Om-gnosis Episode 15: Indian Alchemy and Ayurveda with Dagmar Wujastyk |

Dr. Dagmar Wujastyk discusses Indian alchemy, Ayurveda, and Yoga, exploring their historical, textual, and living traditions.

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Key Takeaways

Indian classical medicine and alchemy have deep historical roots still practiced today.
Sanskrit and Pali philology are essential for understanding ancient Indian medical and yogic texts.
Living traditions like the Ashtavaidyans provide a direct link to classical medical knowledge.
Ayurveda and Yoga, while interconnected, have distinct historical trajectories and modern expressions.
Indian alchemy (Rasa Sastra) involves complex processes and materials, reflecting a sophisticated scientific tradition.

What the video covers

Dr. Dagmar Wujastyk shares her academic journey into Indology, Sanskrit, Pali, and classical Indian medicine.
She explains her initial interest sparked by learning Sanskrit and discovering ancient medical texts like the Astangahrdaya Samhita.
Wujastyk recounts fieldwork with Ashtavaidyans in Kerala who practice medicine based on 7th-century texts.
She discusses the entanglement and distinctions between Yoga and Ayurveda in both historical and modern contexts.
The conversation covers Indian alchemical practices, including the use of mercury and other materials in Rasa Sastra.
Wujastyk highlights the challenges of tracing authorship and the esoteric nature of alchemical and Ayurvedic knowledge.
She touches on cross-cultural influences, such as Tibetan alchemy and Tamil siddhar traditions.
The interview includes reflections on modern Ayurveda and its global adaptations.
The role of medical ethics and historical continuity in Indian medicine is emphasized.
The discussion also considers the potential of AI in visualizing and understanding complex historical and alchemical narratives.

Chapters

What sparked Dr. Wujastyk's interest in Indian medicine and Ayurveda?

Her interest began with learning Sanskrit and discovering ancient medical texts like the Astangahrdaya Samhita, followed by field visits to Kerala to meet practitioners who still use these classical texts.

How are Ayurveda and Yoga connected according to the discussion?

While there is some overlap, Ayurveda and Yoga have distinct historical paths. Modern practitioners often engage with both, but historically their entanglement is limited.

What role does alchemy play in Indian classical medicine?

Indian alchemy, or Rasa Sastra, involves the preparation of medicines using materials like mercury and sulfur, employing complex laboratory techniques that reflect a sophisticated scientific tradition.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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[NON-ENGLISH SINGING] KEITH CANTU: So hello, everyone. Welcome to the next episode of Om-gnosis. Today, I am joined by Dr. Dagmar Wujastyk, who is the associate professor in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta, Canada.

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She is an Indologist trained in Sanskrit and Pali philology and specialized in the history and literature of classical Indian medicine, Ayurveda, alchemy, and iatrochemistry, Rasa Sastra, and Yoga.

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And I also know from 2015 to 2020, she was principal investigator of an ERC starting grant project entitled "Medicine, Immorality, Moksha and Tangled Histories of Yoga, Ayurveda and Alchemy in South Asia," colloquially known among scholars in the field

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as AyurYog, leading a team of four postdoctoral researchers. And you've also published prolifically, which we'll get to in a second.

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And so let's dive in. Thanks so much for joining us today. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Thanks for having me, Keith.

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KEITH CANTU: Yeah, no, it's wonderful. And I should introduce myself as well. I am Keith Cantu, currently a lecturer in South Asian religious traditions at Harvard Divinity School and at the Center for the Study of World Religions.

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And it's wonderful to be able to welcome you and hear more about your research and background.

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And that's where I want to begin is what drew you into the study of Indology, Sanskrit, and Pali philology, Indian medicine, Ayurveda, alchemy, and iatrochemistry.

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Rasa Sastra, which we mentioned, as well as Yoga. How did you get interested in these subjects?

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DAGMAR WUJASTYK: OK, so this is all really a long time ago now because I studied in the '90s.

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So I mean, to get into Indology was a little bit random, and it was basically born out of the wish to be confronted with something that I knew absolutely nothing about, which in this case was Indian culture.

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I grew up in Germany and a little bit also in the US and in a small town.

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And everybody's looking a bit inwardly into their own culture only. And I wanted to understand the bigger, wider world.

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And at the University of Bonn, which is where I studied, there was an Indological institute, and I thought that sounded really interesting.

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And in Germany, you don't pay for studying. You just-- KEITH CANTU: Sounds nice. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: [INAUDIBLE] free as a taxpayer, I suppose.

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So you can be a bit more experimental, I feel, with what you study. And so I basically just turned up in the Indological seminar and said, OK, I'm going to study India.

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And I didn't really know what that was going to be like. I thought I'd be studying modern Indian languages, Hindi, and I'd be going to India.

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And I don't know. I wasn't really thinking it through very much. KEITH CANTU: Sure.

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DAGMAR WUJASTYK: And instead the counselor said, yes, you can learn Hindi, but learn Sanskrit first and maybe Pali.

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And then you can move on to Hindi. It'll be really easy once you've learned Sanskrit.

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And I said, OK. And I started learning Sanskrit and fell in love and really just enjoyed it very, very much.

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This was a very small institute, very few students. I had a lot of classes where it was just the professor and me, or maybe two or three other people in the class.

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So it was a very intensive philological training. And so for all of us, we all learned Sanskrit.

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We all did Pali or some other form of Prakrit as well because at the time when you studied Indology, you'd be doing, the basics, which would be Vedic India, classical India, but also Buddhist India.

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So you'd learn Pali, of course, to engage with the Buddhist sources. And you do the other kinds of Sanskrit for the Hindu or early Hindu sources.

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And so I did do Hindi eventually, but never got very far with it to my shame.

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But yeah, so Sanskrit turned out to be something that I was just really interested in.

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And yeah, I just enjoyed it. And then my main Professor was Professor Claus Vogel, and he was both an Indologist and Tibetologist.

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And he had also written about medicine. So he had done a study of the Tibetan version of the Astangahrdaya Samhita, the heart of medicine, a seventh century medical classic and compared the Tibetan version to the Sanskrit version.

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So he was a sort of specialist in this area and in many others. But when I did my MA, I decided to work on a medical text, actually, that seventh century medical text.

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And I just did a translation of the chapter on pregnancy and birth. And that was just to-- basically, I think I was thinking of it maybe as a women's topic that has some sort of reflection on women, which was maybe a bit more

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neutral in Indian literature. And so that's how I got into Indian medical literature. And then once I completed my MA, I started on my PhD, and I wanted to continue working on medicine, which is obviously a very large field history of medicine.

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And I then thought I'd like to work on medical ethics. Actually, Claus Vogel, who at that time was in fact retiring, but he suggested I should go and visit India.

