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The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions In Medieval India.
312
Book Reviews
endorse Francis Bacon’s account of the two books of God’s word and his works as methodologically exemplary, without reference to the feminist critique of Bacon in an era of gross and progressive environmental degradation of nature, could well compound the isolation of theological discourse from the actuality of the human condition (see p. 178). On the occasion of the presentation at New College of a truly magnificent portrait of Tom Torrance to the University of Edinburgh, the then Dean, Professor Duncan Forrester, referred to Professor Torrance as a ‘bonnie fechter’. This Scots phrase summed up with generosity the sometimes prickly ambiguity of a great, but not flawless, Christian thinker. Despite the extensive list of honours cited in the curriculum vitae with which the reader is provided by Professor McGrath, it has to be acknowledged that Professor Torrance’s main influence has been within the ambit of the Scottish diaspora and its Presbyterian colleges. For reasons that are not made clear, the subject of this book was denied the Bampton, Gifford or the Stanton Lectures. As with Donald MacKinnon, so with Thomas Forsyth Torrance, the voices of the crushed souls who were stepped on in passing are silent. This book is, as it were, in some degree ‘in denial’, and if it is to remain unchallenged as a benchmark for the biography of Christian theologians, then we are in danger of living in a docetic world ruled by discourses cut off from embodiment and from the solidarity represented to us in the full manifold of the human and social sciences. Should we, can we, divorce the person of the Christian from his or her life’s work? Tom Torrance surely deserves better than this naive biography: truth and compassion are the handmaidens banished from this unsubtle, partial and occasionally immature (cf. the unworthy comment upon Heinrich Ott [p. 103]) intellectual account of a very remarkable, but not unproblematic, man and theologian. 2000 Academic Press
This reviewer had the good fortune to come under the direct influence of a number of teachers to whom the word ‘great’ could be ascribed. Thomas Forsyth Torrance falls within this small group. Unfortunately, and in a deeply disappointing way, McGrath’s biography has failed to comprehend the true dimensions of his subject. In an era of Teaching Quality Assessment and the Quality Assurance Agency, figures of the power and stature of T. F. Torrance and Donald MacKinnon are in effect ruled out of order of institutional existence: they would be too disruptive. Precisely why such individuals of powerful independent spirit are now largely, if not wholly, extinct is a question worth addressing. Both Torrance and MacKinnon are distinguished members of a cohort that passed through the Second World War. They responded to the demands of truth seeking. For them, questions of life and death ranked higher than obediential conformity to the maximisation of banal performativity. We, as readers, need to see such figures in the fullness of their great but flawed humanity, so that, not least, we can learn why and how it is that some human beings continue to engage with truth seeking whilst others relapse into the scholastic pathos and repetitive tedium that passes for intellectual life in most British universities. RICHARD ROBERTS Lancaster University doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0264, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions In Medieval India. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997, xviii+596 pp., £39.95, $50.00 (hardback) ISBN 0 226 89497 5, £15.50, $22.00 (paperback) ISBN 0 226 89499 1. Some years ago I met a young yogin named Swami Suddananda in Australia who had just come from the Kumbh Mela in India,
Book Reviews 313 the great festival of ascetics. He told me of his years of traveling around India and of studying many books. Besides hatha yoga, he also practised alchemy. At the time this surprised me, as I thought of alchemy as a lost medieval science. David Gordon White was not fortunate in finding such a swami in India. At first, he went on a research tour to India, hoping ‘to find a living yogin-alchemist and to sit at his feet until I had solved all the riddles the Rasarnava and the Gorakh Bani had posed for me.’ He found no alchemist. A few Nath Siddhas who practised the hatha yoga taught by Gorakhnath would divulge their secrets to him only after a long discipleship. One wonders what form the book would have taken if instead of twelve years of scholarship he had sat for twelve years at the feet of Nath Siddhas versed in the real tradition. White sees this himself, for he states that the twelve years of writing the book were equal to the period of preparation of a yogin in the alchemical-yogic tradition of which he writes. He acknowledges that his interpretations of the language of the Hindu alchemical, hathayogic and tantric traditions bear no stamp of approval from any Indian guru whatsoever. White’s long years of scholarship and fieldwork have, however, borne fruit in an important study of a neglected field of Hindu tantrism. White quotes both Douglas Brooks, who says that Hindu tantrism has been treated as ‘an unwanted stepchild in the family of Hindu studies’, and Betty Dobbs, who says that Hindu studies have rejected alchemy as fuzzy mysticism. After reading White, no one will be able to say either again, for he takes the fuzziness away to reveal a tightly controlled relationship among sacred geography, alchemy and the human body. To White, the human body is an alchemical body. Hence the title of the book. This book is both scholarly and fascinating. White writes in a fresh style peppered with charming Americanese. Medieval
