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    Book Review - Mother of The Universe - Visions of The Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment

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    This document summarizes a book review of "Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment" by Lex Hixon. The reviewer notes that Hixon reworked and expanded upon translations of poems by the 18th century Bengali mystic Ramprasad Sen. While the poems are sensitively reworked as a personal meditation, the book lacks scholarly rigor and provides no indication of where Ramprasad's work ends and Hixon's commentary begins. As such, it is best read as a devotional work for like-minded devotees rather than as a scholarly enterprise.

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    Book Review - Mother of The Universe - Visions of The Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment

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    Tim
    177 views3 pages
    This document summarizes a book review of "Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment" by Lex Hixon. The reviewer notes that Hixon reworked and expanded upon translations of poems by the 18th century Bengali mystic Ramprasad Sen. While the poems are sensitively reworked as a personal meditation, the book lacks scholarly rigor and provides no indication of where Ramprasad's work ends and Hixon's commentary begins. As such, it is best read as a devotional work for like-minded devotees rather than as a scholarly enterprise.

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    Book Review_ Mother of the Universe_ Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment

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    Book Review_ Mother of the Universe_ Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment

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    This document summarizes a book review of "Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment" by Lex Hixon. The reviewer notes that Hixon reworked and expanded upon translations of poems by the 18th century Bengali mystic Ramprasad Sen. While the poems are sensitively reworked as a personal meditation, the book lacks scholarly rigor and provides no indication of where Ramprasad's work ends and Hixon's commentary begins. As such, it is best read as a devotional work for like-minded devotees rather than as a scholarly enterprise.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    177 views3 pages

    Book Review - Mother of The Universe - Visions of The Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment

    Uploaded by

    Tim
    This document summarizes a book review of "Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment" by Lex Hixon. The reviewer notes that Hixon reworked and expanded upon translations of poems by the 18th century Bengali mystic Ramprasad Sen. While the poems are sensitively reworked as a personal meditation, the book lacks scholarly rigor and provides no indication of where Ramprasad's work ends and Hixon's commentary begins. As such, it is best read as a devotional work for like-minded devotees rather than as a scholarly enterprise.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 3

    Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

    Volume 8

    Article 9

    1995

    Book Review: "Mother of the Universe: Visions of


    the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment"
    Arti Dand

    Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs


    Recommended Citation
    Dand, Arti (1995) "Book Review: "Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment"," Journal of
    Hindu-Christian Studies: Vol. 8, Article 9.
    Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1114

    The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies is a publication of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. The digital version is made available by Digital
    Commons @ Butler University. For questions about the Journal or the Society, please contact [email protected]. For more information about
    Digital Commons @ Butler University, please contact [email protected].

    Dand: Book Review: "Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment"

    Book Reviews 43
    the context of enculteration in India. The
    attempt is praiseworthy, where the need for
    a prophetic critique is admitted. But the
    change of metaphors cannot happen in a
    vacuum. First of all the socio-cultural
    factors that condition the thinking pattern of
    a believing community are to be examined
    to see whether such a change of metaphors
    is feasible. That is not done, since the scope
    of the book is limited to convergence and
    divergence in the vocabulary and images
    designating God in both the traditions.
    Secondly, one has to go into the theological
    implications of these metaphors before
    introducing feminine images of God into the
    Christian tradition patterned on the Hindu
    model. That is not done either.
    But the book serves as a good source for

    further research. The poet Bharati's works


    are very well analysed and documented probably for the first time from this
    perspective. It is interesting to mention that
    Bharati himself, a Hindu poet, composed a
    poem on Jesus Christ, which is quite
    significant while comparing Christian and
    Hindu images of God as feminine. The
    poem concludes thus:
    Magdalene is the Eternal Feminine,
    Jesus Christ is unending dharma,
    Draw we close to the symbol;
    look, an inner meaning glows.

    (Cf. Prema Nandakumar's article in this


    volume.)
    Anand Amaladass
    Madras

    Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric


    Hymns of Enlightenment. Lex Hixon. London: Quest Books, 1994,
    xiv+223 pp.
    LEX HIXON'S BOOK Mother of the
    Universe can loosely be called a
    "reworking" of the reflections and songs of
    the eighteenth-century Bengali Mystic
    Ramprasad Sen. Ramprasad was a poet and
    saint, famous in Bengal for his devotion to
    the great goddess of Hinduism. Hixon's
    poems are not based on the original Bengali
    of the poet, but rather on a translation of
    them, rendered into English by Judanath
    Sinha. Hixon has then revised and expanded
    them, with the aim of explicating
    Ramprasad's verse, with reference to his
    own experiences. In this sense, Hixon says,
    "rather than ... scholarly footnotes, the
    expanded poems themselves contain
    commentary on the esoteric Mother Wisdom
    of India" (p. xii). The resulting
    "contemplative visions" then are designed
    especially for the English reader who may
    appreciate Hixon's "Western sensibility

