Thank you for the offer, but I am afraid that in general I have too much dignity to accept loans anyway - however since you have with pinpoint accuracy deduced that I do not own a copy of the book, you have managed to embarrass me into ordering a copy.
I was actually thinking of the comparison in reference to few general trends in Tantrism, but also more specifically a text by David Gordon White 'The Ocean of Mercury: an Eleventh-Century Alchemical Text' (Religions of India in Practice, Lopez, D. ed, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1995).
'Alchemy, the "way of mercury" (rasayana), was essentially a Hindu enterprise in India ; there are no extant Buddhist texts devoted to the subject. Within the Hindu sphere, the roughly eleventh-century Rasanava or "Ocean of Mercury " is the most important textual source for what is known as Tantric alchemy. In contrast to earlier (third to tenth centuries C.E.) "gold-making" alchemy and later (fourteenth to twentieth centuries) therapeutic uses of mercurial and mineral medicines, tantric alchemy, which saw its heyday in the tenth to thirteenth centuries, was most concerned with the alchemical production of an elixir of
immortal life with which to realize the supreme goals of bodily immortality (jivanmukti), supernatural powers (siddhi) and a state of being identical to that of the supreme being Shiva.'
In regards to the more general similarities, there are the solar and lunar channels, male and female Tantric texts, red and white drops, son and mother lights and kundalini/gTummo....it seems rather obvious that there is at least some similarity at play here, the question is why?
vandermok <vandermok@...> wrote:
Tantrism or shaktism? A couple of lines in 'The Hermetic Tradition' apart from the sections on the operations at two vessels, the dump way, and so on. There are many things also in 'Metaphysics of the sex' (for instance sect. 35 on the Corpus Hermeticum). The book has been translated also into French, German, Spanish, Russian, Rumanian.I would make you a loan for buying it, but, sorry, I'm uptight.
Three heavens there are; two Savitar's, adjacent:
In Yama's world is one, home of heroes.
As on a linch-pin, firm, rest things immortal:
He who hath known it, let him here declare it.
- Rig Veda I.35 (Griffith)
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