alchemists are described as ‘quicksilver entrepreneurs’, and White has a very original translation of Patanjali’s yogas cittavritti nirodhah as yoga ‘preventing thought from going around in circles’. White has studied alchemical texts from the Maharaja Man Singh Library at Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur; Anup Sanskrit Library at Lalgarh Palace, Bikaner; Gujarat Ayurved University in Jamnagar; and the Nepal National Archives in Katmandu. Though this is primarily a textual work, White has had help from Nath Siddhas, including the abbots of Nath Siddha monasteries, Indian academics such as Dr Hari Shankar Sharma of Gujarat Ayurved University, the greatest authority on alchemy in India; and Western academics of great importance, including Douglas Brooks, Dominic Wujastyk, Arion Rosu, Alexis Sanderson, and the source of his early inspiration, Mircea Eliade. If you look the word Siddha up in the indexes of most books on Hinduism, you will rarely find any entry. The subtitle of White’s book, Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, is expressive of the main substance of the study. Here at last is a book concerned solely with the lost Siddha medieval world. The core argument of the book is that until the fifth century AD, Siddhas were demi-gods. In the medieval period Siddha movements developed with tantric, yogic and alchemical practices to reach the heights of the semi-divine Siddhas and to achieve immortality. White carefully defines these various Siddha groups. A Siddha is a ‘realized, perfected one’, who attains through his practice the siddhis, ‘realizations, perfections’, which are superhuman powers, and jivanmukti, or bodily immortality. He discusses Mahesvara Siddhas who are devoted to Siva; Sittars in Tamil Nadu who are alchemists; Mahasiddhas and Siddhacaryas, early Buddhist tantrikas in Bengal; Rasa Siddhas, the alchemists of medieval Central India; and
314
Book Reviews
the Nath Siddhas. White sees the Nath Siddhas as the most important group. They are found especially in Northwest India, though extending into South India, especially to Srisailam. The Siddha tradition flowered in the twelfth century and lasted several centuries before declining to the present day with a few mysterious Nath Siddhas and Tamil Sittars still practising alchemy and hatha yoga. Throughout the book the emphasis is almost wholly on the Nath Siddhas, with detailed consideration of the texts of Gorakhnath. White discusses the main alchemical texts, particularly the Rasarnava, and the history of alchemy as well as the various lists of the nine Naths and the Eighty-Four Siddhas. There is an erudite interpretation of the legend of Matsyendranath, showing that matsyodariyoga, the ‘fish-belly conjunction’, refers to the sacred geography of Benares and the Matsyodari channel and lake, the river triad of Ganges-Yamuna-Sarasvati, and inner yogic physiology. The relationship between erotico-mystical and hathayogic practices is explored in the context of Matsyendranath and Kamarupa, the land of women. White shows that the three building blocks of medieval Siddha traditions are alchemy, hatha yoga and tantric worship involving the use of sexual fluids. In alchemy, mercury is equated with the semen of Siva, and sulphur is the uterine or menstrual blood of the Goddess. Mercury affects metal and the body in the
same way. Semen is the vital substance in tantra and hatha yoga, for both tantric sexual practices and hatha yoga are concerned with raising the kundalini energy at the base of the spine. Through siddhasana and matsyodari-yoga the kundalini rises and carries semen up the susumna nadi, the medial channel along the spine, to the head, where it is converted to a source of spiritual power. There is an absorbing account of places where the geographical and geological macrocosm reproduces the alchemical and yogic macrocosm: at sacred wells, caves, and mountains, found at such sakta pithas as Hinglaj in Baluchistan, Kamakhya in Assam, Girnar in Gujarat, Srisailam in Andhra Pradesh, Kedarnath in Uttar Pradesh, Ataka in the eastern Iranian region of Khorasan, and the cave of Ca-ri in Southeastern Tibet. This is a long book of nearly 600 pages, with 167 pages of notes, themselves often more absorbing than the text. There is an extensive and useful bibliography. Lorenzen has said that this book ‘will long remain the definitive study of religious alchemy in South Asia’ (American Anthropologist, 99 [1997], p. 848), which I heartily endorse. There is a growing number of Siddha studies, and The Alchemical Body is an important foundational book for this new field of study. RICHARD SHAW Lancaster University
