Eastern Indian Adepts
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
The
Eastern Indian Adept would be known as Guru, the heavy one, the teacher.
They were called Buddhas, the awakened ones, Mahatmas, great souls, and
Mahasiddhas, the great magicians with control over reality. The Adept in
the sub-continent would be a master of all meditation, would possess the
minor siddhas (powers), such as flying, walking through walls, knowledge
of time, transformation, influencing from a distance, seeing the minds of
others, speed walking, and automatic realization of the dharma. They would
also posses all the super-mundane siddhas such as the enlightened qualities
of body, speech, and mind, in which telepathy is taken to a level of omniscience.
The Tibetan Buddhists list eight mundane and eight super-mundane siddhis,
not including the myriad of powers of omniscient Buddhas. Patanjali and
the Mahasiddhas, such as Krishnacarya, list hundreds of powers in their
literary works. The magicians of the sub-continent would be expert oracles
and diviners, healers with herbs, stones, and energy.
Buddhist teachers adopted many of the old shamanistic rites, such as attempting
to contact the spirit world, and would often take the role of oracles or
divine soothsayers for those Bon deities that had been brought into the
new religion. This assimilation produced a very individual form of Buddhism
that centered on the Lama, the Tibetan Guru and teacher. This is now the
Buddhism of Nepal, Mongolian China, and Bhutan. Within India, Buddhism was
largely reabsorbed into Hinduism; the Buddha himself was said to have come
into being as the ninth incarnation of the great Hindu god Vishnu. This
continual absorption and assimilation of different beliefs is perhaps the
dominant characteristic of Indian religion. Certainly, it is what has helped
give rise to such a rich and varied mythology.