The alchemical body : Siddha traditions in medieval India
"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."
History
xviii, 596 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780226894973, 9780226894997, 0226894975, 0226894991
34545939
1. Indian Paths to Immortality
2. Categories of Indian Thought: The Universe by Numbers
3. The Prehistory of Tantric Alchemy
4. Sources for the History of Tantric Alchemy in India
5. Tantric and Siddha Alchemical Literature
6. Tantra in the Rasarnava
7. Corresponding Hierarchies: The Substance of the Alchemical Body
8. Homologous Structures of the Alchemical Body
9. The Dynamics of Transformation in Siddha Alchemy
10. Penetration, Perfection, and Immortality
Epilogue: The Siddha Legacy in Modern India