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And I had talked to him about how the seventh century medical classic that there were still people in India who were practicing according to this very work.

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These are doctors called Ashtavaidyans living in Kerala. And basically, they practice medicine according to the description of medicine in this work and also another one called the Astanga Sangraha, both attributed to the same author.

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And so I went to India, and just actually because I had online found one of the people who was belonging to this family, the Mooss family, the Ashtavaidyan families in Kerala.

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And I just went and visited and just found out who they were and what they were doing.

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And this really was just so interesting to see a practice that was based on something that was written 1,300 years earlier.

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KEITH CANTU: Wow. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: It's mind blowing. And, of course, living a very modern life at the same time.

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So this was a game changer for me just to see this in action. And so when I came back, I still wanted to work on Indian medicine.

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And, of course, as a philologist, I'm not trained as an anthropologist. This was just me going to India because it was interesting, and it kind of just worked out that I met these people, some of them.

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But when I came back, I started work on my PhD on medical ethics. But then at the time, I was offered a job at Cambridge University with Elizabeth De Michelis.

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And she had started a project at the Dharma Hinduja Institute of Indic Research, which was located in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge.

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It was a four-year project, and she had done two years on modern Yoga, which is a term that she coined at that time.

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She wrote that important book about this, and she wanted to have the next two years of the project dedicated to the entanglement of Yoga and Ayurveda because this was a trend that she had noticed that a lot of Yoga practitioners would be interested in Ayurveda

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as well. And so she got me into the project to look at this connection.

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And so I worked there for two years. And the publication that came out of that was this edited volume that I did with Frederick Smith called Modern and Global Ayurveda.

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So that was the research we were-- in the end, we didn't find that much entanglement with Yoga at that time.

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But we were looking at what does Ayurveda look like in the modern world, so since the 20th century and so on.

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So there's a history project with quite a lot of people taking part in that.

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And so I did that for a few years. And then the whole Institute closed down, in fact, after that.

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KEITH CANTU: [INAUDIBLE] DAGMAR WUJASTYK: And Elizabeth moved, went to Oxford, I think, at the time.

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And I went back to my original PhD work, which was on medical ethics. So that's the story of how I got into this.

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KEITH CANTU: Yeah, well, I mean, it's a really fascinating and interesting story, with these multiple trajectories leading you to Ayurveda and Yoga and then back again.

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And I'm sure encountering these communities, living communities of people who are practicing, based on a

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And related to that, I mean, I first read your book Well-Mannered Medicine-- Medical Ethics and Etiquette in Classical Ayurveda during my doctoral exams, must have been seven years ago.

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And I remember really well how you had this talent for bringing the topic of medicine and client-physician relationships very much alive.

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And I'm wondering if you could tell our viewers a little bit about Ayurveda from this perspective, the client and physician or medical practitioner perspective and what texts really can tell us how medicine was practiced in South Asia prior

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to the colonial period and I guess, by extension, still is practiced today. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah.

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So it's a really big question. And you must stop me if I just do a big catalog of names of works.

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So Ayurveda has a really big literature that goes back 2,000 years. And Ayurvedic thought is older than 2,000 years.

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But when we look at the literature, that sort of emerges roughly 2,000 years ago, the problems with putting a date to a work.

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And this literary production was continuous. So with first works being assembled rather than composed in the early centuries of the first millennium, there was various redactors then brought the things together and then maybe added on some things and reformulated topics

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and then maybe reorganize the materials over time, but also brought in original materials. And we have hundreds of works basically written in Sanskrit over 2,000 years.

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Basically, there were still Sanskrit works being written in the 20th century. And very often, you will find that the newer works use the older works and quote them, sometimes paraphrase them, sometimes it's the same content but written a little bit

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differently depending on whether they wanted to change the verse or write in prose and so on.

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But you have a very strong continuity in these works. So something that was written 2,000 years ago will still be found in something that somebody's writing in the 20th century.

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And this is also true for things written about doctors professional lives, basically. And so one of the things that this literature that emerged 2,000 years ago did was define what a doctor is.

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Of course, you can never put a starting date to medicine, somebody being cured, somebody being treated.

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But this is the beginning where we get a sense of doctors as a professional group, with certain expectations, where the clients have, well, the patients have expectations, their families have expectations, and so do the doctors.

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And in the early works, we have this description of a sort of medical team.

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And it's called the four pillars of treatment. And the four pillars are the doctor, the nurse or helper, the patient, and the medicine.

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So when you talk of a medical team, it's not just the doctor and the nurses, the patient and the medicine are agents in this relationship.

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KEITH CANTU: Yeah, yeah. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: So these are then laid out, and you find this in-- most medical works have some sentences at least dedicated to who's active in this medical scenario.

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And it gets repeated and repeated again. You have it in the Caraka Samhita, this first century work, roughly first century.

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And you have it in the 16th century, Bhava Prakasa. You have it in the 19th century by Bhaisajyaratnavali.

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So it gets repeated and repeated. And so when you look at how these actors are described, the Doctor is supposed to be somebody who's very knowledgeable, very skilled, highly trained.

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He's a scholar, but he also really knows what he's doing. And I'm saying he and not they or she because in the works, it's definitely a male doctor that is being described.

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Nowadays, in Ayurvedic practice, we have actually probably more female practitioners than male practitioners. So this has changed.

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And we know of this change at the latest in the 20th century. There was a sort of shift in who was practicing.

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But in the older works, we only hear of men, where women have a role as midwives, rather, and maybe also as nurses.

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Nurses are never really quite defined. These are probably relatives who are helping out with the patient rather than somebody who is trained by the doctor.

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So these assistants are people who basically do what the doctor says, and they're supposed to have attributes like being caring and not being easily disgusted, which I think is a very important-- KEITH CANTU: Definitely.

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DAGMAR WUJASTYK: --thing for, yeah, a nurse or an assistant. And then we have the patient.

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And the patient's description is-- well, the patient is supposed to be wealthy. KEITH CANTU: OK, all right.

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Important pillar there. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yes, and obedient. So this is a very paternalistic setup.

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The doctor knows everything and will be able to help, but only if the patient actually does what the doctor says.

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And wealth is actually discussed a few times over the works. And there are slightly different ideas of what that means.

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But mostly, the idea is that to do therapy correctly, you have to be able to follow what the doctor says.

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And that includes things like dietary prescriptions, but also getting the medicines that you need.

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And these could be costly, but also, the lifestyle might be costly. You have to be able to rest, for example.

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So if you need to go and work and you're a laborer and you're not able to rest, then your medicine won't work.

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So you can see how wealth would at least indirectly play a role in the possible success of treatment.

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It's not so much to enrich the physician. In fact, there are passages that say that a doctor shouldn't take money for treatment.