    Published by Digital Commons @ Butler University, 1995

    about language and meaning" (p.xi)


    (whatever that may mean).
    Mother of the Universe can best be
    situated in the larger schema of Goddess
    literature if one reads the preface to the
    book carefully. There Hixon confides that he
    was attracted to the Hindu Goddess tradition
    by what he feels is the natural power of the
    feminine metaphor, and received a formal
    initiation at the hands of Swami
    Nikhilananda, a prominent disciple of
    Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi. He perceives
    himself as a committed devotee of Mother
    Kali, who can now "approach and envision
    the Great Goddess naturally, as if I had been
    raised since childhood in the Divine Mother
    tradition of Bengal" (p.xi). His book, as a
    result, is clearly a religious exercise, infused
    with devotional purpose, and his hopes for
    it are quite ambitious. He says, "This book
    can serve as a non-doctrinal, non-official
    scripture of the Goddess" (p.xi), and his

    Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Vol. 8 [1995], Art. 9

    44 Book Reviews

    recommendation is that the poems, as


    "scriptural manifestation", be read each day,
    one at a time, and assimilated into one's
    daily life.
    Hixon's work is a personal meditation
    on the divine Mother, which bases itself on
    the skeletal work of Ramprasad Sen. This in
    itself is not objectionable. All beings are
    entitled to such meditations, and seen from
    this perspective, the poems are quite
    sensitively reworked. As a scholarly
    enterprise, however, the book is highly
    inadequate. It is riddled with generalizations
    and absolutist statements, too many to even
    mention. There is an utter lack of selfconsciousness about scholarly method. For
    example, even though Hixon assures us that

    the poems' "startling imagery and naked


    honesty belong to Ramprasad. My
    expansions have added nothing that diverges
    from his spirit" (p.xii), one is given no
    indication whatsoever as to where
    Ramprasad left off, and where Hixon's
    contemplative commentary begins.
    Similarly, Hixon is sometimes so indulgent
    to mystical language that one sometimes
    becomes quite lost in a quagmire of
    profundity. Mother of the Universe, in short,
    is best read as a devotional work, suited for
    like-minded devotees. To read it with any
    other aim is to be disappointed.
    Arti Dand
    McGill University

    Theo-Monistic Mysticism: A Hindu-Christian Comparison. Michael


    Stoeber. New York: St Martin's Press, 1994, 135 pp.
    THEO-MONISTIC MYSTICISM is a
    thoughtful and challenging study which
    seeks a middle path between two influential
    interpretations of mystical experiences. The
    constructivist interpreters, represented here
    by John Hick, admit that mystical
    experiences are different but argue that the
    differences are explicable by reference to the
    socio-religious framework which the
    particular mystic brings to her experience.
    Stoeber is critical of this school for its
    inability to account for the transmission of
    new religious knowledge and insight through
    mystical experience, since the information
    which the mystic receives is entirely
    dependent on the prior conceptual
    framework. In addition, the constructivist
    thesis cannot adequately account for mystic
    heresy or for the similarities in mystical
    experiences where there are no shared socioreligious factors.
    The essentialist school, represented by
    interpreters like Evelyn Underhill, W. T.
    Stace and Ninian Smart, see mystical
    experience as the same everywhere, but

    http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs/vol8/iss1/9
    DOI: 10.7825/2164-6279.1114

    subject to a variety of socio-religious


    interpretations. Stoeber is critical of the
    essentialist position for its disregard of vital
    differences between monistic experiences,
    which involve a loss of duality and exclude
    personal experience, and theistic
    experiences, which encounter the Real as
    dynamic and where "some sense of
    different~ating self-identity is maintained by
    the participants" (p.24). These important
    differences are illustrated by analysis of the
    writings of Meister Eckhart and Jan Van
    Ruusbroec.
    The study of these two mystics leads
    Stoeber to propose a third experiential
    possibility which he calls theo-monistic
    mysticism. He calls it a theo-monistic
    experience "because although it involves an
    impersonal monistic realization, it issues in
    a perspective that also reflects an active,
    creative, and personal Real" (p.35). Theomonistic mysticism avoids the extremes of
    the constructivist and essentialist schools by
    positing that mystical experiences differ and
    that these differences cannot be explained

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