Word: kali
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...Ocean of Consciousness. To Occidentals, no Hindu deity is stranger than Kali. "She wears necklaces of gold and pearls, a golden garland of human heads, and a girdle of human arms. . . . She has four arms. The lower left hand holds a severed human head and the upper grips a bloodstained saber. One right hand offers boons to Her children; the other allays their fear. The majesty of Her posture can hardly be described. It combines the terror of destruction with the reassurance of motherly tenderness...
These rites Ramakrishna himself practiced as a priest. In 1856 he became a priest of Kali, Hinduism's Divine Mother, in a vast new temple at Dakshineswar, on the Ganges, just north of Calcutta. The temple and its 20 acres of gardens had been built by a wealthy fourth-caste widow named Rani Rasmani, and Ramakrishna showed his disregard for caste by serving as priest there. He had no false respect for his patron. One day as Rani Rasmani was listening to his singing in the temple, the young priest abruptly turned and slapped her. He said that while...
...Ramakrishna, no deity was dearer than Kali. For years his absorbing passion was to become a paramahamsa-one who reached life's highest earthly stage-and see Kali "as tangibly as the temples, the trees, the river." Eventually...
Thomas Mann's latest book is dedicated to his good friend, Dr. Heinrich Zimmer, ex-Heidelberg Orientalist, with the words "Returned with thanks." Mann owed Zimmer his plot: a Hindu legend which Dr. Zimmer (who now lives in New Rochelle, N.Y.) had outlined in a lecture on Kali, the Mother Goddess of India, in Switzerland in 1938. The legend...
...Cawnpore, India, a fanatic Hindu carpenter prostrated himself at the feet of the Goddess of the Kali Temple, cut off his tongue, offered it in exchange for wisdom...