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So he's not supposed to enrich himself by treating other people, but nevertheless, the patient needs some money in order to be able to do what the doctor says.

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Then finally, the medicine is supposed to be of good quality, and it's supposed to be fresh and without flaw and so on.

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So it has to be available. So again, we're in a ideal situation. Everybody's wealthy, and they have willing nurses who are not easily disgusted and caring, and loving, and so on and the doctor, who is very, very knowledgeable

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and the patient who will do what they are being told to do. So that's the general setup.

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And I was thinking, so in visiting India, many times, speaking with modern doctors and especially ones that have this traditional training, if you get stories of what their relationship to patients is, it's that they do expect the patient to follow what they're

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telling them very, very closely. You know how in modern medicine the doctor usually has to give the patient quite a lot of information on what is happening and why it is happening?

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KEITH CANTU: Prescriptions, and yeah, mm-hmm. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, exactly. Why are you being given this, and what are the side effects and all of these things?

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So in this traditional setup, this is not necessary because the paternal doctor knows best, and you don't need all the information as a patient.

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So you're a child being just given what you're given, and you have to follow.

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And I have seen this attitude quite a lot, even with quite funny stories of the doctor tricking the patient into certain therapies, as it were, for their benefit.

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But if I think the same situation in the US, probably the patient would sue.

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But this attitude, I think, of the doctor, of course, is paternalistic because they are trained so well.

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They really know what they're doing. That's the ideal type. And, of course, in real life, there will be better and less good doctors.

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We have a lot of satirical literature in Sanskrit and in other vernaculars where we talk about basically physicians being the lords of death and so on.

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So obviously, medical malpractice was also a thing in ancient and medieval India, but that's not something that we encounter much in the medical classics.

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KEITH CANTU: Very interesting. And what's the word for doctor that's being used? Is it Vidya?

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DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Sometimes Vidya and sometimes bhisak. KEITH CANTU: Bhisak. OK interesting. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, and then very often, you will have words, as you know, the knowledgeable doctor, the expert doctor, somebody who's sastravit, who knows the shastra, and so on.

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So this is somebody who is supposed to be very learned, not just in medicine but also in other sciences, so somebody who just has a very good overview over human life because if you think of Indian medicine, it's called Ayurveda.

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Medical treatment, the more specific word is cikitsa. But if you think of it as Ayurveda, that's the knowledge Veda of ayus, of longevity, of lifespan, and so on, and of life itself.

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And that has a wider range of implications. What is good for a good, healthy life?

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And the good life is also a healthy life, but also that has other implications.

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And all of that should be within the doctor's purview. KEITH CANTU: Yeah, it's really nice to hear the word cikitsa.

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I'm reminded in modern Bengali, cikitsa is still used today, actually, in all contexts, even with modern medicine.

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So it's clear some of the vocabulary even lives on, even if the format of medicine changes.

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That's interesting. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: And I mean, modern Bengal, of course, had the Vaidyaraj, the Vaidyarai, so as the doctor.

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So these words still certainly live on. KEITH CANTU: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE] Raj and then Kobi Raj as well as [INAUDIBLE] local healer.

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Yeah. Wow. So then related to this, clearly we've entered a whole universe where we're dealing with life and treatments for life and so on.

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And I that following this or maybe parallel, depending on when you got started, you writing also specifically on the applications of rasayana, which you translate as elixir often.

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And I'm wondering, what is the elixir actually? And what do you think made so many alchemical authors or Ayurvedic authors, for that matter, believe it could contribute lifespan and aging, sort of health-destroying disease, cognitive power, virility, and even special powers, as you write about?

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And as a follow-up, you talked about the client relationship in medicine, but what were these alchemical laboratories like in South Asia?

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And were they related to the medical context, or were they kind of outside? Is there any way to know.

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DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, so with rasayana, rasayana means different things in different literatures and in different contexts.

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So in medicine, the rasayana is the term used for one of the eight parts of classical medicine.

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And these eight parts of medicine are kaya chikitsa, bodily medicine and surgery and pediatrics and so on.

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And then rasayana is one of these eight, followed by vaji karuna, which is sort of virility treatment, and so in that context, I call rasayana, this is a type of therapy.

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And it's a vitalization therapy. Very often people will say it's rejuvenation, and it is also, a lot of these therapies are aimed at rejuvenation or anti-aging.

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But working with Crystal [? Balwa, ?] and she was looking at this. And she was thinking a lot about the sort of ayus of the Ayurveda.

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And she was sort of suggesting to me that this is really something that vitalizes you, gives you more strength because it's not just that you become younger.

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It's that you become stronger, and your senses are stronger. And everything is stronger, so this sort of sense of getting like a boost of energy.

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So I think vitalization therapy is a very nice way of describing this therapy, and the medicines that are used for this kind of therapy in the medical works are also called rasayana.

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And in that context, I would translate them as tonics, something that sort of enlivens you.

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This is a tonic. You'll feel better after taking it. You just feel vitalized and strengthened and so on.

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And that's the kind of way in which these medicines within this rasayana therapy are described.

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But then even in the earliest works, we have, for example, in the Sushruta Samhita, one of the oldest of the works, we have descriptions within this sort of rasayana section, in this vitalization therapy section that deal with the use of soma which is a special material known

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from Vedic scriptures. And this kind of-- and these are supposed to be plants, and actually the work has more than a dozen of these plants, which will then make you very long-lived.

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So they're not just vitalizing you, but you get 500 years of life or more, depending on how you use it.

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And then there's a sort of specialized therapy described there where you have to go into a hut, and you have lots of preparation therapies, sort of what we would now think of as panchakarma therapies, sort of cleansing the body and so on.

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And then you get your special tonic, which in this case then starts to look a bit more like the magical elixir, the soma, some other materials as well.

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And then you will have a sort of process of disintegration and then reintegration, the body kind of rots and then is built up again from the inside, and then afterwards, you're this sort of special human being with special powers and so on.

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So this sort of stories located within the vitalization therapy section, and all the other recipes are sort of, like, well, drink cold water in the morning or have milk or eat ghee and some plants that will make you feel better.

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So there's a tension there of, well, this sort of extreme outcome and this sort of bit more normal outcome that you'll live up to a hundred years.

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So there's a spectrum, let's say-- KEITH CANTU: Yeah, a pretty wide spectrum. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, exactly.

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And then around the 10th century and maybe a couple of hundred years earlier, we have this new literature, which is this alchemical literature-- rasa shastra, rasa vidya.

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So the knowledge, the disciplines of rasa, which usually means mercury in this case, or the mercurial discipline.

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We're calling it alchemy just for simplicity's sake. And this kind of thinking, it's very strongly based on medicine, but at the same time, they're using different materials, mostly inorganic substances, especially mercury, of course, but also sulfur, mica, and so on.

