Amṛtasiddhi

The ''Amṛtasiddhi'' (Sanskrit: अमृतसिद्धि, "the attainment of immortality"), written in a Buddhist environment in about the 11th century, is the earliest substantial text on what became haṭha yoga, though it does not mention the term. The work describes the role of '' bindu'' in the yogic body, and how to control it using the Mahamudra so as to achieve immortality (''Amṛta''). The implied model is that bindu is constantly lost from its store in the head, leading to death, but that it can be preserved by means of yogic practices. The text has Buddhist features, and makes use of metaphors from alchemy.

A verse in a paper manuscript of the ''Amṛtasiddhi'', possibly a later copy, asserts its date as 2 March 1160. It is written in two languages, Sanskrit and Tibetan. A critical edition based on all surviving manuscripts was published in 2021 by the Indologists James Mallinson and Péter-Dániel Szántó.

Context

The ''Amṛtasiddhi'' is the earliest systematic and well-structured Sanskrit text about what came to be called Hatha yoga. It states that it was written by Madhavacandra. It was probably composed somewhere in the Deccan region of India by the late 11th century CE. Its opening and closing invocations to Siddha Virupa imply that it was written in a Vajrayana tantric Buddhist setting. The text was used also in Tibet, as the basis of the ''’Chi med grub pa'', a textual cycle whose name translated back into Sanskrit was ''Amarasiddhi''.

The text came to the attention of modern scholars in 2002, when Kurtis Schaeffer wrote an article about it. He used a bilingual Sanskrit and Tibetan manuscript known as C, once held in the Library of the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing. A modern critical edition of the ''Amṛtasiddhi'', published in 2021 by the Indologists James Mallinson and Péter-Dániel Szántó, made use of C and eleven other manuscripts, with other evidence. The manuscripts date from the 11th to around the 17th centuries. C, the oldest, was preserved until the 1990s but is now inaccessible, and study has proceeded on the basis of a poor photocopy. The other eleven manuscripts survive in a Southern group at Madras (now Chennai) and Baroda, and in a Northern group at Jodhpur and Kathmandu.

Manuscript C contains the text in three forms, written as groups of three lines, usually with three such groups on each folio. Each three-line group consists of C_S, a line of Sanskrit in handwriting that imitates an East Indian style of the Devanagari script; C_T, a line of transliteration of the Sanskrit into '' dbu can'' Tibetan letters; and C_tr, a line of translation into Tibetan, using '' dbu med'' letters. The C_tr translation, however, is not of the Sanskrit of the first two lines. It was translated earlier by the monk Padma 'od zer from a lost Sanskrit manuscript of the ''Amṛtasiddhi'' that sometimes agrees with the variations in some of the other surviving manuscripts. That means that C_tr can be placed near the base of the Indian branch of the tree of variants of the text, where C_S is on a branch of its own, near the base of the whole tree.

Mallinson and Szántó suggest that the unnamed Tibetan scribe who made manuscript C copied out the Sanskrit, imitating what was presumably the original's East Indian handwriting; then transliterated it, for his Tibetan colleagues who could not read the Indian alphabet; and finally attached the famous translator-monk's Tibetan version, even though he knew it diverged in places from the Sanskrit that he had copied out. The scribe remarked at the end of the text that "it is difficult for somebody like me to modify it because the wise one translated it according to the ntendedmeaning."

Text

Synopsis

The title ''Amṛtasiddhi'' means "the attainment of immortality", from ''a–mṛta'', "not ubject todeath".

Chapters (vivekas) 1-10 describe how the yogic body functions, explaining its elements. The body is arranged around the central channel, with the moon at its top, dripping nectar, ''Bindu'', and the sun at its base, burning up the nectar. Liberation, the final goal of yoga and thus yoga itself, means joining sun and moon together. Yoga is also defined as the union of the two main breaths, Prana and Apana. ''Bindu'' is described as a "single seed" and identified with Sadashiva, the moon, and "other exotic substances" as the basic essence of all that exists. ''Bindu'' is controlled by the breath, requiring control of the mind. The reference to Sadashiva implies a Shaivite Tantric audience, while the text's use of Tantric Buddhist terms implies that the text came from that environment.

Chapters 11–14 describe the practice of yoga. ''Mahāmudrā'', the "great seal", together with Mahābandha, the "great lock", and the ''Amritasiddhi''-specific gesture of Mahāvedha hold back the ''bindu'' or lunar nectar, enabling the yogi to control "body, speech, and mind" and ultimately to prevent death. The combination of these three techniques is to be practised every three hours, making the body strong and destroying diseases and other disturbances; the text cautions that this will be tiring at first. The disturbances arise from Prakṛti, nature, manifesting as the three doṣas (disease-causing qualities) and the three Guṇa

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