NOTES
Preface
1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravityâs Rainbow (London: Picador, 1975), p. 590. According to our best evidence, the vast majority of practitioners of tantric alchemy and haáčha 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 âfive landscapesâ are discussed in A. K. Ramanujan, The Inner Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), pp. 105â8.
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 poĂ©tique de lâespace (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 Girardotâs 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 haáčha 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 ChĂ©nu, 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. 123â24.
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, âTaoĂŻsme et yoga,â Journal Asiatique 257 (1969): 63.
8. Douglas Renfrew Brooks, The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu ĆÄkta Tantrism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 209.
9. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newtonâs Alchemy or âThe Hunting of the Greene Lyonâ (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. xi.
10. RRÄ 3.11bâ12a: na krameáča vinÄ ĆÄstraáč na ĆÄstreáča vinÄ kramaáž„/ĆÄstraáč kramayutaáč jñÄtvÄ karoti sa siddhibhÄk//. Cf. BhP 3.96; 4.139; 9.140bâ141a; 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. âWhy Gurus Are Heavy,â Numen 33 (1984):40â73.
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-Maâash and Other Documents (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1967), pp. 120â24. 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 ÄĆvalayana Ćrauta SÄ«tra 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 âtantrism.â I further adjectivize âtantraâ into âtantricâ to speak, for example, of tantric ritual. I often refer to tantric practitioners as tÄntrikas, following Sanskrit usage.
4. This and all the other terms discussed here are generated from the verbal root sÄdh/sadh (weak form sidh), which means âto realize, succeed.â
5. On the uses of this appellation, see below chap. 4, nn. 112â14.
6. To these groups we might also add the Burmese Zawgyis (= Yogis) or Weikzas (= VidyÄ[puruáčŁas?]), a group of more or less suicidal mercury-drinking TheravÄda Buddhist monks: Patrick Pranke, âOn Becoming a Buddhist Wizard,â in Don Lopez, ed., Buddhism in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 343â58; Maung Htin Aung, Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (London: Oxford University Press, 1962; reprint Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 41â50; Melford Spiro, Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 163â71; and Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in Ancient China, 6 vols, in 17 tomes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954â88), vol. 5, pt. 3 (1976), âChemistry and Chemical Technology: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Historical Survey, from Cinnabar Elixirs to Synthetic Insulin,â p. 166.
7. They are also called NÄth Yogis, the NÄth SampradÄya, KÄnphaáča (âSplit Earedâ) Yogis, Jogis, and GorakhnÄthis in modern northern India.
8. Most fully initiated members of the NÄth Siddha order are given names, upon initiation, that end in the suffix -nÄth. Throughout this book, however, I often shorten the names of these figures, and call GorakhnÄth âGorakh,â MatsyendranÄth âMatsyendra,â etc. Furthermore, in those cases in which I retain the suffix, I generally transliterate it as -nÄth, following modern usage, rather than -nÄtha, the Sanskritic ending. Only in those cases in which I am referring to a given NÄth Siddha as the author of a Sanskrit-language work do I retain the -nÄtha suffix (as in âth...