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And they're making a rasayana, which then I would translate as elixir, because this is then used in the way soma is described in sushruta, so for immortality or extreme longevity, for spiritual insight, but also for things like having

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beautiful offspring. So there's a whole range, again, of things that can happen if you take this mercury elixir.

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So it's not really a tonic anymore, because health is not really the main aim here, but it's something that sort of overcomes the normal human ontological existence.

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So you get a different status. You may experience being like Shiva. You may experience something like flying, sort of astral flight or so.

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So then I would translate rasayana as elixir, and in fact, so sometimes we get this, that rasayana is used to describe alchemical discipline altogether.

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These Sanskrit texts don't use that as an umbrella term for their whole discipline. They use rasayana sometimes, rasa rasayana, to describe the elixir regimen, so that time, that therapy that can go over a period of months in which you

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take the mercurial elixir and then have these changes. So this is how that word, the same word, is used in a related way but slightly differently.

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So then I just say elixir regimen, not rejuvenation or revitalization therapy, but they're clearly linked.

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So it's not the same thing, but it belongs together. And the alchemical one is very clearly based on the medical one in the way the body is prepared and so on, but uses different materials.

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And then these materials are reintegrated into medical works and reinterpreted. it again, but that's a different story.

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KEITH CANTU: Yeah, there's circularity there. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, there's definitely circularity. And you asked about laboratories.

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KEITH CANTU: Yes, exactly. I followed your YouTube videos, where you've recreated several of these experiments, and it just makes me wonder, what they would be like at the time of these texts, when they're being composed.

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DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, so there's a difference between the classical medicine and alchemy and then later, alchemical medicine.

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So in the medical works, you have this description of basically fresh herbs and fruits and so on, and they're being cooked.

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And sometimes they're stored for a year. For example, if you're using amla, the myrobalans, and you cook them with sugar and ghee and so on, and then you're supposed to put them in a pot and store them for a long time before you can have them.

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But a lot of things are just eaten fresh, or you have a dried plant root, or so.

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You grind it. You mix it with water or some other carrier substance, depending on what you're trying to do with it.

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So there's a more immediacy about it. I mean, you have to have the dried herbs and so on, but theoretically, maybe you could go to the market, get the dried herb, bang, you've got your medicine, right?

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Now, with these alchemical elixirs, you're using inorganic substances. You're using metals. And these take a bit longer to prepare, and we get these very complicated ways basically working with mercury and making them into this elixir or, later on, medicine.

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And so this new idea arises of needing to purify materials. Often it's breaking them down, so try to bite on a piece of iron, you won't get very far.

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But if you want to take an iron tonic, you'll need to somehow make it ready for ingestion.

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And so for mercury, the alchemists developed these very complicated procedures to make mercury fit for purpose, and then they use a lot of other materials like sulfur, like mica, but also gold, copper, and things like arsenic and so on.

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And every single material that is used needs to be cleansed, purified, be made fit for use, and then itself is also a kind of medicine for the other materials it is brought together with.

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So this sort of, what is a medicine, and what does it do, changes a lot.

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And now if you've got all these procedures, you also need apparatuses, devices for doing these processes, right?

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And it's things like distillation apparatuses. You need ovens with high temperatures. You need, yeah, so distillation in various Ways-- Sublimation apparatuses.

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And so we see in descriptions of laboratories in alchemical works, when you have a description of the hospital setup and, let's say, the Sushruta Samhita, we're talking about courtly settings and we're talking about what kind of medicines we have.

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And then we have sieves, and we have things to cut the plants with. And we have mortars and so on.

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In the alchemical works, we then have still all the herbs, where do the dried herbs go and so on.

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Where do the fresh herbs go? We have cutting instruments. We have sieves. We have bowls.

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Pestle and mortar are very, very important, and now we got these new apparatuses with things-- pestle and mortar-- that you can make hot.

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They're made out of iron, for example. But you also have sort of pots made with clay but also with other materials that will mean that it can withstand very high heat without breaking and so on.

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You have things that can be assembled to make them into a sublimation or distillation device and so on.

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And so you need all those very regularly, and so an alchemist, to make these medicines, would need a proper laboratory to do this.

Speaker A

Now, these, most of the materials needed would have been-- a normal potter could make them.

Speaker A

Usually they're just clay vessels, maybe with iron shavings in or something. So this is something that would not have been very hard to produce.

Speaker A

You wonder whether the alchemist could have made it themselves, or could they have just bought them and then assembled them into the shape that they needed?

Speaker A

And I don't have an answer for that, but what it does mean is that at least for some time of the year, while they were preparing these tonics, medicines or elixirs, they would have had to be in one place

Speaker A

to just have this laboratory. And the description of the laboratory in the alchemy reader Patricia did, translated one chapter, which was about the laboratory space.

Speaker A

And David Gordon White also has a chapter that talks about that. She noted that they describe different spaces.

Speaker A

One is the laboratory itself, then the other is a sort of altar or worship space, which could be like a mini temple inside the laboratory or at the side of the laboratory.

Speaker A

And then there's a hut where the person who is actually consuming the medicine or elixir is stationed when they take the medicine.

Speaker A

And in the laboratory, you have so many things that are in the laboratory, and then you have the location of the laboratory, that it has to have windows.

Speaker A

There has to be-- the smoke of the fires has to go somewhere. You can't let it rain in, but also water should be available to you close by and so on.

Speaker A

So you have this sort of idealized environment in which the laboratory is situated, and it should be situated away from people.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Away from people? DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, so there's a sort of secrecy element there, maybe safety element or so, so for the concentration that is needed for making these materials.

Speaker A

But, yeah, it sort of points to somebody who was an alchemist perhaps being wealthy to be able to have such a place in which they could just have all these materials, all the apparatuses and so on.

Speaker A

So that's what we know, but we don't have any archeological excavation with an alchemist's laboratory.

Speaker A

And even in Western alchemy, we don't have a lot. We have things from the 18th century or so.

Speaker A

So for India, we have nothing, but then what would it look like? It's just pots.

Speaker A

So maybe if you got a remnant of the medicine in there, or maybe if you could find a vial of mercury or so, but so far, nothing of the has been found, to my knowledge.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Hmm. Yeah, the one thing that I think of are in kitchens, sometimes in the traditional kitchens, you have those-- the big stone, the, shila, and the big slab as well.

Speaker A

And I've seen those in museums too from some thousands of years ago, even in the Harappan culture.

Speaker A

And it makes me wonder, that must have been sort of a staying the mortar and pestle at least.

Speaker A

Yeah. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, and how would you what was a kitchen? What was an alchemist laboratory?

Speaker A

What was maybe a perfumery? So the various contexts in which the same kinds of things would have been used.

Speaker A

So unless you have remnants of the medicines, I guess it would be very hard to actually make out what it was.

