The Nāth Sampradaya

The mark is on the ears. Not the lobes, where an ordinary earring hangs, but the thick central cartilage, the hard ridge of the ear, split with a two-edged blade and plugged with neem wood until the wound heals around a ring of horn or clay or metal. The men who wear those rings are called Kānphaṭa, “split-eared,” and the name is half an insult. They prefer another. They call themselves the Nāths, the Lords, and they are after the one thing no ascetic order has ever quite promised so plainly. They want to not die.

That is the strange and magnificent centre of the Nāth Sampradaya, the order of Śaiva yogis this article maps. Most Indian paths aim past the body, treating it as the thing to be shed. The Nāths aim at it. They set out to take the perishable human body and cook it, by breath and posture and the raising of an inner power, into a siddha-deha, a perfected and deathless form. The tradition they built to do this is the one that carried haṭha yoga down to the modern world, which is why every yoga studio on earth is, at a great distance and without knowing it, in their debt.

This is a story with two clocks running at different speeds, and keeping them apart is the whole discipline of telling it honestly. There is the clock of the tradition, which begins outside time with Shiva. And there is the clock of the record, which is stubborn, late, and full of gaps. The tradition and the record do not agree, and the honest account lets you hear both.

The lords of the immortal body

Start with what the Nāths actually are, on the ground.

They are Śaiva. Their god is Shiva, and their metaphysics grows out of the wider tantric world of the Śaiva traditions. They are ascetics, though the order also holds a huge population of householder Nāths who marry and farm and worship. And they are antinomian, standing deliberately outside the settled brahmanical world of caste and Vedic ritual, a band of avadhutas, “cast-off ones,” who have shrugged off the categories that bind ordinary society.

What sets them apart from every neighbouring order is the goal. The Nāth aim is kāya-sādhana, the cultivation of the body, toward kāya-siddhi, its perfection. George Weston Briggs, whose 1938 study Gorakhnāth and the Kānphaṭa Yogīs remains the fullest early description in English and is now in the public domain, put the promise in the tradition’s own flat terms: “The Yogi, wearing the mudra, becomes immortal.” The body is not a prison to escape. It is raw material to be transmuted. This is the thread that ties the Nāths to India’s alchemists, and we will come to the mercury and the laboratory later, because for the Nāths the alchemy that turns base metal into gold and the yoga that turns a mortal body into a divine one are, in the end, the same operation performed on different substances.

Ādinātha, Matsyendra, Gorakh

Now the charter, told as the tradition tells it.

The first guru is Ādinātha, the “First Lord,” and Ādinātha is Shiva. The teaching descends from him, god to man, to Matsyendranāth, whose name means “Lord of the Fishes.” A legend explains it: the teaching was overheard from inside the belly of a great fish, where Matsyendra, in one form of the story, lay hidden while Shiva taught the Goddess in secret on an island in the sea. From Matsyendra it passes to his disciple Gorakhnāth, in Sanskrit Gorakṣanātha, the towering figure of the whole tradition, the systematiser, the wonder-worker, the one whose name the order carries.

The Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, the fifteenth-century manual by Svātmārāma that became the standard text of haṭha yoga, opens by saluting exactly this line. In Pancham Sinh’s public-domain translation of 1915:

“The royal Yogi Matsyendra Natha, the great Yogi Goraksha Natha, and others knew this excellent practice of Hatha Yoga, through their grace Swatmarama Yogi also learnt it.”

The verses that follow roll out a long roster of Siddhas, the perfected masters, Ādinātha and Matsyendra and Gorakṣa among a crowd of names, and they matter because they show the tradition already, six centuries ago, drawing its own genealogy back through these two figures to Shiva. The line from Ādinātha through Matsyendra to Gorakh is the spine of the Nāth self-understanding.

Below Gorakh the line branches. The tradition speaks of the Navnāth, the Nine Nāths, its founding masters, and of the caurāsī siddha, the eighty-four Siddhas, a great company of adepts shared across the Nāth, Buddhist, and alchemical worlds. This is the charter in full: one god, two founding gurus, nine masters, eighty-four perfected ones, an unbroken current of transmission running down from Shiva to the yogi being initiated today.

The split ear

The initiation that makes a Nāth is one of the most distinctive rites in Indian asceticism, and Briggs, who watched and recorded it, is our clearest witness.

It comes in two stages. A man first becomes an Aughar, a novice, through a preliminary initiation. The second and final stage, which not every Nāth undergoes, is the splitting of the ears. A specialist guru performs it, called the Cira Guru, the “splitting guru,” or the Kan Guru, the “ear guru.” In Briggs’s account:

“Slits, about three-quarters of an inch long, are then made in the cartileges of both ears. The mantra, ‘Siva Goraksa,’ being used… Plugs of nim or of bikua wood are then inserted in the wounds… The care of the wounds continues for forty days.”

