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ARCHEOLOGICAL NOTES.
DECEMBER, 1880.]
Buddhist books describe the power of Irdhi* as a miraculous energy of the purified will gradually prepared by the long and difficult processes previously mentioned, as the potter gradually prepares and tempers his clay for any vessel he designs. Even after the exercise of all the kasinas it was exceedingly difficult to acquire, unless they had been also practised in former times. "To him who has not exercised kasina in former ages its accomplishment is most difficult. Amongst those who have not so exercised it scarcely one out of a hundred or a thousand succeeds in its acquisition. Even after accomplishing the exercises and attaining the nimitta-illumination, it is most difficult to acquire the power of irdhi." When at last reached, it could be used by a simple energy of the will, as is thus explicitly set forth in the Milindaprasna, where Milinda, the king of Sågal, asks the great Buddhist sage Nagasêna:
"Can any one who has the fleshly body of a man pass instantly to other continents, or to the Uturukuru, or to the Dêwa and Brahmalokas ?"
Nágaséna: "It is possible for one who has a body composed of the four elements to visit the places you have named."
Milinda: "In what way can this be done?" Nágasena: "Can you, at your will, leap from the ground, say, to the height of a span or a cubit ?"
Milinda: "With ease I can leap eight cubits high."
Nágasena: "How do you do this?"
Milinda: "I determine to leap; through this determination my body becomes as it were buoyant, and I rise from the ground."
Nagaséna: "Just so the priest who has the power of Irdhi determines to go to such a place; by the determination of his mind, his body becomes as it were imponderous, and he is enabled thereby to pass through the air."
Other ascetics possessed similar powers. Old Ibn Batuta of Fez, who travelled from Marocco to China in A. D. 1324-54, relates: "I was once in the presence of the Emperor of Hindustan where two Jogees wrapped up in a cloak, with their heads covered (for they take out all their hair
The Buddhist references to Irdhi are taken from the works of the Rev. S. Beal and Spence Hardy. Sp. Hardy, East. Monach. p. 262. Id. p. 285.
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with powder) came in. The Emperor caressed them, and said, pointing to me, 'This is a stranger: show him what he has never seen.' They said, 'We will.' One of them then assumed the form of a cube, and arose from the earth, and in this (cubic) shape he occupied a place in the air over our heads. I was so much astonished and terrified at this that I fainted and fell to the earth. The Emperor then ordered me some medicine, on tasting which I recovered and sat up, the cubic figure still remaining in the air, just as it had been." (Lee's Translation, p. 161.) Ibn Batuta, a learned and devout Moslem, would have had no object in inventing such an account, especially when the power belonged to a hostile faith. These were Jogis, a class always distinguished for magical power. Apollonius of Tyana and his companion Damis, who took notes of his travels, affirm that at the Hill of the Wise Men,' they saw Brahmans who walked in the air, not to excite wonder, for they hated ostentation, but in imitation of, and in service to, the sun. (Philostratus, Vit Apol. Tyan. III. 15.)
But Moslem ascetism, no less than Hindu, is no stranger to this mystic faculty. Muhammad was caught up into Paradise; and it is recorded by a contemporary of the famous Jellalu'd-din, the founder of the order of Whirling Dervishes, born A. D. 1207, that when a boy and playing with other children, when they proposed to jump from one housetop to another, he replied that such sport was only fit for cats, but that hd-an beings, if they felt any power in their souls, ought to fly heavenwards with him. Saying so he disappeared from their sight, and on their raising a lamentation he shortly re-appeared with the hue of his countenance changed and his eyes altered, and said, "As I spoke I was suddenly taken up and shown the miracles of the upper world, but when your wailings. ascended I was again deposited here." The whirling dance of the ecstatic Dervish is an inferior sort of Irdhi, strong enough to burst the bounds of sense and perception, but unable to dissolve the resistance of matter; differences and degrees fade and expire, and the Universal
η ̓Απὸ τῆς γῆς ἐς πήχεις δύο two cubita from the ground, no great height, but ce n'est que le premier pouce qui coûte.-Priaulx's Apollonius, p. 35.
See Indian Antiquary, vol. IV, p. 294.
