The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India

542 Pages·1998·6 MB·English

by  David Gordon White

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
Paperback edition 2007
Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11
10 3 4 5 6
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-89497-3 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-89497-5 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-89499-7 (paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-89499-1 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14934-9 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data White, David Gordon.
The alchemical body: Siddha traditions in medieval India / David Gordon
White.
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. Nātha sect. I. Title.
BL1241.56.W47 1996
294.5′514—dc20 96-16977
CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
T H E A L C H E M I C A L B O D Y
Siddha Traditions in Medival India
D A V I D G O R D O N W H I T E
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS/CHICAGO AND LONDON
for Catherine
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
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-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
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 Bachelard’s work is a phenomenological 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 internal 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.6 Therefore, the best way to formulate a
theory concerning the nature of the experiences for which these words and
images are so many signposts is to generate a symbolic lexicon from the
multitude 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 Śaiva (and tantric), population always already assume to
be the case prior to giving 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 written with regard to its
rejection of alchemy as so much fuzzy mysticism, that “modern science, like
adolescence, denies its parentage,”9 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 bānīs, the mystic vernacular poems of
Gorakhnāth, 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 Rasārṇava (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 Rasārṇava and the Gorakh Bānī 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 charlatans), and the few Nāth Siddhas who struck me as genuine
practitioners of the haṭha yoga taught by Gorakhnāth made it clear that they
would be willing 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 followed the leads the texts
offered me. In spite of my rush at the outset, it is only now, after an additional
ten years, that I feel myself capable of understanding these mystic disciplines
sufficiently to be able to share certain of my insights on them. Let the reader be
forewarned, then, that my interpretations of the language of the Hindu
alchemical, hathayogic, and tantric traditions bear no stamp of approval from
any Indian guru of any sect whatsoever. This is a textual study, one that is based,
in any case, on a number of texts for which the all-important chain of
transmission of oral tradition from teacher to disciple has long since been
broken. In the absence of a teacher from the tradition itself, I have taken the
difficult road of letting the texts speak for themselves and even communicate
among themselves as the exemplars and followers of the medieval Siddha
traditions under study here would have done. I hope they will speak to the reader
of this work as well.
I feel somewhat justified in my textualist bias, however, since it is shared by
the alchemical tradition itself. We read in three major alchemical works that
“neither sequence (oral teachings) without written sources nor written sources
without sequence [are acceptable]. Knowing the written sources to be conjoined
with sequence, the person who then practices [alchemy] partakes of the
siddhis.”10 On still another score I also believe this to be an authentic work. The
twelve years’ preparation this book has required of me corresponds to the
standard period of preparation of a yogin in the traditions under study here.
Twelve years, the mystic homologue of a year of twelve months in which the
seasons and the dance of sun and moon are brought full circle, seems to me to be
an appropriate period for this scholarly exercise, which will have succeeded if its
final transmutation of raw data into food for thought pleases the reader’s palate.
Many are the people to whom I owe thanks for their help in the preparation of
this book. A great number of these persons’ names will be found in the text of
this book itself or in the endnotes, under the rubric of “personal
communication.” This group includes several of the countless Nāth Siddhas who
offered to share their chillums and knowledge with me (usually in that order) as
well as fellow academics from both India and the west. In India, these include
Bhambhulnāth, the late abbot of the Hardwar monastery; Avedyanāth, abbot of
the Gorakhpur monastery; and the great Nāth Siddha scholar Narharināth, abbot
of the Caughera monastery in the Dang region of southern Nepal; Sivaprasad
Dabbaral, Dr. Laxmi Chandra Sastri, Dr. Surya Kumar Yogi, Dr. N. Sethu
Raghunathan, Dr. Rajendra Kumar Agrawal of Gurukul Kangri University in
Hardwar, Dr. Damodar Joshi of Benares Hindu University, Dr. Siddhinandan
Mishra of Sampurnanand Sanskrit University (Benares), Dr. Hari Shankar
Sharma of Gujarat Ayurved University (Jamnagar), Mahavir Prasad Gill of the