Alchemy and Yoga

At the heart of both yoga and alchemy (rasaśāstra/rasavāda) we find practices meant to change bodies. These disciplines offer a variety of ways in which one can counteract greying hair, eliminate wrinkles, prolong life, and cure disease. However, their approaches are often quite different, with yoga focusing on physical and mental practice and alchemy emphasizing the use of herbal, mineral, and metallic medicines. Both systems prioritize a sort of divine body, describing the attainment of enlightenment during life (jīvanmukti) or a perfected body (dehasiddhi). While both yoga and Indian alchemy persist today as part of the global wellness industry, for the purpose of this bibliography we will consider the premodern developments of these disciplines. In the case of yoga this means examining works from the 6th century on that focus on tantric and haṭha yogic schools of thought. Rasaśāstra literature proper dates to no earlier than the 10th century and makes explicit reference to tantric texts and traditions. Thus though tantric and yogic texts rarely make overt references to the use of mercurials we can see that these traditions overlapped and were very much aware of one another. In addition to an emphasis on the body we also find tantric mantras, yantras, and maṇḍalas throughout the rasaśāstra corpus. Recent work on yoga has also demonstrated early connections to alchemy through the metaphors of Śiva’s semen as mercury and Śakti’s menstrual blood as cinnabar as well as these substances’ life-preserving usages. Several Sanskrit terms that appear in yoga and rasaśāstra can cause issues on first glance. First and foremost, the word “yoga” itself. Meaning union, “yoga” appears as early as the Vedas. It also appears in the Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gītā in which it refers to a source of knowledge and perception. It is the usage in the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali that “yoga” appears as a philosophical term connected to meditation. This is the beginning of yoga for our purposes. In rasaśāstra “yoga” is rarely used in this way. Most often “yoga” denotes a recipe or alchemical preparation, the union of substances that transform the body through medical intervention. The second term we must note is “rasa.” Within tantra and yoga “rasa” means “juice” “fluid” or most commonly “elixir.” This rasa is the elixir that brings about immortality and often appears as a substance already within the body. In rasaśāstra the term nearly always denotes “mercury.” This rasa too brings about immortality but only after it has been processed through alchemical procedures (saṃskāras).