Indian alchemy: mercury and the body that does not die

After Chinese alchemy, Arabic alchemy and Avicenna against the alchemists, this article goes to India. I read two treatises in Sanskrit, in the Wikisource edition: the Rasahṛdayatantra (chapters 1 and 2 in full and the start of 3) and verses 1.1–1.30 of the Rasārṇava. The testimony of an outsider comes from al-Biruni, through a book of 1902, and what is known today from a study of 2008. What I could not read, I say at the end. I am not a Sanskritist: the translations are mine, made word by word, and may contain mistakes; that is why the verses are given.

A note before going on. Mercury and its vapours are toxic, and there are Indian preparations with mercury, lead or arsenic that have poisoned people, outside India too (below). This article reports what some texts say: it is not a guide, and the interactive piece carries no ingredients, times or amounts.

A science of mercury

Rasaśāstra (रसशास्त्र) is the name of the genre: the science of rasa, a word that means "juice, essence" and that in these texts is, above all, mercury. According to Wikipedia, these are processes by which metals, minerals and other substances, above all mercury, are purified and combined with herbs to treat illness: a pharmaceutical branch of Indian medicine and at the same time a literary genre. The first medical work with alchemical content would be the Kalyāṇakāraka of Ugrāditya, from South India, of the early ninth century, and the first text of the genre proper, the Rasahṛdayatantra, of the tenth century, with 19 chapters and 18 operations for mercury.¹

A caution from that same source: when Caraka and Suśruta, the great ancient medical texts, say rasa, later commentators read it as mercury, although the word has many meanings. The first mentions of mercury are of the unprocessed substance, and recipes for purification and calcination do not appear until the ninth century.¹

The genre saw itself as having a lineage. The Rasaratnasamuccaya opens (1.2–1.4) with a list of twenty-seven masters "who give success with rasa": I counted them, there are twenty-seven, and among them is Nāgārjuna. I do not know who they were or when they lived, and I give no date for that text.²

A treatise that begins with compassion

The Rasahṛdayatantra ("the heart of rasa") opens like this (1.1): "Victory to him from whom, seeing this whole world afflicted by misery and disease, the compassion that was in his heart melted and took the form of rasa." And a few verses later (1.3):³

मूर्छित्वा हरति रुजं बन्धनमनुभूय मुक्तिदो भवति । अमरीकरोति सुमृतः कोऽन्यः करुणाकरः सूतात् ॥ — mūrchitvā harati rujaṃ bandhanam anubhūya muktido bhavati | amarīkaroti sumṛtaḥ ko 'nyaḥ karuṇākaraḥ sūtāt ||

"Swooned, it takes away disease; having known bondage, it gives liberation; well killed, it makes immortal. Who else is more compassionate than mercury?"

There are three states: swooned (mūrchita), bound (baddha) and dead (mṛta). The Rasārṇava, a dialogue between Bhairava (Śiva) and Pārvatī, repeats the triad (1.19): swooned it removes disease, dead it gives life, bound it lets one move through the air (khecaratā). And it joins it to another path, the breath: rasa and breath (pavana) are the two forms of "yoga of action" (1.18).⁴ The Hindi Wikipedia quotes this same verse 1.3 and another from a text called Rasacaṇḍāṃśu, according to which merely seeing mercury gives the merit of a hundred horse sacrifices, of ten million cows given, of a thousand gold coins and of bathing at all the holy places. I did not read that text.⁵

And there is a promise that is not only individual, in 1.6: "when rasa is perfected, I shall make the earth free of old age and death."³

Why a stable body

Here is what sets this alchemy apart. The Rasahṛdayatantra argues, in verses 1.8–1.11, like this: goods and pleasures are in the body, and the body is passing, so all of that is vain; one must strive for liberation (mukti); liberation comes from knowledge, knowledge from practice, and practice from a stable body. And it goes on saying (1.17, 1.30): a body broken by illness, old age and death cannot meditate; the boy of sixteen is greedy for pleasures, and when discernment arrives he is already old: how is a mortal to be liberated?³