Speaker A

But also in archeology, there's very little archeology that is dedicated to households, so, yeah, this is one of the things where-- I mean, of course we know a lot about pottery and so on, remnants of pottery, but the context in which

Speaker A

things were used, where are the priorities of archaeological digs and so on, it's usually not on the household.

Speaker A

And I think that an alchemical laboratory would look like a household, wouldn't necessarily be a temple setting or something that-- a grave setting or something that would be exciting to see from the outside.

Speaker A

So you know how-- one of the questions that I always ask myself-- so one of the things in the apparatuses is that one of them, which is called a sand bath, uses a glass bottle.

Speaker A

So you have the substance inside a glass bottle, and then the glass bottle is covered in clay, probably cloth and clay, and sealed in that way, and then it's put into sand, which is in a pot.

Speaker A

And then the heat, it gets well-regulated through the sand, so it's heat from all around.

Speaker A

And this works very well and is still used today in making some medicines. And so what about that glass?

Speaker A

India, as far as we know, they had glass. We have a lot of archeology dedicated to glass beads, for example, but not to household items.

Speaker A

So a normal household would probably not have glasses for drinking out of or bottles for drinking out of.

Speaker A

So I've been really trying to find archaeological finds with bottles, and I found just two papers-- a colleague, and archeologist pointed me to some.

Speaker A

But it's very hard to pinpoint because no work has been done on these sort of everyday utensils basically.

Speaker A

And I think that alchemical laboratories would look like everyday utensils. KEITH CANTU: Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, so transitioning now from the everyday to what I think you were calling sort of special ontological states or what did you-- something relating to that different kinds

Speaker A

of ontological existence. The subtitle of this podcast is based on an occult South Asia workshop at the University of Vienna, where I know you were formally affiliated for a while.

Speaker A

DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, that was where my ERC project was actually located. Yeah. KEITH CANTU: Perfect.

Speaker A

And so this podcast seeks to offer more critical analysis of the category, and clearly, if you say the English word, alchemy, I'm sure you're already aware, you're sort of in this realm of thinking about esotericism or occult sciences or so on from the medieval period onward.

Speaker A

And I'm wondering, in what ways does your research connect with the subfield, and are there problems or benefits with using this word, occult, as an adjective, even if treated generally as the hidden nature of these herbs or other worlds?

Speaker A

You mentioned a temple and so on. How does that relate? DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, so I always feel so uneasy about this, and I feel like you invited the wrong person working on alchemy.

Speaker A

You should have asked David Gordon White to come. You should have David come over, because he's the one who's really dealt with all the occult and hidden parts, the sort of tantric elements of practice, whereas I focus much more on alchemy, Indian alchemy,

Speaker A

as a shastra, which is this sort of authoritative body of knowledge. And a shastra can be hidden or esoteric, but there is something in which it is mainstream in some sense, for something to call itself a shastra.

Speaker A

Now, some of the alchemical works don't call themselves a shastra. They use words like vidya, the knowledge, or vada, the doctrine.

Speaker A

And we have this divide in the earliest works where, who are they addressing? And how are they framed?

Speaker A

And so the earliest of the alchemical works, the Hridaya Tantra, roughly 10th century, is the heart of mercury, is very sober in tone, and it addresses a king of the kiratas.

Speaker A

And the king of the kiratas is called a rasacharya, basically a scholar of the mercurial science.

Speaker A

And so we have one scholar talking to another scholar, and they're discussing what this field looks like.

Speaker A

And there are definitely spiritual elements, but there's not really esoteric elements. It's just, you do this, and then this will be the outcome.

Speaker A

And the outcome may be that you become like Shiva, but it's not hidden, whereas one work further on, the rasayanava, the ocean of mercury, which is the work that David Gordon White has dealt with so much, it's already framed

Speaker A

as a conversation between the god, Shiva, and the goddess, his consort. And she's asking him about this hidden knowledge, and he's saying, OK, but don't tell anyone.

Speaker A

But this is the special sacred knowledge, and this is why mercury is so special.

Speaker A

And this is, the laboratory must have this temple space, and we have offerings to the guardian deities and all of that.

Speaker A

So we have this whole story. And then he goes on to doing basically what is described in this earlier work, which is so much more sober and technical.

Speaker A

So you have this whole sort of technical part in the ocean of mercury as well, but the whole framework is of specialized, esoteric knowledge that can only be given to those who are initiated.

Speaker A

So a practitioner is not a technician unless you think of ritual technology also, that people can be ritual technicians, as it were.

Speaker A

But this is something where you have to be initiated to really understand it on a different level in order for it to be potent.

Speaker A

So there we have this occult story, and then in later works, we have both things going on.

Speaker A

And then a lot of the works then go away from the tantric elements, but use more medicine.

Speaker A

And the more medicalized it becomes, the more mainstream and open and not hidden it becomes.

Speaker A

It's still a specialist topic. An expert is the one who can make these medicines because it's complicated and hard, just like any artisan has specialist knowledge that they can do because they have this practice, and they've been trained.

Speaker A

But then the esoteric part kind of goes away, and maybe those who were more dedicated to that part, maybe just became or continued to be yogins rather than alchemists or [? yetra ?] chemical physicians.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Right on Well, that's a wonderful answer, and I have a lot of respect, as you know, for David Gordon White's work and everything, as a former advisor of mine.

Speaker A

But at the same time, I think I certainly invited the right person for this podcast simply because what you can look at is with this perspective that you have from medicine as well as looking at the more mundane.

Speaker A

And I don't say that to minimize the alchemical work, but the mundane in the context of daily apparatus, the laboratory life, and the more exoteric worlds in which alchemy is practiced.

Speaker A

I think that it's equally important to understand those worlds as the context within which some of these more tantric or yogic elements get integrated, and I think that it's, as you're saying in your answer, there's an interplay between the two.

Speaker A

And the interest or the focus on one or the other sort of waxes and wanes.

Speaker A

Would you say that's about right? DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, this waxing and waning, I like.

Speaker A

When you think of India, the Indian history of the shaiva age or the tantric age, that more people engaging in this, it makes complete sense that alchemists would also engage in this worldview.

Speaker A

And then maybe Vadanta arises, and it becomes less important to have tantric vocabulary or tantric practices or so.

Speaker A

So I see that sort of part of historical work, but also I think it probably comes down to individual practitioners because we don't know of communities exactly.

Speaker A

So in some of the works, they define themselves as kaula, so they would have been part of a kaula shaiva community, maybe.

Speaker A

But we don't quite in what ways alchemists talked with each other or related with each other than as part of their training.

Speaker A

So it's really hard to trace, but I think if you just go from work to work, author to author, many works don't have an author because they're framed as a conversation between god and goddess.

