[INDOLOGY] Alchemy metaphor

[Isabelle Ratie]

Dear Christopher,

The passage in IPVV, vol. III, p. 348 is as difficult (to me at least)
as it is interesting. Needless to say I don't claim to understand it
better than you or any of the other learned scholars involved in this
discussion, all the more since I am utterly ignorant of Indian
alchemy. I would simply like to make a few additional remarks, hoping
that they won't end up making things more obscure than they already
are!

1. As regards the first part of the analogy: Abhinavagupta also uses
the image of mercury transforming copper into gold in Tantraaloka
5.151 (note the use of vedhita by the way): svaya.mbhaasaatmanaanena
taadaatmyaṃ yaaty ananyadhii.h / "sivena hemataa.m yadvat taamra.m
suutena vedhitam // (Cf. also TA 14.12). See also e.g. Yogaraaja ad
Paramaarthasaara 96, p. 186: yathaa taamradravya.m siddharasapaataat
suvar.niibhavati... I'm afraid these passages don't shed much light on
the problems that you are trying to solve - still, maybe it is worth
looking for other passages of this sort that could be more detailed?

2. I would consider with much caution the suggestion that
tannijaruupasamyagviddhakanakaruupataa is a marginal annotation that
crept in the text of the KSTS edition, and this because (not to
mention that marginal annotations are much more rare in IPVV
manuscripts than in IPV manuscripts, and understandably so given the
length of the IPVV) the IPVV comments on the lost text of the Viv.rti,
so that there is much in the IPVV that does not make sense to us
simply because we don't have the muula-text (compare for instance IPVV
ad IPK 1.3.6 to 1.5.3 with the Viv.rti fragments now at our disposal
thanks to Raffaele Torella's editions...So much that sounded like
gibberish before makes sense now!). It is true that tannijaruupa- for
instance rings like a mere gloss of some tatsvaruupa- ending compound;
but then again it is likely that here Abhinavagupta is simply
explaining the analogy as he found it in the Viv.rti.

3. I understand why you want piitalataa to mean "gold leaf", although
I must confess that just as Raffaele Torella and Ashok Aklujkar, my
first reaction was to think "brassness". I see why you want to
understand it in this way: you need gold here rather than brass,
especially given the passage that you brought to the list's attention
in the first place, which is clearly about gold being dissolved by
mercury. But I don't know if lataa can have this meaning, and in the
context of this analogy we would rather expect a word matching
idantaa, i.e. with an abstract suffix. Would it be possible to
understand piitalataa as we would understand piitataa, i.e. as
"goldness" (given that piita means both "yellow" and "gold", and that
piitala also means yellow/yellow substance)? I'm afraid that piitala
only designates brass but I have no certainty in this regard. Wouldn't
you contemplate a tentative emendation into piitataa then? In any case
the compound that you see as spurious could actually serve your
overall interpretation. Abhinavagupta could mean that in the
turyaatiita state of consciousness even the remnants of objectivity
(in the form of residual traces) are dissolved/liquefied and immersed
into the pure "I", just as mercury liquefies the goldness
(piitalataa/piitataa) that remains (it seems to me that ava"se.sa
rather goes with piitalataa/piitataa) due to the force of residual
traces, by bringing it into a full "jara.na" (maturation, or whatever
this technical term really means) where this goldness (this time
kanakaruupataa) is entirely pervaded by the own form of this
(tannijaruupa) - that is, by the own form of mercury.

Does this sound awfully far-fetched? I don't know - once more I have
no certainty whatsoever as regards the meaning of this passage, and I
can only say that you are brave to tackle it!

All best wishes,

Isabelle

-- 
Dr. Isabelle Ratié
Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia
Austrian Academy of Sciences
Apostelgasse 23, 1030 Vienna, Austria



2014-07-13 11:48 GMT+02:00 Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com>:

> ​Just on the pitta/pīta issue, these are, from the point of view of
> historical phonology, alternants of the same word meaning "yellow" (cf. law
> of morae; Mayrhofer). Bile, pitta, in Indian medicine, was "[yellow, pīta]
> bile."  The word pīta occurs very frequently in ayurvedic sentences in
> close collocation with the word pitta (e.g., see this listing of
> collocations
> <http://sarit.indology.info/newphilo/search3t?dbname=indologica&word=.*pitt.*+.*p%C4%ABt.*&OUTPUT=conc&CONJUNCT=PROXY&DISTANCE=5&title=&author=>).
> So I think this semantic connection was alive in the minds of ayurvedic
> authors.  This deserves proper study.
>
> India did not evolve the concept of "black bile" (Gk. melancholia) that
> evolved in Hippocratic medicine.
>
> Best,
> Dominik
>
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