishna rejected Advaita Vedanta in favor of Shakti Tantra. In this psychoanalytic study of Ramakrishna's life, Kripal portrayed Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences as symptoms of repressed homoeroticism. Some scholars agreed — John Stratton Hawley wrote that Kripal had established that Ramakrishna associated his strong attractions for young men with his mystical experience of Kali. Other scholars, including Huston Smith and Gerald James Larson, disagreed. Larson wrote that Kripal had failed to show a causal relationship between the [...] symbolism and Ramakrishna's religious experiences.

In 1999, postcolonial historian Sumit Sarkar argued that he found in the Kathamrita traces of a binary opposition between unlearned oral wisdom and learned literate knowledge. He argues that all of our information about Ramakrishna, a rustic near-illiterate Brahmin, comes from urban bhadralok devotees, "...whose texts simultaneously illuminate and transform." In 2007, postcolonial literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote that Ramakrishna was a "Bengali bhakta visionary" and that as a bhakta, he turned chiefly towards Kali.