Speaker A

But some do, and then you get a sense of the contexts in which they were working.

Speaker A

And we have authors who worked in Jain contexts, or we have early works where you have Buddhist traces.

Speaker A

So a lot of it is sort of shaiva within the shaiva worldview and the cosmology that that brings.

Speaker A

In all of them, you have a world in which there's more going on than just the human life and animals around us, so you have an idea of, well, rebirth, but also the possibility of immortality, the possibility of transmutation and so on.

Speaker A

So this is, like, a given to all of the works, and this is a cosmology that underlies everything that people do.

Speaker A

And even if their work is very mundane, they may still believe in the possibility of enlightenment, or in the possibility of being able to fly or having the experience of flight, at least, when you take a particular concoction.

Speaker A

So this is something that they all share. I mean, on a day-to-day level, I always think of that an alchemist would have basically spent all day sort of grinding materials.

Speaker A

It takes ages. If you grind iron or so, it takes so long until anything happens.

Speaker A

So I think these must have also been fairly patient people and quite strong. KEITH CANTU: Yeah, it makes sense, the connection with yoga there, and I guess as a side question, you mentioned Jaina and Buddhist texts as well.

Speaker A

It makes me think too, as well, the interplay between the Sanskrit alchemical literature and in other languages, vernacular languages like, say, Tamil, for example, or Bengali.

Speaker A

I know that there's a record in Tamil of alchemy, of the siddhars and so on, but do you see references to the vernacular in any of these Sanskrit texts?

Speaker A

Or is it just more or less its own corpus of literature? DAGMAR WUJASTYK: You know How Sanskrit literature generally never admits to any outside influence?

Speaker A

We just know. This has always been here. Knowledge is forever. But you sometimes have to read between the lines.

Speaker A

In some of the Sanskrit works, we get reference to Tibetans, some recipes from Tibet.

Speaker A

So we know that these Sanskrit works were brought to Tibet, and some of them were translated into Tibetan and are part of the Tibetan Buddhist canon.

Speaker A

[? Harmon ?] Simioli has written about this and has worked a lot about this.

Speaker A

We know that a lot of-- that some Sanskrit names for materials appear in Tamil siddhar works, so there's some connection there.

Speaker A

But, again, the Tamil works never admits to getting outside influence either, but you can sometimes see it in traces of words and so on.

Speaker A

And then the medical parts of the alchemical works, sometimes via Sanskrit medical work-- so you have an alchemical recipe but in, let's say, the sharngadhara samhita, a 13th, 14th century medical work, goes into Persian medical literature, so Indo-Persian medical literature.

Speaker A

So Fabrizio Speziali has been working on this literature, so the Persian writing physicians. And they could be Muslim, but they could also be Hindu.

Speaker A

And they would have sort of Ayurvedic works or works that based on Greco-Arabic medicine, so unani medicine.

Speaker A

And then they would also bring in these sort of [? yetra ?] chemical formulae, so these chemical medicines, using, for example, mercury and so on, and the kinds of procedures for processing the materials.

Speaker A

And so we have this trajectory from the Sanskrit works into the Indo-Persian medical works.

Speaker A

What we don't know is how reciprocal that relationship was. But also, it could have been the same people, so somebody writing-- a physician writing in Persian might have been a Hindu, might have been a shavia.

Speaker A

So it's much more closely related than you might think, and they're talking to Sufis.

Speaker A

So it's much more hybrid. In the Sanskrit works, you don't it, but in the Sanskrit works, the mere presence of mercury is a mystery because you don't have it on the Indian subcontinent.

Speaker A

We have it in Afghanistan. We have it in Tibet. But it's not really a sort of Indian material, if you will.

Speaker A

So it would have been imported. Why not. Also the procedures for dealing with it?

Speaker A

And then we have an Arabic medicine. We have some eighth, ninth century medical texts like from Al-Razi or so who are dealing with mercury and have a number of these procedures that then also appear in India.

Speaker A

What we don't have is any Sanskrit text ever saying it's coming from the outside.

Speaker A

It's really fitted in beautifully into the Indian sort of medical and then tantric context.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Hmm. So I've heard a lot of speculation too in some historical work that has connected it to China as well, the spread over ports and so on.

Speaker A

DAGMAR WUJASTYK: And this seems very likely. It's the sort of thing where for years I've been sort of saying, we can see the smoke, but we haven't found the fire, where we don't-- the main thing is that if-- and in Chinese

Speaker A

alchemy, they use mercury, and they use sulfur as very important materials. I don't think mica has quite the same status as it does in India.

Speaker A

So this big use of mercury, quicksilver, in China makes it seem like it's a likely contender for-- and because this kind of alchemy in China is just a lot older than the Indian one.

Speaker A

But we never quite find how or when or where or who was it. Was it sort of a Buddhist exchange or so?

Speaker A

And so we don't have a trail basically for this, except for that it just seems so likely that it's so similar.

Speaker A

Also, this whole idea of being able to gain immortality or have spiritual insight and so on, because that is something that is not really the case with any of the Western forms of alchemy.

Speaker A

And when I say Western, I mean the Greco-Egyptian alchemical literature and then later the Arabic one and then the European one, where they also speak of mercury and sulfur, but these are not the materials, mercury and sulfur.

Speaker A

These are principles of heat and coolness and so on, that you can reduce any material to and then mix it to make gold.

Speaker A

Making gold was something that the Chinese and the Indians also were interested in, but this whole sort of then having an elixir that you then apply to the human being, that was something that only happened in Western alchemy at a much, much later point in time.

Speaker A

So there, it's very difficult to make out this connection. I'm thinking-- and this is always-- like, this is where I would be going is I think Arabic medicine might be a more interesting place to look at than Arabic alchemy, to understand

Speaker A

these new procedures that are happening in Indian alchemy and then also in Indian medicine for how to deal with these substances that Indians had not really dealt with before.

Speaker A

But there is maybe with the Silk Road or the Golden Road, some connection from China via the Silk Road to Arabic lands or what today is Uzbekistan and so on, and then via Tibet and so on.

Speaker A

And then that way coming down into India, that's a possibility, but it's all speculation.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right, well, lots of work for future scholars to do, but I want to focus on what you have done in terms of paving the way for these future questions and scholarship along these lines, which is,

Speaker A

congratulations on the massive accomplishment of releasing Indian Alchemy Sources and Contexts through Oxford University Press as well as, I've seen recently, many other recent works that you've been publishing on alchemy as well and related topics.

Speaker A

And I'm wondering if you could talk more about the contribution of this volume to the study of Indian alchemy.

Speaker A

I know you've been working on it for how many years now? I mean-- DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Oh, it's seven years, right.

Speaker A

When we started in 2018, because of, course, Keith, you yourself contributed to this volume in a really fun chapter on alchemical pilgrimage.