Into the healed slits go the rings, called mudra, or kundal, or, in a term of real reverence, darśan, a word that carries the sense of “vision,” of having seen the ultimate. The earrings are the visible sign of the vow, and they are why the yogi may, from that day, add Nāth to his name. As Briggs records the transformation: “By the slitting of the ears the Aughar becomes a Yogi, and may add to his name the word Natha, Lord.”

The vows sworn at initiation draw the shape of the life. Briggs sets them down almost as a list, the candidate swearing over the knife driven into the ground:

“swearing not to engage in trade, not to take employment, not to keep dangerous weapons, not to become angry when abused, not to marry, and to protect his ears.”

To protect the ears is no small clause. In the traditions of the order, to have one’s ring torn out is a catastrophe, a fall from the state the ring signifies. The rite closes, Briggs notes, “with the worship of the nine Nathas, the eighty-four Siddhas and Balasundari,” so that at the very moment a new Nāth is made, the whole charter is invoked over him. The split ear is a wound that heals into membership, and the tradition reads the cut itself as opening a channel, a nadi, that assists the yogi’s power. Whatever else it is, it is unforgettable, and it made the Nāths visible across India for a thousand years as the men with the great rings in their ears.

The nine, and the eighty-four

The Navnāth, the Nine Nāths, are the founding masters, and here the record begins its first quiet correction of the charter.

A common list runs: Matsyendra, Gorakṣa, Jālandhara, Kāṇhapā, Gahinī, Bhartṛnāth, Revaṇa, Carpaṭi, Nāganāth. But the list is not fixed. It shifts from region to region and text to text, and the Sanskrit tradition, as James Mallinson has shown, has no settled roster of the nine before roughly the eighteenth-century Gorakṣasiddhāntasaṃgraha. The Nine Nāths feel eternal and canonical. They were, in fact, assembled and re-assembled over centuries, and different corners of India venerate a different nine.

The eighty-four Siddhas are looser still, a semi-fixed company of perfected adepts whose membership varies across every source that names them, and which overlaps heavily with the eighty-four mahāsiddhas of Buddhist Vajrayāna. Into this company the tradition folded some of India’s most famous alchemists, above all Nāgārjuna, the master of mercury, who was, in Mallinson’s careful word, “coopted” into the Nāth line. The eighty-four are less a fixed brotherhood than a shared pantheon of the medieval Siddha world, claimed by several traditions at once.

Who really made haṭha yoga

Here the two clocks pull furthest apart, and the honest account has to slow down.

The tradition holds, plainly, that Matsyendra and Gorakh created and systematised haṭha yoga, that the whole science of posture and breath and the raising of kuṇḍalinī flows from them. It is a beautiful claim, and modern scholarship does not think it is quite true.

James Mallinson, the leading present-day scholar of the Nāths and of haṭha yoga, has made the case in detail. The earliest datable formulation of haṭha yoga, he argues, is found in the roughly thirteenth-century Dattātreyayogaśāstra, a text that was not composed in a Nāth milieu at all. The Nāths, on this reading, did not invent haṭha yoga. They inherited an already-existing ascetic practice and overlaid their own contribution, the meditative laya yoga of dissolving the mind, onto that base, and later, much later, wove the whole thing into a sectarian identity of their own. Mallinson goes further, noting that many of the works bearing Gorakṣa’s name are retrospective ascriptions, credited to him long after the fact, and that the Gorakṣasaṃhitā, one such text, “contains no references to Gorakṣa other than in its colophons.”

And the order itself is late. This is the single most important correction the record makes. The named gurus are old, ninth to twelfth century for Matsyendra and Gorakh. But the Nāth Sampradaya as an organised order, with its twelve sub-orders, its monasteries, its worked-out metaphysics, is first attested only around the beginning of the seventeenth century. The twelve panths appear in Sikh writings and in the Persian Dabistān-i Mazāhib of the mid-1600s. A distinctively Nāth philosophy, set out in texts like the Siddha Siddhānta Paddhati, is a still later, roughly eighteenth-century, formation.

So the charter and the record stand in open tension, and the article names it rather than smoothing it. The tradition remembers a continuous order founded by Gorakh around the twelfth century. The documentary record shows real early gurus, an existing haṭha practice the Nāths adopted rather than invented, a body of scripture credited to Gorakh long after his death, and an organised order that crystallised only in the early modern centuries. Both are true, on their own clocks. The Nāths are the great carriers and transmitters of haṭha yoga to the world. Whether they were its sole inventors is a claim the evidence will not quite bear.