The Rasārṇava puts it more bluntly (1.9): "The liberation that comes when the body falls is a meaningless liberation: when the body falls, even a donkey is freed."⁴

पिण्डपाते च यो मोक्षः स च मोक्षो निरर्थकः । पिण्डे तु पतिते देवि गर्दभोऽपि विमुच्यते ॥ — piṇḍapāte ca yo mokṣaḥ sa ca mokṣo nirarthakaḥ | piṇḍe tu patite devi gardabho 'pi vimucyate ||

Hence the goal: jīvanmukti, liberation in life, in a body "without old age or death" (ajarāmara). The treatise's declared aim is not gold. In 1.11 the treatise says why mercury is needed:³

तत्स्थैर्यं न समर्थं रसायनं किमपि मूललोहादि । स्वयमस्थिरस्वभावं दाह्यं क्लेद्यं च शोष्यं च ॥ — tatsthairyaṃ na samarthaṃ rasāyanaṃ kim api mūlalohādi | svayam asthirasvabhāvaṃ dāhyaṃ kledyaṃ ca śoṣyaṃ ca ||

"For that stability no rasāyana made of common metals and the like is enough: they are themselves of unstable nature; they burn, they get wet and they dry."

An observation of mine, not the treatise's: those three words, dāhya, kledya and śoṣya, are three of the four that the Bhagavadgītā denies of the self. In 2.24 it says of the ātman: acchedyo 'yam adāhyo 'yam akledyo 'śoṣya eva ca, "it is not cut, not burnt, not wetted, not dried."⁶ The treatise affirms them of common metals: what burns, gets wet and dries cannot sustain what does not burn, get wet or dry. I do not know whether the author had the Gītā in mind; the echo is in the text.

Everything dissolves in mercury

Verse 1.12 sets out a chain of dissolutions. Following the usual identifications of the metals, which I did not check in a glossary (nāga, lead; vaṅga, tin; śulva, copper; tāra, silver), it says: wood and herbs dissolve in lead, lead in tin, tin in copper, copper in silver, silver in gold, and gold in mercury.³

The next verse gives the reason by analogy: as all beings dissolve in the supreme Self, so mercury, the "king of rasa", is the only one that makes the body without old age or death (1.13); and as yogis dissolved in the form of Hara (Śiva) reach immortality, so gold and the metals in the mercury that has "swallowed the sky" (1.14).³ Chemistry and theology are inside the same image.

The eighteen steps

In 1.33–1.34 the treatise says that whoever seeks liberation in life must first make for themselves a "divine body", and that for this one must know "with effort" the eighteen saṃskāra, the perfectings of mercury. In 2.1–2.2 it lists them (rasa-karma, "works of rasa"). Here they are, one by one.³

Notice the vocabulary: it is that of a body. Mercury sweats, is kneaded, swoons, rises; mistreated, it goes limp, and its vigour has to be restored so that it does not end up "impotent"; it is restless and has to be subdued; it is kindled until it wants to eat; and then it grazes and digests. My reading is that the text treats mercury as a being that is taken through a life and a death. It is my reading: the text says it in its verbs, not in one sentence.

And it gives a reason, in 2.5. Mercury has three natural faults: impurity (mala), which causes fainting; fire (śikhin), which causes burning; and poison (viṣa), which causes death. The third step, the swoon, is there to take them away.³ What today's medicine says about the toxicity of mercury comes below.

