The Nātha sampradāya and haṭha yoga

नाथ सम्प्रदाय

Also written: nath sampradaya · gorakhnath · hatha yoga origin · siddha tradition · matsyendranath · नाथ

The Nāthas are a Śaiva order, not a departure from the tradition — but they departed decisively from Vedic ritualism, and what they built has travelled further than almost anything else in the corpus.

The core claim

The body is not the obstacle to liberation; it is the only available instrument for it. Hence kāya-sādhanā — the perfecting of the body — and the whole apparatus of āsana, prāṇāyāma, bandha, mudrā and ṣaṭkarma. The aim is the raising of kuṇḍalinī from the mūlādhāra to the sahasrāra, the union of Śiva and Śakti within the practitioner, and the state of the siddha: liberated, and alive.

The texts

Text	Content
Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā	Svātmārāma, 15th c. — āsana, prāṇāyāma, mudrā, nāda; states that haṭha exists solely for rāja yoga
Gheraṇḍa Saṁhitā	The sevenfold yoga: purification, strengthening, steadying, calming, lightness, perception, isolation
Śiva Saṁhitā	Philosophy with practice; the nāḍīs and cakras in detail
Goraksha Śataka	Attributed to Gorakhnātha; the concise root text of the tradition

The Nāthas cut across the boundaries of their time: their lineages included Hindus and Muslims, their teaching was given in vernaculars, and Kabīr, Gorakhnāth's poetic heir in many respects, belongs partly to the same current. Modern postural yoga worldwide descends from this stream — filtered through the twentieth-century teachers of Mysore and beyond.

The Nātha sampradāya and haṭha yoga

The core claim

The texts

The tributaries — traditions born from the same ground

Buddhism

Jainism

Sikhism

The bhakti movement and the sants

Modern movements and teachers