Alchemical body - Siddha traditions in medieval India

616 Pages·1996·4.49 MB·English

by  White, David Gordon

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THE ALCHEMICAL BODY

Siddha Traditions in Medieval India

DAVID GORDON WHITE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
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for Catherine

CONTENTS

PREFACE / ix

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION / xv

ABBREVIATIONS / xvii

ONE
Indian Paths to Immortality / 1

TWO
Categories of Indian Thought: The Universe by Numbers / 15

THREE
The Prehistory of Tantric Alchemy / 48

FOUR
Sources for the History of Tantric Alchemy in India / 78

FIVE
Tantric and Siddha Alchemical Literature / 123

SIX
Tantra in the Rasārṇava / 171

SEVEN
Corresponding Hierarchies: The Substance of the
Alchemical Body / 184

EIGHT
Homologous Structures of the Alchemical Body / 218

NINE
The Dynamics of Transformation in Siddha Alchemy / 264

TEN
Penetration, Perfection, and Immortality / 301

EPILOGUE
The Siddha legacy in Modern India / 335

NOTES / 353

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY / 521

INDEX / 555
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PREFACE

In the new age India of the 1990s, it has become popular, even
fashionable, to have the name of a tāntrika, a kind of all-purpose
sexologist, medicine man, and shaman, in one’s little black book of phone
numbers. This same phenomenon has brought with it the appearance,
preceding the title page of books on magic and tantra, of “disclaimers” to
the effect that said book does not guarantee the results of the techniques
it is treating and that its editors are not responsible for unhappy side-
effects of said techniques when they are practiced in the privacy of one’s
home. The present work carries no such disclaimer because it in no way
purports to be a “how-to” book for realizing immortality. Nor is this a
study in the history of Indian medicine or science: a great number of
Indian scholars and scientists as well as a growing number of western
authors have written excellent works on the matters I will be treating from
these perspectives, incorporating into their writings comprehensive
overviews of Indian chemistry, human physiology, pharmacology, and
therapeutics.
The present work is rather a history-of-religions study of the medieval
Siddha traditions of Hindu alchemy and haṭha yoga, which formed two
important fields of theory and practice within the vast current of Indian
mysticism known as tantra. It is the religious and, more specifically,
tantric features of these interpenetrating traditions that I will be treating
in these pages, from both a historical and a phenomenological
perspective. In the main, this will be a study of the language of mystic
experience and expression, and it will be from the standpoint of language
that I will chart out the theoretical, symbolic, and analogical parameters
of the alchemical and hathayogic disciplines within their broader tantric
and Hindu contexts. And, working from the semantic and symbolic fields
of meaning that the alchemical material generates, this study will also
look at a much wider array of Hindu and Indian phenomena through
“alchemical eyes”.
This will furthermore be a scholarly work, nearly entirely divorced
from any ground of personal mystical experience. Apart from a short
period of schooling in haṭha yoga undertaken in Benares in 1984–85, I
have never experienced anything that one could qualify as a genuine
master-disciple relationship. I have never levitated, read other people’s
minds, or even seen auras. This being the case, it may well be that I belong
to the great mass of those who “must go on blundering inside our front-
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brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psisynthetic
taken from Earth’s soul there is a molecule, secular and more or less
ordinary and named, over here—kicking endlessly among the plastic
trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all
together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous
and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot
be spoken ... to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth
in so much replication”.1
Ultimate reality is beyond my reach, either to experience or express. I
nonetheless hope that these pages may serve to bridge a certain gap
between raw experience and synthetic description, and thereby contribute
to an ongoing tradition of cultural exchange that is at least as old as the
Silk Road.

In reading these pages, the reader may come to experience a sensation
of vertigo, as the horizon of one mystic landscape opens onto yet another
landscape, equally vast and troubling in its internal immensity. It may be
that these landscapes,2 with their dizzying multitudinous levels of self-
interpretation, may inspire analysis by psychologists of both the armchair
and professional varieties.3 I believe, however, that the most useful
western companion to the present study is the work of the French
philosopher Gaston Bachelard entitled The Poetics of Space.4

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).
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