Book Reviews
endorse Francis Bacon’s account of the two books of God’s word and his works as methodologically exemplary, without reference to the feminist critique of Bacon in an era of gross and progressive environmental degradation of nature, could well compound the isolation of theological discourse from the actuality of the human condition (see p. 178). On the occasion of the presentation at New College of a truly magnificent portrait of Tom Torrance to the University of Edinburgh, the then Dean, Professor Duncan Forrester, referred to Professor Torrance as a ‘bonnie fechter’. This Scots phrase summed up with generosity the sometimes prickly ambiguity of a great, but not flawless, Christian thinker. Despite the extensive list of honours cited in the curriculum vitae with which the reader is provided by Professor McGrath, it has to be acknowledged that Professor Torrance’s main influence has been within the ambit of the Scottish diaspora and its Presbyterian colleges. For reasons that are not made clear, the subject of this book was denied the Bampton, Gifford or the Stanton Lectures. As with Donald MacKinnon, so with Thomas Forsyth Torrance, the voices of the crushed souls who were stepped on in passing are silent. This book is, as it were, in some degree ‘in denial’, and if it is to remain unchallenged as a benchmark for the biography of Christian theologians, then we are in danger of living in a docetic world ruled by discourses cut off from embodiment and from the solidarity represented to us in the full manifold of the human and social sciences. Should we, can we, divorce the person of the Christian from his or her life’s work? Tom Torrance surely deserves better than this naive biography: truth and compassion are the handmaidens banished from this unsubtle, partial and occasionally immature (cf. the unworthy comment upon Heinrich Ott [p. 103]) intellectual account of a very remarkable, but not unproblematic, man and theologian. 2000 Academic Press
This reviewer had the good fortune to come under the direct influence of a number of teachers to whom the word ‘great’ could be ascribed. Thomas Forsyth Torrance falls within this small group. Unfortunately, and in a deeply disappointing way, McGrath’s biography has failed to comprehend the true dimensions of his subject. In an era of Teaching Quality Assessment and the Quality Assurance Agency, figures of the power and stature of T. F. Torrance and Donald MacKinnon are in effect ruled out of order of institutional existence: they would be too disruptive. Precisely why such individuals of powerful independent spirit are now largely, if not wholly, extinct is a question worth addressing. Both Torrance and MacKinnon are distinguished members of a cohort that passed through the Second World War. They responded to the demands of truth seeking. For them, questions of life and death ranked higher than obediential conformity to the maximisation of banal performativity. We, as readers, need to see such figures in the fullness of their great but flawed humanity, so that, not least, we can learn why and how it is that some human beings continue to engage with truth seeking whilst others relapse into the scholastic pathos and repetitive tedium that passes for intellectual life in most British universities. RICHARD ROBERTS Lancaster University doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0264, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions In Medieval India. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997, xviii+596 pp., £39.95, $50.00 (hardback) ISBN 0 226 89497 5, £15.50, $22.00 (paperback) ISBN 0 226 89499 1. Some years ago I met a young yogin named Swami Suddananda in Australia who had just come from the Kumbh Mela in India,
Book Reviews 313 the great festival of ascetics. He told me of his years of traveling around India and of studying many books. Besides hatha yoga, he also practised alchemy. At the time this surprised me, as I thought of alchemy as a lost medieval science. David Gordon White was not fortunate in finding such a swami in India. At first, he went on a research tour to India, hoping ‘to find a living yogin-alchemist and to sit at his feet until I had solved all the riddles the Rasarnava and the Gorakh Bani had posed for me.’ He found no alchemist. A few Nath Siddhas who practised the hatha yoga taught by Gorakhnath would divulge their secrets to him only after a long discipleship. One wonders what form the book would have taken if instead of twelve years of scholarship he had sat for twelve years at the feet of Nath Siddhas versed in the real tradition. White sees this himself, for he states that the twelve years of writing the book were equal to the period of preparation of a yogin in the alchemical-yogic tradition of which he writes. He acknowledges that his interpretations of the language of the Hindu alchemical, hathayogic and tantric traditions bear no stamp of approval from any Indian guru whatsoever. White’s long years of scholarship and fieldwork have, however, borne fruit in an important study of a neglected field of Hindu tantrism. White quotes both Douglas Brooks, who says that Hindu tantrism has been treated as ‘an unwanted stepchild in the family of Hindu studies’, and Betty Dobbs, who says that Hindu studies have rejected alchemy as fuzzy mysticism. After reading White, no one will be able to say either again, for he takes the fuzziness away to reveal a tightly controlled relationship among sacred geography, alchemy and the human body. To White, the human body is an alchemical body. Hence the title of the book. This book is both scholarly and fascinating. White writes in a fresh style peppered with charming Americanese. Medieval
