Mircea Eliade YOGA IMMORTALITY AND ... - Brihaspati.net

are other quite different from those that are strange characters, are almost perpetually
traveling back and forth, are people who laughs at everything, do not bother about
anything, people who kept secrets, and that, believing what the people say, know how to
make gold and prepare mercury so admirably that one or two grains every morning
tornadoes heal and fortify the body such as the stomach, which digests very well and it
feels sick of eating. (Ibid., pag. 130).
The tradition that the Indians knew the ascetics secrelo longevity through drugs is also in
the works of Muslim historians "I've read in a book that certain heads of Turkestan sent
ambassadors with letters to the kings of India with the following mission: they had been
in-formed, these chiefs, who in India could get drugs to the ownership of prolonging
human life and through which the king of India reached very old (...) and heads of
that they be a little of the drug, co-mo so the indications concerning the method by which
the rishis to retain their health for a long time "1
According to the Emir Khusru, longevity was obtained also in India, thanks to
pranayama. "... With her art, the Brahmins can get longevity by reducing the number of
breaths per day. A yogi who lived respiration could restrict its more than 330 years."
(Nuh Sipihr, ou Les neufcieux spheres, by Emir Khusru, translated 'by Elliot, The History
of India, vol. Ill, London, 1871, pp. 563-564). The same author also found the following
with regard to yogis: "You can predict upcoming events to be shown by the respiration
leaving the pot holes> them, according to this more or less open the right nostril and left
another body may also inflate with its own respiration Many of these men in the
mountains of Kashmir's borders (...) They can fly through the air like chickens, incredible
as it seems. They may even become invisible at will, putting itself in antimony eyes. Only
those who have witnessed these miracles can believe in "(op. cit. 564). We recognize that
most of the yogic siddhi, and first term, the. Power to "blow up". Let us note in passing
that this siddhi has finally integrated into the alchemical literature (Note VII, 1).
The literature abounds with allusions to alchemical yogis tar-mist "When I was a
teenager, he wrote the famous Jain ascetic Hemacandra to Devacandra, a piece of copper
durno previously pregnant with the sap of a bush and placed near the (...) you later,
according to your instructions, went gold. Tell us the name of that bush and its characters,
and other necessary details about them ".2 But it is mainly around the famous Nagar -
1 Translating. By Elliot, The History of India as told by its own Historians (vol. II,
London, 1869, p. 174). The legend of a plant in India by which one can obtain eternal
life, is known in Persia since the time of King Chosroes (531-578); Reinaud, Memoire
sur Vlnde (Paris, 1849), p. 130. We also find referenda on the elixir of immortality in the
Jataka, but this drink is probably referring to the legend of ambrosia more than alchemy.
2 Prabandhacintamani, trans. C. H. Tawney, Calcutta, 1901. p. 147, idem, p. 173: a priest
gets an elixir that transmuted into gold everything he touched. The author is the Jain
monk Merutunga (fourteenth century), who wrote also a legend that crystallize juna
alchemists. Indeed, this per-speaking legendary character who Somadeva (eleventh
century) in his Katha-saritsagara and Merutunga in Prabandhacintamani not the same as
the illustrious Dr. Madhyamika, as everyone knows, a whole tantric gia mythological,
alchemical and magical was added to the biography of the famous philosopher, but it is
important to emphasize how Tantrism and magic alchemy appear saturated in the
exemplary image of Nagarjuna (the only one that was imposed and was preserved by
collective memory). We read in the Kathasaritsa-gara to Nagarjuna, Chirayus minister,