The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India by David Gordon White

Author:David Gordon White [White, David Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

8. The Man with the Golden Finger and Gorakh’s Smithy

Such legends of bodily dismemberment and restoration as that of Pūraṇ Bhagat are not wholly unique to the Nāth Siddha tradition. A number of similar accounts, apparently of Rasa Siddha inspiration, are recounted by the eleventh-century Muslim savant Alberuni. One is “a tale about … the city of Valabhī”:

A man of the rank of a Siddha asked a herdsman with reference to a plant called Thohar, of the species of the Lactaria, from which milk flows when its leaves are torn off, whether he had ever seen Lactaria from which blood flows instead of milk. When the herdsman declared that he had, he gave him some drink-money that he should show it to him, which he did. When the man now saw the plant, he set fire to it, and threw the dog of the herdsman into the flame. Enraged thereby, the herdsman caught the man, and did with him the same as he had done to his dog. Then he waited till the fire was extinguished, and found both the man and the dog, but turned to gold. He took the dog with him, but left the man on the spot. Now some peasant happened to find it. He cut off a finger, and went to a fruit-seller who was called Ranka, i.e. the poor, because he was an utter pauper and evidently near bankruptcy. After the peasant had bought from him what he wanted, he returned to the golden man, and then found that in the place where the cut off finger had been, a new finger had grown.178

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