Amritasiddhi
The Amṛtasiddhi (
A verse in a paper manuscript of the Amṛtasiddhi, possibly a later copy, asserts its date as 2 March 1160. It is written in two languages,
Context
The Amṛtasiddhi is the earliest systematic and well-structured Sanskrit text about what came to be called Hatha yoga. It states that it was written by Madhavacandra. It was probably composed somewhere in the Deccan region of India by the late 11th century CE. Its opening and closing invocations to Siddha Virupa imply that it was written in a Vajrayana tantric Buddhist setting. The text was used also in Tibet, as the basis of the ’Chi med grub pa, a textual cycle whose name translated back into Sanskrit was Amarasiddhi.[3]
The text came to the attention of modern scholars in 2002, when Kurtis Schaeffer wrote an article about it. He used a bilingual Sanskrit and Tibetan manuscript known as C, once held in the Library of the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing. A modern critical edition of the Amṛtasiddhi, published in 2021 by the Indologists James Mallinson and Péter-Dániel Szántó, made use of C and eleven other manuscripts, with other evidence. The manuscripts date from the 11th to around the 17th centuries. C, the oldest, was preserved until the 1990s but is now inaccessible, and study has proceeded on the basis of a poor photocopy. The other eleven manuscripts survive in a Southern group at Madras (now Chennai) and Baroda, and in a Northern group at Jodhpur and Kathmandu.[4]
Manuscript C contains the text in three forms, written as groups of three lines, usually with three such groups on each folio. Each three-line group consists of CS, a line of Sanskrit in handwriting that imitates an East Indian style of the
Mallinson and Szántó suggest that the unnamed Tibetan scribe who made manuscript C copied out the Sanskrit, imitating what was presumably the original's East Indian handwriting; then transliterated it, for his Tibetan colleagues who could not read the Indian alphabet; and finally attached the famous translator-monk's Tibetan version, even though he knew it diverged in places from the Sanskrit that he had copied out. The scribe remarked at the end of the text that "it is difficult for somebody like me to modify it because the wise one translated it according to the [intended] meaning."[5]
Text
Synopsis
The title Amṛtasiddhi means "the attainment of immortality", from a–mṛta, "not [subject to] death".[6]
Chapters (vivekas) 1-10 describe how the yogic body functions, explaining its elements. The body is arranged around the
Chapters 11–14 describe the practice of yoga.
Chapters 15–18 set out the four grades of person, namely weak, middling, excellent, and outstanding.[11]
Chapters 19–31 define the four stages of yoga practice, namely Arambha, Ghata, Paricaya, and Nispatti. It is explained that death is caused by the "bliss of ejaculation", and that "innate bliss" or sahajānanda is brought about by reversing the flow so it moves up the
Chapters 32–35 describe the results of success in yoga. Imperfections of body, breath, and mind, are all overcome. The yogi then becomes able to make himself invisible. The yogi attains nirvāṇa.[11]
Amritasiddhimula
A Tibetan text, given the Sanskrit name Amṛtasiddhimula, "the root of achieving amṛta" by translation from the Tibetan by Mallinson and Szántó, has 58 verses, 48 of them "very rough translations" of parts of the chapters 11–13 of the Amṛtasiddhi, covering its core practices in a disordered way. Its other verses cover teachings not from the Amṛtasiddhi, including the idea that progress is tied to repeated practice of three mudras or seals for the body (karmamudrā, samayamudrā, and dharmamudrā), and a practice of stretching and retracting the arms and legs, like one in the Tibetan 'khrul 'khor.[12]
New yoga teachings
Bindu model of Hatha yoga
The Amṛtasiddhi places sun, moon, and fire inside the body. As in earlier texts, the moon is in the head, dripping
The body is evidently male; the text is thought to derive from a celibate male monastic tradition.[15] Also for the first time, the text states that preserving this fluid is necessary for life: "The nectar of immortality in the moon goes downwards; as a result men die." (4.11)[14]
The bindu is of two kinds, the male being bīja, semen, and the female being rajas, the "female generative fluid".
