Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Alchemical Body PDF full book. Access full book title The Alchemical Body by David Gordon White. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: David Gordon White Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022614934X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 616
Book Description
“[A] brilliant disquisition on . . . mostly unpublished texts for three allied systems of tantric thought and praxis (sexual, alchemical, and hatha yogic).” —The Journal of Asian Studies The Alchemical Body excavates and centers within its Indian context the lost tradition of the medieval Siddhas. Working from previously unexplored alchemical sources, David Gordon White 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 be understood only when viewed together. White opens the way to a new and more comprehensive understanding of medieval Indian mysticism, within the broader context of south Asian Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Islam. “White proves a skillful guide in disentangling historical and theoretical complexities that have thus far bedeviled the study of these influential aspects of medieval Indian culture.” —Yoga World “Anyone seriously interested in finding out more about authentic tantra, original hatha yoga, embodied liberation . . . sacred sexuality, paranormal abilities, healing, and of course alchemy will find White’s extraordinary book as fascinating as any Tom Clancy thriller.” —Georg Feuerstein, Yoga Journal “Remarkable . . . a study of the language of mystic experience and expression—the multitudinous symbols, rituals, and doctrines of the medieval siddhis, yogis, and alchemists.” —Skeptic Meditations
Author: David Gordon White Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022614934X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 616
Book Description
“[A] brilliant disquisition on . . . mostly unpublished texts for three allied systems of tantric thought and praxis (sexual, alchemical, and hatha yogic).” —The Journal of Asian Studies The Alchemical Body excavates and centers within its Indian context the lost tradition of the medieval Siddhas. Working from previously unexplored alchemical sources, David Gordon White 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 be understood only when viewed together. White opens the way to a new and more comprehensive understanding of medieval Indian mysticism, within the broader context of south Asian Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Islam. “White proves a skillful guide in disentangling historical and theoretical complexities that have thus far bedeviled the study of these influential aspects of medieval Indian culture.” —Yoga World “Anyone seriously interested in finding out more about authentic tantra, original hatha yoga, embodied liberation . . . sacred sexuality, paranormal abilities, healing, and of course alchemy will find White’s extraordinary book as fascinating as any Tom Clancy thriller.” —Georg Feuerstein, Yoga Journal “Remarkable . . . a study of the language of mystic experience and expression—the multitudinous symbols, rituals, and doctrines of the medieval siddhis, yogis, and alchemists.” —Skeptic Meditations
Author: David Gordon White Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226894997 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 620
Book Description
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.
Author: David Gordon White Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226895157 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality, and the true story of yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and more entertaining than most of us realize. To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation—to acquire power, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated, Sinister Yogis tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.
Author: David Gordon White Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691190453 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 661
Book Description
As David White explains in the Introduction to Tantra in Practice, Tantra is an Asian body of beliefs and practices that seeks to channel the divine energy that grounds the universe, in creative and liberating ways. The subsequent chapters reflect the wide geographical and temporal scope of Tantra by examining thirty-six texts from China, India, Japan, Nepal, and Tibet, ranging from the seventh century to the present day, and representing the full range of Tantric experience--Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and even Islamic. Each text has been chosen and translated, often for the first time, by an international expert in the field who also provides detailed background material. Students of Asian religions and general readers alike will find the book rich and informative. The book includes plays, transcribed interviews, poetry, parodies, inscriptions, instructional texts, scriptures, philosophical conjectures, dreams, and astronomical speculations, each text illustrating one of the diverse traditions and practices of Tantra. Thus, the nineteenth-century Indian Buddhist Garland of Gems, a series of songs, warns against the illusion of appearance by referring to bees, yogurt, and the fire of Malaya Mountain; while fourteenth-century Chinese Buddhist manuscripts detail how to prosper through the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper by burning incense, making offerings to scriptures, and chanting incantations. In a transcribed conversation, a modern Hindu priest in Bengal candidly explains how he serves the black Goddess Kali and feeds temple skulls lentils, wine, or rice; a seventeenth-century Nepalese Hindu praise-poem hammered into the golden doors to the temple of the Goddess Taleju lists a king's faults and begs her forgiveness and grace. An introduction accompanies each text, identifying its period and genre, discussing the history and influence of the work, and identifying points of particular interest or difficulty. The first book to bring together texts from the entire range of Tantric phenomena, Tantra in Practice continues the Princeton Readings in Religions series. The breadth of work included, geographic areas spanned, and expert scholarship highlighting each piece serve to expand our understanding of what it means to practice Tantra.
Author: David Gordon White Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022602783X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 393
Book Description
For those who wonder what relation actual Tantric practices bear to the "Tantric sex" currently being marketed so successfully in the West, David Gordon White has a simple answer: there is none. Sweeping away centuries of misunderstandings and misrepresentations, White returns to original texts, images, and ritual practices to reconstruct the history of South Asian Tantra from the medieval period to the present day. Kiss of the Yogini focuses on what White identifies as the sole truly distinctive feature of South Asian Tantra: sexualized ritual practices, especially as expressed in the medieval Kaula rites. Such practices centered on the exchange of powerful, transformative sexual fluids between male practitioners and wild female bird and animal spirits known as Yoginis. It was only by "drinking" the sexual fluids of the Yoginis that men could enter the family of the supreme godhead and thereby obtain supernatural powers and transform themselves into gods. By focusing on sexual rituals, White resituates South Asian Tantra, in its precolonial form, at the center of religious, social, and political life, arguing that Tantra was the mainstream, and that in many ways it continues to influence contemporary Hinduism, even if reformist misunderstandings relegate it to a marginal position. Kiss of the Yogini contains White's own translations from over a dozen Tantras that have never before been translated into any European language. It will prove to be the definitive work for persons seeking to understand Tantra and the crucial role it has played in South Asian history, society, culture, and religion.
