Sathya Sai Baba: gold from body in ‘lingam’

Frames from BBC's 'The Secret Swami' showing Sai Baba sleight of hand

According to Sathya Sai Baba’s translator ‘Professor’ Anil Kumar, Sai Baba said that his collapse at the Shivarthri festival in 2004 was due to the three tonnes of weight of the golden lingam he claimed emerged from his body (see here – also view how the BBC camera showed that no lingam actually emerged). Probably the fatuous blind believer Anil Kumar mistranslated Sai Baba’s words… for the Sanathana Sarathi printed version of Sai Baba discourses in which he claims that the weight of the gold in the human body – and in the gold lingams he produces – was ‘three tolas’. This is equivalent to the weight of three original silver Indian rupees of 11.4 grams each. So Sai Baba’s lingam of three tolas would weigh just over 34 grams.

Further, Sai Baba said in his discourse after the Shivarathri lingodbhava two years previously (13/3/2002) “(Showing the golden Linga to the devotees, Swami said). “As you can all see, this Linga is rather bigger in size. There is a meaning behind this. This is five Tolas in weight. [one Tola is 11.66 grams. 5 Tolas = about 60.0 grams]Every human being possesses five Tolas of gold essence known as Hiranyagarbha… Gold represents energy in man and is the cause of his radiance. The gold content within each body is this size only. It is gold essence in the body that makes the eyes see, ears hear etc.“ (Sanathana Sarathi – April 2002, p. 127)

Firstly, the human body cannot possibly contain so much gold! In Wikipedia we find that the amount of gold in the human body is vanishingly tiny:-

Element	Percent of Atoms	Atoms

Gold

0.00000030

2 x 1019

Further: “only salts and radioisotopes of gold are of pharmacological value, as elemental (metallic) gold is inert to all chemicals it encounters inside the body” (see here)

Sai Baba’s fantastic account of the imaginary ‘Hiranyagarbha’ and how it ‘represents’ energy [but also ”makes the eyes see, ears hear etc.”] is beyond all reason and science. It is a primitive Vedic superstition, which led to the use of gold as an ayurvedic ‘medicine’. It is used in ayurvedic clinics even today, despite modern scientific knowledge of all the properties of gold in all its different forms on the human body as having very little effect except some reduction of some arthritic inflammation. In short, another myth perpetrated by Sathya Sai Baba with his ignorance of science and belief in ancient mythology as superior even to modern knowledge! Click here to see a continuation of this discussion.