RamaKrishna was a induistic CD guru,read more...

[Lucia]

Arjuna, one of the epic heroes of the Mahabharata, is claimed by contemporary Hijras as one of their mythic forebears. Arjuna, the fiercest of the Pandava warriors, spends a year dressed as a member of the 'third sex' living in a harem, teaching women the arts of song and dance.

and again

Gender-bending saints
In Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, author Jeffrey J. Kripal discusses Ramakrishna's injunction that, in order to approach a God, the male devotee should take on a female identity. Ramakrishna paired his male disciples up into 'masculine' and 'feminine' couples. According to his teachings, these 'spiritual' genders result in different types of religious experience, the object of the gender-assignation being to awaken desire and devotional love. According to Ramakrishna's teachings, everyone in the world is 'female' in relation to the divine. According to the biographer Datta, Ramakrishna was taught by one of his tantric friends that "if one is to know the Man, one must take the state of the Woman - as a Female friend, as a handmaiden, or as a mother."

Ramakrishna spent long periods in a 'handmaid state' - one such period being whilst living in the household of his temple boss, Mathur, and fanning the image of the Goddess with the women of the household. Ramakrishna's biographer Datta records that Mathur would buy Ramakrishna women's clothes........

ok now you can see more at

http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/tt_ ... hvara.html

[Cathy L. Anderson]

Hi Lucia,

Thanks for posting this! I've been trying for several years to get details on this, having once heard that Ramakrishna sometimes practiced ritual transvestism. I searched the web but couldn't find more than a few lines.

There's a lot of gender-bending in the Hindu tradition. Quite a bit is described in the book:

The Man Who Was a Woman and Other Queer Tales from Hindu Lore
Devdutt Pattanaik

http://www.haworthpressinc.com/store/pr ... p?sku=4489

I found the book worth reading.

Cathy