Speaker A

And maybe you should be the one telling us about that chapter if you'd like to.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: [LAUGHS] Well, I mean, yeah, it was a privilege to be able to contribute, and I know, as you say, it's not exactly an exemplary model of all Indian alchemical texts and so on.

Speaker A

But that particular one about the wonders of srisailam and different kinds of herbs and metals and mantras that can be used by the sadhaka or alchemist to uncover and create all kinds of different powers and integrate those within the body, I mean,

Speaker A

it was really fascinating to look at. And what I realized in looking at that and in conversation with your input and work as well, was that there are so many technical terms that are related to the laboratory alchemy world,

Speaker A

as well as units of measure distance and so on. And so it's sort of impossible to know one without the other, if that makes sense.

Speaker A

DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, I think, yeah, you kind of-- it's not enough to just read alchemical texts.

Speaker A

It's good to know medical texts. It's good to have some tantric vocabulary. That's really helpful to understand what's going on.

Speaker A

There's so many-- and this pan Indic thought there, as you say, with the measurements and so on, this idea that when you have measurement, that something is a hand, you dig a hand deep.

Speaker A

Or if there's a finger breadth, what's a finger breadth? Is it from here to here?

Speaker A

No, it's from there to there. That the measurement is the human, but it's the individual human in anything that is made or dug or-- so it's something about the relationship of the human body to the wider environment.

Speaker A

And I think that's a really interesting thing that we see not just in alchemical literature but in medical, in architecture, and so on.

Speaker A

If you build a temple, how high is the door? And it's in relation to the patron's body and so on, all of these things that we find going there.

Speaker A

With the specialized vocabulary-- I mean, when I first started looking at this literature, I really had trouble understanding what it all meant, and there's still many words where I really wonder how they came to mean what they seem to mean in alchemy.

Speaker A

One of the examples is [? nidorina, ?] for example, where mercury, after having been made to faint, to become weak, you have this [INAUDIBLE], which you can say-- you can call it just thickening, but you can also-- David translates it as swooning.

Speaker A

Fainting, the mercury's fainting. And then it's revived, and the word used is [? nidorina, ?] which usually means to stop.

Speaker A

Think of it in Buddhist, the cessation of something, but instead, in the alchemical word, it's actually waking up again.

Speaker A

So all this kind of vocabulary is quite surprising, and I think this would also be an avenue to look for cross-cultural sort of interchange where also like the killing of mercury, for example, the idea of killing something to make it an agent of immortality

Speaker A

is quite a surprising sort of idea. So I found Oliver Helwig's work very helpful for the general technical use, but also David's.

Speaker A

And I don't know. I think this is the problem. In your English translation, or German or French, it's very hard to bring out these two sides of every word that is being used.

Speaker A

You have this sort of word that is swooning but that is also thickening, to bring out this field of associations that comes with every technical term, and then, of course, just the general worldview of what people were trying to achieve.

Speaker A

And I'm really somebody who really learns through seeing and feeling and touching and tasting and so on, and this is where the recreations that we did, Andrew Mason and I did, came in because I kind of wanted to see,

Speaker A

can we see what this word is trying to describe in the revival of the mercury or in it's bringing it to a faint or so?

Speaker A

What's happening? What is visible? And this is an aspect that I think is really interesting.

Speaker A

I don't know that we were super successful in actually recreating things correctly, but it is just-- KEITH CANTU: No immortality?

Speaker A

No? DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Well, who knows? So far, so good. [LAUGHS] Aging has happened in the last few years.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Oh, well. [LAUGHS] DAGMAR WUJASTYK: I mean, with the book, seven years, we started in 2018.

Speaker A

I still had some money left over from the ERC project, and I just thought I'd really noticed the yoga part and the medicine part we had covered quite well, and especially because there was also the Hatha yoga project at the same time, another ERC project.

Speaker A

They were doing so much on the yoga works. But the alchemy works were the part where I felt that nobody really knew much about it.

Speaker A

Of course, we had David Gordon White's book, The Alchemical Body, and there were some studies, [INAUDIBLE] and so on.

Speaker A

But there was very little for people to actually access in terms of what these texts feel and taste like, as it were.

Speaker A

And so that was my general idea with making this reader, making this literature accessible, also to people who are interested in a more global history of alchemy to just see-- basically put India on the map.

Speaker A

And there's a tension here, because we have this still sort of surviving rasa shastra in Indian medicine, in rasa shastra, where you learn these formulations that were written 700 or 800 years ago.

Speaker A

And you're learning how to make them now in college in India, when you're becoming a doctor with maybe a specialization in this field.

Speaker A

So but of course, the kinds of things that we were recreating were the earlier works, which weren't really for medicines but for elixirs or to make gold or silver and so on.

Speaker A

So there's not too much overlap with the modern practice, but, yeah, I still think that this book this Indian Alchemy Sources and Context, will really help with situating Indian alchemy into a larger history of science, also history of religion.

Speaker A

But I do think that histories of alchemy in other fields are usually in the history of science and technology field, and I think this book will really help with that and, at the same time, also highlight these sort of Indigenous, Indian, religious

Speaker A

and, yes, occult elements as well within which these technologies functioned. KEITH CANTU: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Speaker A

Great. Well, I mean, again, I'm really grateful for the invitation to contribute to that text and also to David for actually telling me about this text and putting it on my radar.

Speaker A

And I think that it's just a wonderful project, and I think it really does point to the accessibility and the need to take Indian alchemy serious, not just from a history of religions point of view, but also from history of science.

Speaker A

And I think that's great. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: I just wanted to tell you, so I've been using your chapter in my teaching-- KEITH CANTU: OK.

Speaker A

[LAUGHS] DAGMAR WUJASTYK: --and so on, and also some of the other chapters too. I teach history of alchemy in South Asia sometimes, and so I've been using your chapter.

Speaker A

And one of the things I do with my students is that they have to make an exhibition on alchemy as their final project, so they will do something, some artwork or something.

Speaker A

And so one of the students used your chapter to make a little video game, and it was very-- KEITH CANTU: Wow, yeah.

Speaker A

DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, so it was very basic, but still, somebody goes into the woods and then comes to the portal and then takes the leaves and all of these things.

Speaker A

So she just did it through text, so there were no images and so on.

Speaker A

But I just thought that was really fun to think of, that a student seeing this text and then immediately having this, this is like a game.

Speaker A

We can game this. Now you go meters to the left, and then you will meet a nymph and so on.

Speaker A

It was really-- KEITH CANTU: Exactly. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, it was a very popular chapter for sure among the students.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Oh, well, that's exciting. Yeah, it is so much like a game, and I did actually-- you posted the link to that, and I was able to get it to work.

Speaker A

And I played the game actually as well, and it was really wonderful to see.

