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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Hinduism
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The Alchemical Body - Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Paperback)
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The Alchemical Body - Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Paperback)
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Beginning in the fifth century A.D., various Indian mystics began
to innovate a body of techniques with which to render themselves
immortal. These people called themselves Siddhas, a term formerly
reserved for a class of demigods, revered by Hindus and Buddhists
alike, who were known to inhabit mountaintops or the atmospheric
regions. Over the following five to eight hundred years, three
types of Hindu Siddha orders emerged, each with its own specialized
body of practice. These were the Siddha Kaula, whose adherents
sought bodily immortality through erotico-mystical practices; the
Rasa Siddhas, medieval India's alchemists, who sought to transmute
their flesh-and-blood bodies into immortal bodies through the
ingestion of the mineral equivalents of the sexual fluids of the
god Siva and his consort, the Goddess; and the Nath Siddhas, whose
practice of hatha yoga projected the sexual and laboratory
practices of the Siddha Kaula and Rasa Siddhas upon the internal
grid of the subtle body. For India's medieval Siddhas, these three
conjoined types of practice led directly to bodily immortality,
supernatural powers, and self-divinization; in a word, to the
exalted status of the semidivine Siddhas of the older popular
cults. In The Alchemical Body, David Gordon White excavates and
centers within its broader Indian context this lost tradition of
the medieval Siddhas. Working from a body of previously unexplored
alchemical sources, he demonstrates for the first time that the
medieval disciplines of Hindu alchemy and hatha yoga were practiced
by one and the same people, and that they can only be understood
when viewed together. Human sexual fluids and the structures of the
subtle body aremicrocosmic equivalents of the substances and
apparatus manipulated by the alchemist in his laboratory. With
these insights, White opens the way to a new and more comprehensive
understanding of the entire sweep of medieval Indian mysticism,
within the broader context of south Asian Hinduism, Buddhism,
Jainism, and Islam. This book is an essential reference for anyone
interested in Indian yoga, alchemy, and the medieval beginnings of
science.
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