The Amṛtasiddhi: Haṭhayoga’s Tantric Buddhist Source Text

Like many of the contributors to this volume, I had the great fortune to have Professor Sandersonas the supervisor of mydoctoral thesis,whichwas a critical edition of an early text on haṭhayoga called the Khecarīvidyā. At the outset of my work on the text, and for several subsequent years, I expected that Sanderson’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Śaiva corpus would enable us to find within it forerunners of khecarīmudrā, the haṭhayogic practice central to the Khecarīvidyā. However, notwithstanding a handful of instances of teachings on similar techniques, the fully-fledged practice does not appear to be taught in earlier Śaivaworks. In subsequent years, as I readmore broadly in the corpus of early texts on haṭhayoga (which, in comparison to the vast Śaiva corpus, is relatively small and thus may easily be read by one individual), I came to the realisation that almost all of the practices which distinguish haṭhayoga from other methods of yoga were unique to it at the time of their codification and are not to be found in the corpus of earlier Śaiva texts, despite repeated assertions in secondary literature that haṭhayoga was a development from Śaivism (or “tantra” more broadly conceived). The texts of the haṭhayoga corpus do, however, couch their teachings in tantric language. The name of the haṭhayogic khecarīmudrā, for example, is also that of an earlier but different Śaiva practice. When I was invited to speak at the symposium in Professor Sanderson’s honour held in Toronto in 2015, I decided to try to articulate my rather inchoate thoughts on this subject by presenting a paper entitled “Haṭhayoga’s Śaiva Idiom.” The inadequacy of my theories was brought home to me some months after the symposium when I started to read, together with two other former students of Sanderson, PéterDániel Szántó and Jason Birch,1 a twelfth-century manuscript of the Amṛtasiddhi (AS), the earliest text to teach many of the key principles and practices of