Core practices: mahāmudra, mahābandha, mahāvedha
The core practices of the Amṛtasiddhi are mahāmudra, mahābandha, mahāvedha, described in chapters 11 to 13.[16]
- Mahāmudra consists of sitting, pressing the perineum with the left heel and grasping the extended right foot with the hands; breath is taken into the body and held. The text states that this destroys impurities, activates bindu and nāda, and checks death.[16]
- Mahābandha is the combination of the perineum lock (contracting the perineum and pushing the apāna breath upwards) and the throat lock (restraining the breath and directing prāna downwards, until the two breaths join and rise). Together, these restrain and direct the prāna and apāna breaths so as to force open the central channel, the sushumna nadi.[16]
- Mahāvedha begins with two hand-gestures, the yoni mudrā and the liṅga mudrā. Both gestures were apparently made with the hands on the ground. The yoni mudrā may have consisted of wrapping the little and ring fingers of both hands around the thumbs. The liṅga mudrā consisted of clasping the fingers of both hands together and pointing the thumbs upwards; the gestures are described in the Brahmayamāla 43–45. The buttocks are then lifted, and with the feet toes-downward, the perineum is tapped on the heels. This causes all the knots (granthi) to be pierced, and the goals of yoga are attained.[16]
Buddhist features
A primary
At the navel is a white lotus. On top of that is the spotless orb of the scorching-rayed [sun].... In the middle [emanating from a downward-facing triangle for the female sexual organ]... I worship her... Chinnamasta... who is a yoginī, bearing the seal of yoga.[17]
Other Buddhist features of the text include the idea of a chandoha, a gathering place; the existence of four elements (not five as in Shaivite tradition); the term kutagara, a "multi-storeyed palace"; the
Metaphors from alchemy
Much of the description of the transformation to be achieved through yoga in the Amṛtasiddhi uses metaphors from Indian alchemy, a philosophy with aims such as the transformation of metals into gold and the attainment of immortality. Mallinson and Szántó give multiple examples of such language, extending to terms such as mahāmudrā, fundamental to Hatha yoga. They comment that if the alchemical transformations are often unclear, the details of the bodily transformations that are metaphorically described are even more so. They state that later authors writing about yoga in Sanskrit often did not have the alchemical knowledge to interpret these metaphors; early Hindi texts teach a similar yoga, but use the metaphor of distillation, not alchemy.[18]
Term | English translation | Alchemical meaning | Meaning in the Amṛtasiddhi |
---|---|---|---|
mahāmudrā |
"the Great Seal" | Seal of ash or mud closing joint between top and bottom halves of a closed crucible, preventing evaporation | with mahābandha, makes coiled Kundalini[b] straight, attain state of māraṇa |
mahābandha | "the Great Lock" | Process of stabilising mercury to resist heat; result of heating mercury with gold or silver to form a solid ball | Attainment of saṃpuṭa state |
mahāvedha | "the Great Piercing" | The transformative merging of a pair of reagents | Breath bursts forth from the double puṭa |
saṃpuṭa | "a sealed crucible" | Sealed fire-resistant pot containing mercury and other reagents | the body closed off by constrictions at throat and perineum |
jāraṇa | "digestion" | absorption of some substance by mercury | processes that work on semen, impurity, Bindu, and Nāda
|
cāraṇa | "activation" | ||
māraṇa | "killing" | Changing a substance's state by heating until it becomes inert, e.g. by oxidation |
The stilling or stopping of breath or Bindu |
Amṛtasiddhi 7.7 speaks of the effects of transforming Bindu, as if alchemically transforming mercury, with the terms "thickened" (mūrcchitaḥ), "fixed" (baddha), "dissolved" (līna), and "still" (niścala). The verse is parallelled by many later Hatha yoga texts and in Tantra by the Hevajratantra.[19]
Thickened, [Bindu] removes disease; bound, it makes one a Sky-Rover; absorbed, it brings about all supernatural powers and unmoving it bestows liberation.
— Amṛtasiddhi 7.7[20]
Interpretation
Relationship with tantric Buddhism
The scholar of Tibetan and Buddhist studies Kurtis Schaeffer stated in 2002 that the Amṛtasiddhi is "part of a hybrid tradition of yogic theory and practice" that "cannot be comfortably classified as either Buddhist or non-Buddhist", but instead "embodies the shared traditions of praxis and teaching" between Buddhist and (predominantly Shaiva) Natha groups.[21]
The yoga scholar
The scholar of religion Samuel Grimes notes that the Amṛtasiddhi shows evident Buddhist influence, and had an easily traced influence on physical Hatha yoga; its effects on later tantric Buddhism are doubtful. He notes that its Hatha yoga model has two key ideas: that preserving the Bindu stored in the head extends one's life; and that manipulating the breath to force it up through the central channel of the subtle body may reverse the fall of the Bindu and prolong life. Earlier tantric Buddhism disapproved of using force such as Hatha yoga.[24]
Relationship with later Shaivite Hatha yoga
Nils Jacob Liersch writes that the Gorakṣayogaśāstra, an early 15th century text attributed to the sage Gorakṣa, paraphrases much of the Amṛtasiddhi and borrows several verses from it. Like the earlier text, it does not use the name Hatha yoga directly; and like the Amaraughaprabodha, it condenses the Amṛtasiddhi, dropping much of the theory and doctrine to be less sectarian.[26]
Mallinson states that multiple Hatha yoga texts make use of the Amṛtasiddhi. The 16th century Yogacintāmaṇi and the 1837 Haṭhapradīpikājyotsnā quote it by name. The 13th century
Hagar Shalev argues that where classical Hinduism holds that the body is impermanent, and that suffering results from the self's attachment to the body, the Amṛtasiddhi marked an early stage in Hatha yoga's assignment of increased importance to the body. This includes the jīvanmukti state of living liberation in the body, though several texts view the state as at once embodied and disembodied without concern for inconsistency. He notes that Birch instead considers that the jīvanmukti state is transcendent rather than this-worldly in the Haṭhayogapradīpikā.[27]
Notes
- ^ The Amṛtasiddhi is the first text to teach this structure for the subtle body, which became commonplace later.
