The Alchemical Body

Siddha Traditions in Medieval India

David Gordon White

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780226894997, 9780226894973
• eBook ISBN: 9780226149349
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History

The Alchemical Body excavates and centers within its Indian context the lost tradition of the medieval Siddhas. Working from previously unexplored alchemical sources, David Gordon White demonstrates for the first time that the medieval disciplines of Hindu alchemy and hatha yoga were practiced by one and the same people, and that they can be understood only when viewed together. White opens the way to a new and more comprehensive understanding of medieval Indian mysticism, within the broader context of south Asian Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Islam.

"White proves a skillful guide in disentangling historical and theoretical complexities that have thus far bedeviled the study of these influential aspects of medieval Indian culture."—Yoga World

"Anyone seriously interested in finding out more about authentic tantra, original hatha yoga, embodied liberation . . . sacred sexuality, paranormal abilities, healing, and of course alchemy will find White's extraordinary book as fascinating as any Tom Clancy thriller."—Georg Feuerstein, Yoga Journal

NOTES

Preface

1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Picador, 1975), p. 590. According to our best evidence, the vast majority of practitioners of tantric alchemy and haṭha yoga have always been males. So it is that I employ the masculine pronoun he, rather than she or s/he when referring to such practitioners.

2. Cf. the akam genre of classical Tamil love poetry, whose “five landscapes” are discussed in A. K. Ramanujan, The Inner Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), pp. 105–8.

3. Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Given that many of the interpretive connections made between les mots et les choses in this book are my own, some may be moved to turn their analytical lights on my own psychological profile as well.

4. La poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1974). A recent western study of an eastern tradition, which I feel to be most respectful of the phenomenological approach, a book which moreover devotes many of its pages to charting mystic landscapes, is Norman Girardot’s admirable Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

5. Even if, as Gadamer and others have demonstrated, such is patently impossible: one always comes to a text with a forejudgment of its meaning. This includes, for the alchemical portion of the books, the models of the modern science of chemistry. Many are the historians who have treated tantric alchemy as a protochemistry or iatrochemistry and who have, working from this methodological assumption, projected the writings of the alchemical tradition upon a modern chemical grid. Such attempts are, I believe, tentative at best, given our uncertainty of the modern equivalents of medieval (and often local) terminology. This is especially the case with botanical names, in which the sources abound. Similarly, modern interpretations of the subtle body of haṭha yoga which would see in the medieval texts proofs for the advanced state of Indian knowledge of physiology and psychology force the textual data into impossible and highly prejudicial directions.

6. On the theological uses of anagogy, as a complication of analogy and allegory, in the medieval west, see Marie-Dominique Chénu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, tr. and ed. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969; reprint Chicago: Midway Books, 1979), pp. 123–24.

7. Symbolic language is employed with such great success in these traditions because the name of a thing bears the efficacity of a given object: Jean Filliozat, “Taoïsme et yoga,” Journal Asiatique 257 (1969): 63.

8. Douglas Renfrew Brooks, The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Śākta Tantrism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 209.

9. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy or “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon” (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. xi.

10. RRĀ 3.11b–12a: na krameṇa vinā śāstraṃ na śāstreṇa vinā kramaḥ/śāstraṃ kramayutaṃ jñātvā karoti sa siddhibhāk//. Cf. BhP 3.96; 4.139; 9.140b–141a; and RRS 6.2.

11. Mircea Eliade, Forgerons et alchimistes, 2d rev. ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1977); idem, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, 2d ed., tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen, 1973).

12. “Why Gurus Are Heavy,” Numen 33 (1984):40–73.

Chapter One

1. Reproduced with translation and notes in B. N. Goswamy and J. S. Grewal, The Mughals and the Jogis of Jakhbar: Some Madad-i-Ma’ash and Other Documents (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1967), pp. 120–24. Jakhbar monastery is located in the Gurdaspur district of the Punjab.

2. The root tan is a cognate of the English tension and tensile, in which the senses of stretching and weaving are also present. On tantra as ritual framework, see Brian K. Smith, Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 126, citing Āśvalayana Śrauta Sītra 1.1.3.

3. In order to avoid confusion between Tantra as written work and tantra as religious phenomenon, I follow general modern usage and refer to the latter as “tantrism.” I further adjectivize “tantra” into “tantric” to speak, for example, of tantric ritual. I often refer to tantric practitioners as tāntrikas, following Sanskrit usage.

4. This and all the other terms discussed here are generated from the verbal root sādh/sadh (weak form sidh), which means “to realize, succeed.”

5. On the uses of this appellation, see below chap. 4, nn. 112–14.

6. To these groups we might also add the Burmese Zawgyis (= Yogis) or Weikzas (= Vidyā[puruṣas?]), a group of more or less suicidal mercury-drinking Theravāda Buddhist monks: Patrick Pranke, “On Becoming a Buddhist Wizard,” in Don Lopez, ed., Buddhism in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 343–58; Maung Htin Aung, Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (London: Oxford University Press, 1962; reprint Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 41–50; Melford Spiro, Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 163–71; and Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in Ancient China, 6 vols, in 17 tomes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954–88), vol. 5, pt. 3 (1976), “Chemistry and Chemical Technology: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Historical Survey, from Cinnabar Elixirs to Synthetic Insulin,” p. 166.

7. They are also called Nāth Yogis, the Nāth Sampradāya, Kānphaṭa (“Split Eared”) Yogis, Jogis, and Gorakhnāthis in modern northern India.

8. Most fully initiated members of the Nāth Siddha order are given names, upon initiation, that end in the suffix -nāth. Throughout this book, however, I often shorten the names of these figures, and call Gorakhnāth “Gorakh,” Matsyendranāth “Matsyendra,” etc. Furthermore, in those cases in which I retain the suffix, I generally transliterate it as -nāth, following modern usage, rather than -nātha, the Sanskritic ending. Only in those cases in which I am referring to a given Nāth Siddha as the author of a Sanskrit-language work do I retain the -nātha suffix (as in “th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• Abbreviations
• One: Indian Paths to Immortality
• Two: Categories of Indian Thought: The Universe by Numbers
• Three: The Prehistory of Tantric Alchemy
• Four: Sources for the History of Tantric Alchemy in India
• Five: Tantric and Siddha Alchemical Literature
• Six: Tantra in the Rasārṇava
• Seven: Corresponding Hierarchies: The Substance of the Alchemical Body
• Eight: Homologous Structures of the Alchemical Body
• Nine: The Dynamics of Transformation in Siddha Alchemy
• Ten: Penetration, Perfection, and Immortality
• Epilogue: The Siddha Legacy in Modern India
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index