[INDOLOGY] Alchemy metaphor

[Christopher Wallis]

Dear Dr Aklujkar,
I hope you'll forgive me for correcting a small misunderstanding:  I meant
"gold leaf" in the established English sense of "a very thin sheet of
gold", not as the kind of leaf equivalent to *patra.  *But as I mentioned,
I would have to find an attestation of it elsewhere in this meaning, which
I think is beyond the scope of my project right now since I don't know
rasaśāstra.

thanks for all your contributions!



On 12 July 2014 21:50, Ashok Aklujkar <ashok.aklujkar at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Christopher,
>
> Yes. You are right. It should be piita, not pitta. But what I consider to
> be a more likely meaning of the word would not change, because
> piitala/pittala continues to exist in slightly different forms in modern
> Indo-Aryan languages in the sense  'brass'. So does taamra in forms such as
> taamba/taambaa. Furthermore, if the idea ' leaf" were to be conveyed, a Skt
> author would have naturally thought of words such as suvar.na-patra or
> kanaka-patra. They indeed are used in modern Indian languages as they are
> or in slightly different forms.
>
> You write: >it is not wild speculation to suppose that in the sphere of
> more popular discourse, uneducated as most were in the details of alchemy,
> the idea circulated that alchemists magically transmuted base metal into
> gold using rasa, and thus the word *vedha *used in a non-technical sense
> would mean "transmute", even if technically speaking it is in error.<
>
> Researchers are frequently tempted to rationalize as they feel a need to
> reconcile different strands of evidence. Sometimes it is also useful to
> mention possibilities of reconciliation for the benefit of future research.
> However, rationalization should not be allowed to take the place of reason
> or evidence.
>
> Your write further: >I see evidence for this hypothesis in BCA 1.10<.
>
> You will be justified in seeing the Bodhi-caryaavataara verse this way
> only if the Tibetan cited by Prof. Kapstein ("It is the finest transformer
> because it causes very great transformation") is an explanation of only
> vedhaniiyam or atiiva vedhaniiyam and not a capturing of the import of the
> whole of 'rasa-raajam atiiva vedhaniiyam. As it stands, the Tibetan seems
> to be doing the  latter with focus on rasa-raaja.
>
> Now I must indeed return to my other 'time-is-of the-essence' kind of
> commitments.
>
> a.a.
>


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