The body made deathless

Set the history aside for a moment and enter the practice, because the goal is what makes the Nāths the Nāths.

The enemy is time, and time acts on the body through loss. The vital essence drains away, the nectar of life is consumed, and the body ages and dies. Nāth yoga is a vast programme for reversing that flow. Its physiology is the tantric subtle body, the network of channels, the cakras, and the central axis up which the coiled power, kuṇḍalinī, is raised. Its techniques are the practices haṭha yoga made famous: posture, breath-control, the locks and seals that redirect the inner currents.

The most striking of these seals, and one especially associated with the Nāths, is khecarī mudrā, the “seal of moving in the void.” The tongue is lengthened over months, its frenum gradually cut, until it can be turned back and up above the soft palate to seal an inner cavity in the head. There, the tradition holds, is stored the amṛta, the nectar of immortality, which ordinarily drips down and is burned away in the fire of the belly, ageing the body. The yogi who masters khecarī catches and drinks that nectar, and preserves the bindu, the vital drop, and so halts the leak of life. The Khecarīvidyā, a text attributed to Ādinātha himself and edited by Mallinson, is devoted to exactly this practice.

The metaphysics that frames it all is set out in the Siddha Siddhānta Paddhati, the great doctrinal text ascribed to Gorakṣa, translated into English by the scholar-practitioner Akshaya Kumar Banerjea in his Philosophy of Gorakhnath. Its organising category is the piṇḍa, the body understood as a microcosm, a small mirror of the whole universe. The text moves through the origin of the piṇḍa, its nature, its foundation, and its union with the Parama-pada, the Supreme State, ending on the figure of the avadhuta, the liberated one beyond all convention. The goal, throughout, is that transformation of the gross body into the siddha-deha, the perfected body, that no other tradition pursues quite so literally. The Nāth does not want to leave the body behind. He wants to make it immortal.

The alchemists in the line

This is where the mercury comes in, and where the Nāths join the strangest and most fascinating current in medieval Indian religion.

The historian David Gordon White, in his 1996 study The Alchemical Body, argued that the Nāth Siddhas, the Rasa Siddhas of the alchemical tradition, and the Siddha tantrics were not three separate worlds but one interlocking one, practised often by the same men. Alchemy, rasāyana, the science of mercury, sought to perfect and immortalise base metal by fixing quicksilver. Haṭha yoga sought to perfect and immortalise the body by fixing bindu, the vital essence. White’s insight was that these were understood as versions of a single project, the transmutation of the perishable into the deathless, run once in the laboratory and once in the flesh. Mercury was even identified with the seed of Shiva. The alchemist and the yogi were doing the same work.

This is why Nāgārjuna the alchemist sits among the eighty-four Siddhas, why the Nāth texts are steeped in the vocabulary of mercury and sulphur and calcination, and why the dream of the immortal body has, at its root, a chemical imagination. The Nāths stood at the meeting point of yoga and alchemy, and they held that a man could, by the right operation on his own substance, cheat death itself.

The order today

The living Nāth tradition is real and continuous, and it wears its long history lightly.

Its principal seat is the great temple and monastery at Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh, the Gorakhnāth Math, established, like so much of the organised order, in the seventeenth century. After Partition, Mallinson notes, Haridwar and Gorakhpur competed for primacy within the tradition, with Gorakhpur currently the more influential. The order numbers, by modern estimate, some eight to ten thousand ascetics across roughly five hundred monasteries, with householder Nāths far outnumbering the renunciates. Unlike the militant Daśanāmī and Rāmānandī orders, the Nāths never formed armed regiments; theirs was a different kind of power, the power attributed to the yogi who has conquered his own body and, with it, death.

The Nāths have left a mark out of all proportion to their numbers. The haṭha yoga they carried is now practised, in some diluted and secularised form, by tens of millions of people who have never heard the name Gorakhnāth. The tales of Matsyendra and Gorakh are sung across Maharashtra and Bengal and Nepal. And the split ears still heal, today, around the great rings, on men who have sworn not to marry, not to trade, not to grow angry when abused, and to protect the sign in their ears.

The tradition says its founder is deathless, that Gorakhnāth walks the earth still, appearing to those who need him. The record says the order took its organised shape only four centuries ago, and that the science it carried was older than the men it credits. Both statements can be held at once, and the Nāths, who built their whole path on the refusal of easy oppositions, would perhaps not be troubled by the tension. The body and the spirit, the metal and the flesh, the god and the yogi: the whole point of the path was that these were never really two.