Speaker A

I'm sure with AI and all of these other technologies, probably all of our work will be given new visual dimensions, whether we like it or not, but I mean, it's how it goes.

Speaker A

[LAUGHS] DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yes, yes. I mean, I think that would actually be an amazing use of AI, to be honest, to do, like, a storyboard of that.

Speaker A

Yeah. Exactly. KEITH CANTU: And the laboratory apparatus that you point to as well. I mean, there are ways to recreate these using descriptions and very technical ways.

Speaker A

And, of course, it might not be historical, but at least it gives a window into what they-- DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, so a student of mine did in, fact, also make-- what she used, Artstep to make a 3D sort of model

Speaker A

of the laboratory, and you could also move around in it and so on. The only problem was that the program sometimes broke down, and you couldn't get very far with it sometimes.

Speaker A

But she did all the work, and it was really nice. And I'm sure one could elaborate on that and do something really interesting.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Hmm. Well, take note if any computer engineers are watching. On that note, I want to close with, what are some of your current projects and initiatives in the pipeline?

Speaker A

And where do you see your research going from here? DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, so I'm on sabbatical still, just another six weeks or so, and then I'm back into teaching and admin and all of that.

Speaker A

But I've had a sabbatical this year, and I'm working on basically a book on the emergence of [? yetra ?] chemistry, so chemical medicine.

Speaker A

And it's really a summary of everything I've been thinking about for the last 10 years-- KEITH CANTU: Wow.

Speaker A

DAGMAR WUJASTYK: --and just thinking, trying to think about how these changes in Indian medicine, how or whether they relate to the emergence of Indian alchemy?

Speaker A

And so I'm thinking about things like the manuscripts having images of apparatuses on them and about also just the use of these new materials.

Speaker A

And where does it appear first? And how is it always described? What kind of-- the technical terms, is it couched in, and so on.

Speaker A

So that's what I'm working on now, and I haven't got as far as I would hope to get.

Speaker A

Somehow a year passes very quickly, but the other thing I've been doing-- and this is probably won't be successful-- but I have been working with some colleagues on an ERC project proposal where we would like to look at alchemical works written

Speaker A

in Sanskrit but also in Persian and in Tamil and in Tibetan to see if we can find where they meet and then also how they possibly connect with, let's say, Chinese alchemy, but also with Western forms of alchemy and medicine.

Speaker A

So we worked quite a long time on getting that proposal. We've submitted it. Only has a 7% chance of getting these things, so I don't want to hope too hard for this.

Speaker A

But that would be a direction that I would really like to go into just to have more translations of the Sanskrit works, but also get all these other Indic forms of alchemy and the Tibetan one.

Speaker A

Tibetan alchemy is so interesting because it has all sorts of influences from everywhere, and then indigenizing it.

Speaker A

So it'd be wonderful if we could get a big project like that going, and one of the aspects of this would mostly would be philological and translating works.

Speaker A

But it would also-- I think we would also have an art element. I'd like to make video documentaries showing the connection of the materials to the land and to just show how things are made and so on.

Speaker A

I have had these recreations of things, but I'd like to do this in India, go into the woods and get those leaves.

Speaker A

Go to [INAUDIBLE]. Go and see the mercurial lingams in a temple, and then show how one would make this.

Speaker A

So something like that would be a big part of what I would like to do with that project, but we'll have to see about the funding.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Yeah, well, that sounds like a wonderful vision, in any case, and good luck on securing this project.

Speaker A

Wow. That would be really, really exciting. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yes, if everybody could speak the appropriate mantras to get this project, but, yeah, you know how it is.

Speaker A

And I think if we don't get it, all of us who are involved in this will, in our smaller ways, just keep on working on this field.

Speaker A

And I think other than that, I think maybe I would also like to look into other things, maybe more-- I was thinking maybe of pigments and art, more with art and thinking of the chemical elements that go into making Indian art would be interesting.

Speaker A

And then also cooking. Cooking. I like the whole sort of literature around cooking, I think is really interesting, but we're waiting just now.

Speaker A

Very soon, there will be a new publication by Andrea Gutierrez, I believe, on paka shastra, on cooking, the science of cooking.

Speaker A

So have a look at that and see what kind of new work that will inspire.

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Yeah, that sounds really interesting, the connections there and everything. Yeah wow. Well, I look forward to the results of that project, and I came across some references just recently to-- in Sri Sabhapati Swami's Tamil works, to alchemical pills and flights.

Speaker A

And so it's clearly a subject that sometimes you encounter in places that you don't expect.

Speaker A

And so it's really important, I think, to have these sort of connections on a global scale, and then also, as you're saying, these connections to other forms of sciences, whether it be cooking or dyes or art.

Speaker A

And so I really appreciate and respect your vision on that front. Yeah. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Where are you going with your work?

Speaker A

I want to know also. I know you're supposed to interview me, but I would like to know, where are you going?

Speaker A

KEITH CANTU: Sure. Yeah, so I'm continuing project on this yoga diagrams project that was sort of started and launched online, so that's being turned into a digital publication that will be published here and hopefully a hard copy work as well through Harvard University Press.

Speaker A

And beyond that, still working on reprints of these books by Sabhapati Swami and also continuing to look at the Bengali bowel siddhar side of things as well, middle Bengali works as well.

Speaker A

Yeah. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, it's really good that you're working with Bengali as well.

Speaker A

As a Sanskritist, it's quite circumscribed what you will find. I think in the vernaculars, you will find very interesting offshoots but also original ideas.

Speaker A

That is so fascinating. I'm glad that you're working on this. KEITH CANTU: Thank you.

Speaker A

Yeah, it's surprising, and I'm sure that you can speak to this a little bit as well, which is that find words sometimes that are still spoken today, these tatsamas or other Sanskrit words that have really contemporary meanings.

Speaker A

And they actually help. I think that they help more than they harm, honestly, on the projection backward, because obviously you can't project contemporary meanings onto the past in all cases.

Speaker A

But sometimes the ways in which there are these contemporary words, and I guess in the case that you've studied, these practices that are still living, you can really learn a lot, sometimes, at least in terms of how it might have been,

Speaker A

even if it's not exactly the same. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: I mean, the past is like a foreign country, but at the same time, I do think we can get a glimpse, at least, and a feeling for it, so, yeah, to make it relevant to us

Speaker A

also today. KEITH CANTU: Yes. Yes. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today about all of your wide range of expertise, and it was a real pleasure.

Speaker A

And all the best for your future work. DAGMAR WUJASTYK: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to chat with you, Keith.

Speaker A

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING AND MUSIC]

Topics:Indian alchemyAyurvedaYogaIndologySanskritPaliRasa SastraAshtavaidyanshistory of medicineclassical Indian medicine

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