14 MYSTICAL BUDDHISM 



hibernation like that of animals, by some method of suspend- 

 ing temporarily the organic functions. A certain Colonel 

 Townsend is said to have succeeded in doing so. 



A well-known instance of suspended animation occurred in 

 the Punjab in 1837. A certain Yogi was there, by his own 

 request, buried alive in a vault for forty days in the presence 

 of Runjit Singh and Sir Claude Wade; his eyes, ears, and 

 every orifice of his body having been first stopped with plugs 

 of wax. Dr. McGregor, the then residency surgeon, also 

 watched the case. Every precaution was taken to prevent 

 deception. English officials saw the man buried, as well 

 as exhumed, and a perpetual guard over the vault was kept 

 night and day by order of Eunjit Singh himself. At the end 

 of forty days the disinterment took place. The body was 

 dried up like a stick, and the tongue, which had been turned 

 back into the throat, had become like a piece of horn. Those 

 who exhumed him followed his previously-given directions for 

 the restoration of animation, and the Yogi told them he had 

 only been conscious of a kind of ecstatic bliss in the society 

 of other Yogis and saints, and was quite ready to be buried 

 over again. 



What amount of fraud, if any, there may be in these 

 feats it is impossible to say. The phenomena may possibly 

 be accounted for by the fact that Indian Yogis have studied 

 the habits of hibernating animals for ages. 



I may add that it is commonly believed throughout 

 India that a man whose body is sublimated by intense ab- 

 stract meditation never dies, in the sense of undergoing 

 corruption and dissolution. When his supposed death occurs 

 he is held to be in a state of trance, which may last for cen- 

 turies, and his body is, therefore, not burnt, but buried 

 generally in a sitting posture and his tomb is called a samadh. 

 With regard to the fifth requisite the act of withdrawing 

 the senses from their object, as, for example, the eye from 

 visible forms this is well compared to the act of a tortoise 

 withdrawing its limbs under its shell. 



The sixth requisite fixing the principle of thought com- 

 prises the act of directing the thinking faculty (citta) towards 

 various parts of the body, for example, towards the heart, 

 or towards the crown of the head, or concentrating the will- 

 force on the region between the two eyebrows, or even fixing 

 the eyes intently on the tip of the nose. (Compare Bliagavad- 

 gltd, vi. 13.) 



The seventh and eighth requisites viz., internal self-con- 

 templation and intense self-concentration are held (when 

 conjoined with the sixth) to be most important as leading to 