- ^ Kundalini fits well with the Subtle Body concepts described in the Amṛtasiddhi text, but is not mentioned directly.[15]
References
- ^ Mallinson & Szántó 2021, pp. 25–26.
- ^ a b Szántó, Péter-Dániel (15 September 2016). "A Brief Introduction to the Amrtasiddhi" (PDF). SOAS. Retrieved 2 February 2019.
- ^ Mallinson & Szántó 2021, pp. 3–5.
- ^ Mallinson & Szántó 2021, pp. 3–5, 25–28.
- ^ a b Mallinson & Szántó 2021, pp. 4, 25–28.
- ^ Mallinson & Szántó 2021, p. 7.
- ^ Mallinson & Szántó 2021, pp. 8, 114.
- ^ Mallinson & Szántó 2021, p. 117.
- ^ a b c Mallinson & Szántó 2021, p. 8.
- ^ a b c Burns, Graham (13 October 2017). "Sanskrit Reading Room: Haṭhayoga's Tantric Buddhist source text". SOAS. Retrieved 2 February 2019.
- ^ a b c Mallinson & Szántó 2021, p. 9.
- ^ Mallinson & Szántó 2021, pp. 13–15.
- ^ Mallinson & Singleton 2017, pp. 32, 180–181.
- ^ a b c d e f g Mallinson 2018.
- ^ a b Mallinson 2019.
- ^ a b c d Mallinson & Szántó 2021, pp. 128–134.
- ^ a b Mallinson & Szántó 2021, p. 107.
- ^ a b Mallinson & Szántó 2021, pp. 20–23.
- ^ Mallinson & Szántó 2021, pp. 21, 119.
- ^ Mallinson & Szántó 2021, p. 119.
- ^ Schaeffer 2002, p. 517-523.
- ^ Mallinson & Singleton 2017, p. xx.
- ^ Mallinson & Szántó 2021.
- ^ Grimes 2020.
- ^ Birch 2019.
- ^ a b c Liersch 2018.
- ^ Shalev 2022.
Sources
- S2CID 198531075.
- Grimes, Samuel (19 March 2020). "Amṛtasiddhi A Posteriori: An Exploratory Study on the Possible Impact of the Amṛtasiddhi on the Subsequent Sanskritic Vajrayāna Tradition". .
- Liersch, Nils Jacob (2018). "The Gorakṣayogaśāstra: an early text of Haṭhayoga". 17th World Sanskrit Conference. Vancouver: 9–13.
- OCLC 928480104.
- Mallinson, James (2018). Dominic Goodall, Shaman Hatley & Harunaga Isaacson (ed.). The Amṛtasiddhi: Haṭhayoga's Tantric Buddhist Source Text. Leiden: Brill. p. 409.
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ignored (help) - ISBN 978-81-8470-242-2.
- Mallinson, James (14 January 2019). "The Yoga of the Amṛtasiddhi". Soundcloud.com. SOAS University of London. (1 hour 5 minutes audio recording of a talk)
- Mandal, Niradbaran (2018). Satapathy, Bandita (ed.). Amr̥tasiddhiyogaḥ: Text, English translation and critical study on the basis of single manuscript. Lonavla, Pune: ISBN 978-9387198005.
- S2CID 169684620.
- Shalev, Hagar (2022). "The Increasing Importance of the Physical Body in Early Medieval Haṭhayoga: A Reflection on the Yogic Body in Liberation". Journal of Indian Philosophy. 50 (1): 117–142. S2CID 246056083.