Author: Kamil Zvelebil Publisher: Mandrake of Oxford ISBN: Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
In South India there is a society where priests and lay people claim supernatural powers. Where a sophisticated medical system underlies a quest for physical longevity and psychic immortality and where arcane and sexual rituals take place that are far removed from the Brahmanic tradition of the rest of India. That society is the Tamil Siddhas. Here expert Kamil Zvelebil offers a vivid picture of these people: religious beliefs, magical rites, alchemical practices, complex system of medicine, and inspired tradition of poetry. Topics covered include: On Siddhas medicine; The ideological basis of Siddhas quest of immortality; Basic tenets of Siddhas medicine; Diseases and their cure; Yoga in Siddhas tradition; Daily regime; Siddhas alchemy; Rejuvenation, longevity, and 'immortality'; Doctrines and traditions of the Siddhas; Tantrik Siddhas and Siddhas attitudes to sex; Siddhas poetry and other texts.
Author: Robert E. Cox Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 159477756X Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 245
Book Description
Outlines the principles and mechanics of the soul body, the spiritual vehicle that enables individual consciousness to survive the body’s death • Shows that the ancient Vedic, Egyptian, Hebraic, and Pythagorean traditions shared and understood this spiritual practice • Reveals modern science as only now awakening to this ancient sacred science Ancient peoples the world over understood that individual consciousness is rooted in a universal field of consciousness and is therefore eternal, surviving the passing of the physical body. They engaged in spiritual practices to make that transition maximally auspicious. These practices can be described as a kind of alchemy, in which base elements are discarded and higher levels of consciousness are realized. The result is the creation of a vehicle, a soul body, that carries consciousness beyond physical death. These spiritual preparations are symbolized in the Vedic, Egyptian, and Hebraic traditions as a divine stairway or ladder, a step-by-step path of ascent in which the practitioner raises consciousness by degrees until it comes to rest in the bosom of the infinite, thereby becoming “immortal.” This spiritual process explains the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, for example, whose reincarnation is confirmed in infancy through physical and spiritual signs, indicating that the consciousness has been carried from one lifetime to the next. In Creating the Soul Body, Robert Cox maps the spiritual journey of consciousness behind this sacred science of immortality and reveals the practice of creating a soul body in detail. He also shows that this ancient spiritual science resembles advanced theories of modern science, such as wave and particle theory and the unified field theory, and reveals that modern science is only now awakening to this ancient science of “immortality.”
Author: Mark Singleton Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199745986 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
Yoga is so prevalent in the modern world--practiced by pop stars, taught in schools, and offered in yoga centers, health clubs, and even shopping malls--that we take its presence, and its meaning, for granted. But how did the current yoga boom happen? And is it really rooted in ancient Indian practices, as many of its adherents claim? In this groundbreaking book, Mark Singleton calls into question many commonly held beliefs about the nature and origins of postural yoga (asana) and suggests a radically new way of understanding the meaning of yoga as it is practiced by millions of people across the world today. Singleton shows that, contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence in the Indian tradition for the kind of health and fitness-oriented asana practice that dominates the global yoga scene of the twenty-first century. Singleton's surprising--and surely controversial--thesis is that yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20th-century women's gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition. This discovery enables Singleton to explain, as no one has done before, how the most prevalent forms of postural yoga, like Ashtanga, Bikram and "Hatha" yoga, came to be the hugely popular phenomena they are today. Drawing on a wealth of rare documents from archives in India, the UK and the USA, as well as interviews with the few remaining, now very elderly figures in the 1930s Mysore asana revival, Yoga Body turns the conventional wisdom about yoga on its head.
Author: Aaron Cheak Publisher: ISBN: 9780987559821 Category : Alchemy Languages : en Pages : 683
Book Description
Featuring both well-established scholars and emerging, cutting-edge researchers, this book synthesises a quintessentially high caliber of academic authorities on the vast and baroque heritage of the alchemical world.
Author: Suzanne Anderson Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1631520822 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 457
Book Description
The Way of the Mysterial Woman is for every woman who feels the call into greatness, authenticity, and meaningful living. This is The Way for women who are stepping into their lives with mind, body, heart, and soul fully engaged, ready to awaken to their true potential. We hear the clarion call, but how will we meet it? It’s almost like we need a completely new internal operating system. The Mysterial Way is the upgrade we’ve been searching for. Women’s leadership development pioneers and co-authors Suzanne Anderson and Susan Cannon know that we’re not alone in our yearning to meet this call. In fact, they assure us that this is a naturally occurring global imperative for women. The Way of the Mysterial Woman reveals a Feminine source code, helping us once and for all break through our old limitations, and effectively take our lives to the next level so we can meet the unique callings and urgent challenges of these dynamic times. This is not a passive book for armchair travelers. Drawing upon real life success stories, based on their 12 years of running University certificate women’s leadership programs, readers are guided through a step-by-step, transformative “Mysterial Sequence.” Each interactive chapter offers practical and fun insights and practices that compel us toward genuine shifts and solid growth. The Way of the Mysterial Woman is a blend of cutting edge transformational psychology, ancient Mystery school secrets, and visionary evolutionary thinking delivered in a warm, down-to-earth style. Here is the elegant code we‘ve been searching for that finally unlocks our greatest potential.
Author: David Gordon White
Author: David Gordon White
Author: David Gordon White
Author: David Gordon White
Author: David Gordon White
Author: David Gordon White
Author: Kamil Zvelebil
Author: Robert E. Cox
Author: Mark Singleton
Author: Aaron Cheak
Author: Suzanne Anderson