Who signs it

The last verse of the treatise (19.80) is a signature: "having received great honour from the king of the Kirātas, devoted to the work of rasa, the mendicant Govinda composed the treatise called Rasahṛdaya." The verse before (19.78) praises a Śrīmadana, lord of the Kirātas, "teacher of rasa" (rasācārya), of the Haihaya lineage, as I read it. I do not know who they were; the text says that a mendicant (bhikṣu) wrote a manual of alchemy under a king's patronage.³

A witness from outside

Around the eleventh century the Persian scholar al-Biruni wrote a book about India. I read al-Biruni in Sachau's translation as P. C. Ray quotes it in the History of Hindu Chemistry (1902), not in the book itself. Al-Biruni writes: "The Hindus do not pay particular attention to alchemy." The text admits the author could not find out their methods, because the adepts keep it hidden: all that was heard was talk of sublimation, calcination, analysis and the "waxing of talc". And it goes on: "They have a science similar to alchemy which is quite peculiar to them. They call it Rasāyana." It is an art of "certain operations, drugs, and compound medicines, most of which are taken from plants", which restores the health of those ill beyond hope and gives youth back to fading old age; and it adds that, according to Patañjali, one of the methods leading to liberation is rasāyana.⁷

An observer from outside sees, in what they were told, the same thing as the treatise: an art that goes from the body (health, youth, long life) and is joined to liberation. With two provisos. What that observer calls rasāyana is, according to Wikipedia, an earlier medical tradition with which al-Biruni mixed the alchemy of mercury, so what was heard and what I read are not necessarily the same. And Sachau translates rasa as "gold"; in the texts I read it is "mercury". I do not know whether that is a mistake of al-Biruni, of the informant or of the translation.⁷

What is known today

This is the uncomfortable side. In 2008 the journal JAMA published a study: its authors ordered 230 Ayurvedic medicines, Indian- and US-made, over the internet in 2005; they received 193 and measured their metals by X-ray fluorescence. 20.7% had detectable lead, mercury or arsenic. Rasa shastra products had metals more often (40.6% against 17.1%) and higher median concentrations of lead and mercury (20,800 micrograms of mercury per gram, against 34.5 in the others). That median amounts to about two grams of mercury per hundred of product. All those containing metals exceeded at least one limit of acceptable daily intake.⁸

Wikipedia gives both positions: modern medicine says mercury is toxic in itself, not because of impurities; Ayurvedic practitioners say the poisonings come from mass production that does not follow traditional practice. It adds that the US Centers for Disease Control reported several cases of lead poisoning associated with Ayurvedic medicine.¹ With what I read I cannot settle the matter of tradition; what I can say is that mercury is toxic and that these numbers exist. If you take a product with metals, consult a doctor.

What I could not read

I read in Sanskrit chapters 1 and 2 of the Rasahṛdayatantra, the start of 3 (3.1–3.6) and the last verse; the rest I searched by words and did not read, so of eight of the eighteen steps I only know what the list says. Of the Rasārṇava I read verses 1.1–1.30 and, loose and without their context, the ones I cite from other chapters; of the Rasaratnasamuccaya, only 1.1–1.10. I read no commentaries or specialists' studies: Wikipedia's dates are second-hand, and I could not date the Rasārṇava or the Rasaratnasamuccaya. I did not read al-Biruni in the original or in Sachau (the archive was down from this server). I did not read the Tamil texts of the Siddha tradition, and I do not know whether they speak of the same thing. And I do not know whether this alchemy and the Chinese one influenced each other: I do not claim it. If you read Sanskrit or Tamil and want to correct us, this Diary needs it.

What we do with this

One verse of the Rasahṛdayatantra touches us closely. In 1.28 it says:³

प्रमाणतोऽपि प्रत्यक्षाद्यो न जानाति सूतकम् । अदृष्टविग्रहं देवं कथं ज्ञास्यति चिन्मयम् ॥ — pramāṇato 'pi pratyakṣād yo na jānāti sūtakam | adṛṣṭavigrahaṃ devaṃ kathaṃ jñāsyati cinmayam ||

"Whoever does not know mercury by proof, not even by direct perception, how will that person know the god of invisible form, made of consciousness?" First what is seen and checked; then the rest. It is a standard this Diary shares, and that is why it includes what is checked today about these preparations.

Anima Mundis claims no ancient wisdom and promises no stable body. What it can tell, in the Observatory, is how many times someone said how they were and at what UTC hour. It is a modest count and can be checked.