Then, again, a method of fasting called very painful (atikṛiććhra), described by Manu (XI. 213), was often practised. It consisted in eating only a single mouthful every day for nine days, and then abstaining from all food for the three following days.
Another method, called the lunar fast (VI. 20, XI. 216), consisted in beginning with fifteen mouthfuls at full moon, and reducing the quantity by one mouthful till new moon, and then increasing it again in the same way till full moon.
Passages without number might be quoted from ancient literature to prove that similar practices were resorted to throughout India, with the object of bringing the body into subjection to the spirit. And these practices have continued up to the present day.
A Muhammadan traveller, whose narrative is quoted by Mr. Mill (British India, i. 355), once saw a man standing motionless with his face towards the sun.
The same traveller, having occasion to revisit the same spot sixteen years afterwards, found the very same man in the very same attitude. He had gazed on the sun’s disk till all sense of external vision was extinguished.
A Yogī was seen not very long ago (Mill’s India, i. 353) seated between four fires on a quadrangular stage. He stood on one leg gazing at the sun, while these fires were lighted at the four corners. Then placing himself upright on his head, with his feet elevated in the air, he remained for three hours in that position. He then seated himself cross-legged, and continued bearing the raging heat of the sun above his head and the fires which surrounded him, till the end of the day, occasionally adding combustibles with his own hands to increase the flames.
I, myself, in the course of my travels, encountered Yogis who had kept their arms uplifted for years, or had wandered about from one place of pilgrimage to another under a perpetual vow of silence, or had no place to lie upon but a bed of spikes.
As to fasting, the idea that attenuation of the body by abstinence from food facilitates union of the human soul with the divine, or at any rate promotes a keener insight into spiritual things, is doubtless as common in Europe as in Asia; but the most austere observer of Lent in European countries would be hopelessly outdone by devotees whose extraordinary powers of abstinence may be witnessed in every part of India.
If we now turn to the second method of attaining mystic union with the Divine Essence, namely, by profound abstract thought, we may observe that it, too, was everywhere prevalent in Buddha’s time.
Indeed, one of the names given by Indian philosophers to the One Universal Spirit is Ćit, ‘Thought.’ By that name, of course, is meant pure abstract thought, or the faculty of thought separated from every concrete object. Hence, in its highest state the eternal infinite Spirit, by its very nature, thinks of nothing. It is the simple thought-faculty, wholly unconnected with any object about which it thinks. In point of fact, the moment it begins to exercise this faculty, it necessarily abandons for a time its condition of absolute oneness, abstraction, and isolation, to associate itself with something inferior, which is not itself.