alchemists are described as ‘quicksilver entrepreneurs’, and White has a very original translation of Patanjali’s yogas cittavritti nirodhah as yoga ‘preventing thought from going around in circles’. White has studied alchemical texts from the Maharaja Man Singh Library at Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur; Anup Sanskrit Library at Lalgarh Palace, Bikaner; Gujarat Ayurved University in Jamnagar; and the Nepal National Archives in Katmandu. Though this is primarily a textual work, White has had help from Nath Siddhas, including the abbots of Nath Siddha monasteries, Indian academics such as Dr Hari Shankar Sharma of Gujarat Ayurved University, the greatest authority on alchemy in India; and Western academics of great importance, including Douglas Brooks, Dominic Wujastyk, Arion Rosu, Alexis Sanderson, and the source of his early inspiration, Mircea Eliade. If you look the word Siddha up in the indexes of most books on Hinduism, you will rarely find any entry. The subtitle of White’s book, Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, is expressive of the main substance of the study. Here at last is a book concerned solely with the lost Siddha medieval world. The core argument of the book is that until the fifth century AD, Siddhas were demi-gods. In the medieval period Siddha movements developed with tantric, yogic and alchemical practices to reach the heights of the semi-divine Siddhas and to achieve immortality. White carefully defines these various Siddha groups. A Siddha is a ‘realized, perfected one’, who attains through his practice the siddhis, ‘realizations, perfections’, which are superhuman powers, and jivanmukti, or bodily immortality. He discusses Mahesvara Siddhas who are devoted to Siva; Sittars in Tamil Nadu who are alchemists; Mahasiddhas and Siddhacaryas, early Buddhist tantrikas in Bengal; Rasa Siddhas, the alchemists of medieval Central India; and
314
Book Reviews
the Nath Siddhas. White sees the Nath Siddhas as the most important group. They are found especially in Northwest India, though extending into South India, especially to Srisailam. The Siddha tradition flowered in the twelfth century and lasted several centuries before declining to the present day with a few mysterious Nath Siddhas and Tamil Sittars still practising alchemy and hatha yoga. Throughout the book the emphasis is almost wholly on the Nath Siddhas, with detailed consideration of the texts of Gorakhnath. White discusses the main alchemical texts, particularly the Rasarnava, and the history of alchemy as well as the various lists of the nine Naths and the Eighty-Four Siddhas. There is an erudite interpretation of the legend of Matsyendranath, showing that matsyodariyoga, the ‘fish-belly conjunction’, refers to the sacred geography of Benares and the Matsyodari channel and lake, the river triad of Ganges-Yamuna-Sarasvati, and inner yogic physiology. The relationship between erotico-mystical and hathayogic practices is explored in the context of Matsyendranath and Kamarupa, the land of women. White shows that the three building blocks of medieval Siddha traditions are alchemy, hatha yoga and tantric worship involving the use of sexual fluids. In alchemy, mercury is equated with the semen of Siva, and sulphur is the uterine or menstrual blood of the Goddess. Mercury affects metal and the body in the
same way. Semen is the vital substance in tantra and hatha yoga, for both tantric sexual practices and hatha yoga are concerned with raising the kundalini energy at the base of the spine. Through siddhasana and matsyodari-yoga the kundalini rises and carries semen up the susumna nadi, the medial channel along the spine, to the head, where it is converted to a source of spiritual power. There is an absorbing account of places where the geographical and geological macrocosm reproduces the alchemical and yogic macrocosm: at sacred wells, caves, and mountains, found at such sakta pithas as Hinglaj in Baluchistan, Kamakhya in Assam, Girnar in Gujarat, Srisailam in Andhra Pradesh, Kedarnath in Uttar Pradesh, Ataka in the eastern Iranian region of Khorasan, and the cave of Ca-ri in Southeastern Tibet. This is a long book of nearly 600 pages, with 167 pages of notes, themselves often more absorbing than the text. There is an extensive and useful bibliography. Lorenzen has said that this book ‘will long remain the definitive study of religious alchemy in South Asia’ (American Anthropologist, 99 [1997], p. 848), which I heartily endorse. There is a growing number of Siddha studies, and The Alchemical Body is an important foundational book for this new field of study. RICHARD SHAW Lancaster University