Excerpts from "The Rainbow Body and Resurrection"
"It seems that the Tamil Siddha tradition has its own accounts of the body of masters disappearing after death. The most famous recent case—that of Swami Ramalinga whose body dissolved into light in March, 1874—is attested to in police reports of the time. Ramalinga’s religious movement, which continues to the present day, insists on the literal disappearance of the body.
Ramalinga’s practices involve opening the third eye and the fontanel; the fontanel, which is the aperture at
the top of the skull, is also important in Tibetan ‘ pho wa practices (practices involving techniques for expelling the consciousness principle from the top of the skull).
As in Tibetan dzogchen, the red sun at sunrise is contemplated with open eyes. A mantra favored by Ramalinga, the jyothi (light) mantra, (emphasizing the grace and compassion of the Dancing Shiva) is repeated continuously for six months. Having attained the signs of completion, the practitioner can contemplate the “white” sun of midday. At this point, light begins to develop a direct relationship with the body of the yogin. Entering the eyes, sunlight travels through the subtle channels of the yogic body, permeating the cells.
...what is important is the use of the eyes as an entryway into the subtle channels that bring the light energy into the cells and down to the molecular and atomic levels of the body. The eyes and channels provide a vital interface between the material body and the subtle body. These practices are very similar to the methods of tregchod and thodgal in Tibetan dzogchen, both Bonpo and Buddhist, as we verified in our February 2001 interviews with Loppon Tenzin Namdak.
Once brought inside the body, the light brings about the transformation of itself : the practitioner does not manipulate it with the conscious mind; it just happens spontaneously. Ramalinga is particularly interesting not only for having revived the yogic teachings of Tirumular but also for his more modern understanding of the atomic nature of material phenomena.
He advocated for a transformation of the entire body-mind complex at the atomic level, on the level of the pure elements, in a way that also resonates with Tibetan tantric systems description of the coarse elements and their subtle substratum (space, air, water, fire, and earth). The light body arises from the vishuddha bhutas . These purified bhutas or elements are drawn upwards and outwards from the aperture of Brahma. In effect Ramalinga is describing a bodily alchemy of distillation made possible by the energy of solar light that has been brought down into the cells.
Ramalinga is said to have appeared by bilocation to Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky. Since his disappearance in 1874, he is reported to have appeared to many people in the form of a luminous hologram; there are also many reports of Ramalinga locutions. Tulasiram, a Pondicherry author and practitioner who has written voluminously on Ramalinga, reports on a woman devotee who in 2001 was awakened from sleep by a slap from Ramalinga and was put into a state of meditative absorption. Tulasiram claims to have seen a luminous apparition of Ramalinga in his private apartment in 1982.
The Tamil Siddha tradition is a branch of Shaivite Hinduism that is typically practiced among marginalized, non-caste based, non-Brahman yogis and medical practitioners. It is not a religion in the sense of having its own priesthood and scriptures at the service of a clearly defined community. Although there are certainly temples served by Brahman pujaris (ritual specialists) connected to Tamil Siddha tradition, their existence is more a matter of classic Hinduism acknowledging the validity of the attainment of these siddhas than a defining institutional base for the movement. The reason that the Tamil Siddhas interest us is that their approach to spiritual attainment is firmly grounded in the material body. Like the set of spiritual traditions loosely called “tantra,” the Tamil Siddha tradition recognizes the jiva (life principle or soul, which it calls the uior )."