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MYSTICAL BUDDHISM. 25 
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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 Runjit 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. 
J 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 Bhagavad- 
gitd, 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 
