Untitled - Magia Metachemica

614 Pages·2009·17.66 MB·English

T HE A L C H E M I C AL B O DY
Siddha Traditions in Medieval India
r
DAVID GORDON WHITE
HE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS / CHICAGO AND LONDON
David Gordon White is associate professor of religious
studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
He is the author of Myths of the Dog-Man (iooi), also
published by the University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
©1996 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1996
Printed in the United States of America
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 1 2 34 5
ISBN: 0-226-89497-5 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
White, David Gordon.
The alchemical body : Siddha traditions in
medieval India / David Gordon WTiite.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-89497-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Siddhas. 2. Alchemy—Religious aspects—
Tantrism. 3. Yoga, Hatha. 4. Tantrism. 5. Nätha
sect. I. Title.
BL1241.56.W47 1996
294.5'5i4—dc2o 96-16977
CIP
© The paper used in this publication meets the
minimum requirements of the American National
Standard for nformation Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-
1984.
for Catherine

CONTENTS
PREFACE / ix
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION / xv
ABBREVIATIONS / xvii
ONE
Indian Paths to Immortality / i
TWO
Categories of Indian Thought: The Universe by Numbers /
THREE
The Prehistory of Tantric Alchemy / 8
4
FOUR
Sources for the History of Tantric Alchemy in India /
7
FIVE
Tantric and Siddha Alchemical Literature / ¡^
SIX
Tantra in the Rasärnava / 171
SEVEN
Corresponding Hierarchies: The Substance of the Alchemical Body / i8
4
EIGHT
Homologous Structures of the Alchemical Body / ^8
NINE
The Dynamics of Transformation in Siddha Alchemy / ¿(^
TEN
Penetration, Perfection, and Immortality / ^
EPILOGUE
The Siddha Legacy in Modern India / ^
NOTES / <„
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY / ^
s
INDEX / 555
PREFACE
In the new age India of the 1990s, it has become popular, even fashionable,
to have the name of a täntrika, 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 hathayoga, which formed two im-
portant fields of theory and practice within the vast current of Indian mys-
ticism 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 expres-
sion, 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
rrtjace
any ground of personal mystical experience. Apart from a short period of
schooling in hath a 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-brain faith in Kute
Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic 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 repli-
cation." '
Ultimate reality is beyond my reach, either to experience or express. I
nonetheless hope that these pages may serve to bridge a certain gap be-
tween 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.31 believe, however, that the most useful western
companion to the present study is the work of the French philosopher Gas-
ton Bachelard entitled The Poetics of Space* Bachelard's work is a phenome-
nological study of literary depictions of the experience of space, from cellar
to attic, from Chinese boxes to the interiors of seashells. In these pages I
will endeavor to follow just such a phenomenological approach, pointing
out homologies where the sources would seem to indicate connections in-
ternal to the traditions themselves, without attempting to force the textual
data into any preconceived model.5
I treat alchemical and tantric discourse as self-referential, as part and
parcel of a self-enclosed network of specifically Indian symbols and signs,
my assumption being that the words and images of these traditions are
always referring, before all else, to other words and images/1 Therefore,
the best way to formulate a theory concerning the nature of the experiences
Preface
for which these wrords and images are so many signposts is to generate a
symbolic lexicon from the multiuide of intersecting words and images the
sources offer.7 Rather than exposing the doctrines of any single school,
movement, or exegetical tradition, this study seeks to lay bare the words,
images, and logic that a wide swath of the Hindu, and particularly Saiva
(and tantric), population always already assume to be the case prior to giv-
ing voice to their doctrines.
This is, in the main, a study of a pervasive Indian worldview from a
tantric and alchemical perspective. Now, if we follow Douglas Brooks
when he maintains that Hindu tantrism has been treated as "an unwanted
stepchild in the family of Hindu studies";8 and if, as Betty Dobbs has writ-
ten with regard to its rejection of alchemy as so much fuzzy mysticism,
that "modern science, like adolescence, denies its parentage,"0 then the
subject of this study has a troubled family life. Perhaps it is the stepparents'
and adolescents' judgment that one ought to question here.
This book is the fruit of twelve years of research begun at the University
of Chicago, where I began to translate the tów/s, the mystic vernacular
poems of Gorakhnäth, under the direction of Professor Kali Charan Bahl.
The use of metaphor and imagery in these poems reminded me of similar
language from an alchemical work entitled the Rasamava (The Flood of
Mercury), which I had attempted to translate (with mitigated success) for
a self-styled French mystic a few years earlier.
It was on the basis of these first tentative identifications that I embarked
in earnest on the present research, going to India in 1984-85 under the
auspices of a grant from the American Institute for Indian Studies. It had
been my intention, in undertaking my research tour, to find a living yogin-
alchemist and to sit at his feet until I had solved all the riddles the Rasär-
nava and the Gorakh Barn had posed for me. This endeavor was a total
failure. There were no alchemists to be found in the places in which I
sought them out (although I did meet a number of amateurs and charla-
tans), and the few Näth Siddhas who struck me as genuine practitioners of
the hath a yoga taught by Gorakhnäth made it clear that they would be will-
ing to divulge their secrets to me only after a long period of discipleship.
Being a westerner in a hurry, I spurned this path, in spite of its many
attractions, for that of the textualist. First in India, under the guidance of
a number of professors of Ayurvedic studies, and later in Europe and the
United States, then in India and Nepal once again, under the auspices of a
grant from the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, I fol-