Ashta Siddhi: The Eight Siddhis Explained

The ashta siddhi are the eight classical “perfections” or powers said to arise from advanced yogic and Tantric practice — anima, mahima, garima, laghima, prapti, prakamya, ishitva and vashitva. The word siddhi means accomplishment or attainment. The same traditions that list these powers warn, with unusual consistency, that pursuing them derails the practitioner.

That warning is the most important thing on this page. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras the attainments described in the third chapter are immediately called obstacles to samadhi. Tantric and Nath literature says much the same in its own vocabulary. This guide explains what the eight are and where they are listed, how the separate “nav nidhi” treasure list became attached to them, why the tradition treats powers as a trap, and how to think soberly about modern claims that anyone possesses them. It contains no methods and no instructions for obtaining anything.

What Does Siddhi Mean in Hinduism?

The Sanskrit siddhi (सिद्धि) comes from the root sidh, “to succeed, to be accomplished”. Its ordinary meanings are success, fulfilment, completion and proof. A siddha is one who has accomplished — a perfected or realised person — and in the phrase mantra siddhi the word simply means that a mantra practice has come to fruition.

So the term carries two senses that are constantly confused. In the first, siddhi is the successful completion of spiritual practice: the goal itself. In the second, it is the set of extraordinary abilities that the literature says may appear along the way. Popular usage has collapsed the first sense into the second, so that “getting siddhi” has come to mean acquiring powers. The texts do not read that way. They treat the powers as by-products — often unwanted ones — of a process whose purpose is entirely different.

It is also worth separating siddhi from two neighbouring ideas. It is not the same as vibhuti, which in the Yoga Sutras names the manifestations that arise from meditative absorption, though the terms overlap. And it is not the same as the ritual results (shatkarma) promised in some Tantric manuals for specific rites; those belong to a different genre, discussed historically in our article on the fear of black magic.

The Eight Siddhis: Names and Meanings

The standard list runs as follows. The meanings are those given by the commentators; the imagery is deliberately cosmic, and classical writers were not necessarily describing conjuring tricks.

Where do these lists come from? Attribution needs care, because the eight are quoted far more often than they are located.

• The Bhagavata Purana gives the fullest classical enumeration. In its eleventh book, in Krishna’s teaching to Uddhava, a set of primary siddhis is distinguished from a longer list of secondary ones, and the primary set corresponds closely to the eight above.
• The Yoga Sutras devote their third chapter to the attainments that arise from samyama, the combined practice of concentration, meditation and absorption. Patanjali refers to animadi — “anima and the rest” — as part of the perfection of the body, without spelling the set out; it is Vyasa’s commentary and the later tradition that enumerate the eight. So the familiar list is properly called commentarial rather than Patanjali’s own.
• Tantric and Nath literature refers to siddhis constantly, and hatha yoga texts describe results of particular practices at length. The specific eight appear in this literature too, but the lists are not stable: different works count differently, some add or substitute items, and the Buddhist tantric traditions have their own enumerations of siddhi that distinguish “common” attainments from the “supreme” attainment of awakening.

Longer lists exist as well — groups of eighteen, and the secondary set of ten in the Bhagavata — which is a good reason to treat “the eight siddhis” as a convention rather than a fixed doctrine of Hinduism.

Ashta Siddhi and Nav Nidhi: Why the Two Get Confused

Search for the eight siddhis in India and you will almost always find them paired with the nav nidhi, the nine treasures. The two lists have quite different origins.

The nine nidhis belong to the lore of Kubera, the god of wealth, and are named treasures of his hoard — Padma, Mahapadma, Shankha, Makara, Kachchhapa, Mukunda, Nanda, Nila and Kharva in one common listing, with variants in other sources. They are objects of prosperity, not yogic attainments, and they are personified in Puranic literature rather than described as states a practitioner reaches.

The pairing is overwhelmingly devotional, and one line does most of the work: the Hanuman Chalisa of Tulsidas states that Hanuman is the giver of the eight siddhis and the nine treasures, having received this boon from Janaki, that is Sita. Because the Chalisa is among the most recited devotional texts in north India, the compound phrase “ashta siddhi nav nidhi” entered ordinary speech as a single unit meaning something like “every power and every kind of wealth”. That is why the two lists are constantly presented together, and why many popular accounts treat the nidhis as if they were a second set of yogic powers. They are not.

Why the Tradition Calls Siddhis Obstacles

This is the heart of the subject, and it is the part that popular treatments omit.

Having spent most of a chapter cataloguing the attainments that arise from samyama, Patanjali states flatly that they are impediments to absorption, even though they are attainments from the point of view of ordinary outward-turned consciousness. (The sutra is numbered 3.37 in many editions and 3.38 in others; the numbering of this chapter differs between recensions.) The commentarial tradition reads the verse as a warning against precisely the state of mind that would find the third chapter exciting. The yogi who acquires a power acquires with it a reason to remain in the world exercising it — and that reason is an attachment, no different in structure from any other.

The logic is repeated in later literature. An attainment produces reputation; reputation produces followers; followers produce income, deference and the quiet conviction that one has arrived. Each step increases the ego that practice was supposed to dissolve. The Yoga Sutras make the same point again in the fourth chapter, where even the highest discernment must be let go. Hatha yoga texts, for their part, insist on secrecy about practice, a rule that removes the social reward of being seen to have powers.

Tantric works take a similar line from a different direction. Texts such as the Kularnava Tantra insist that the goal of the path is liberation — in the Tantric formulation, bhukti and mukti together, enjoyment and release — and they are scathing about practitioners who perform rites for display, for money, or for power over others. Nath and Siddha literature is more ambivalent, since its heroes are literally called Siddhas and its stories are full of marvels; but even there the marvels serve to demonstrate the master’s indifference to the world, and the tales regularly show a siddha humbled for showing off. Our pages on the Nath Sampradaya and on notable masters describe these traditions and how their hagiographies work.

There is also a practical reason the tradition says siddhis cannot be pursued directly. In the classical account they are not techniques but symptoms — things that may appear when the mind has become extremely steady. Aiming at them means aiming at a side effect, which requires exactly the restless, acquisitive attention that prevents steadiness. This is why no responsible teacher offers a course in obtaining powers, and why the promise of one is itself diagnostic.

Siddhis in Tantric and Nath Traditions

Tantric literature discusses attainment in two registers that are easy to run together. The first is soteriological: the accomplished practitioner, the siddha, is one whose practice has borne fruit. The second is ritual: many Tantras contain sections promising specific results from specific rites, and it was partly these sections that gave Tantra its reputation for sorcery, as our article on common misconceptions discusses.

Historians read those ritual sections in context. They belong to a wider South Asian genre of result-oriented ritual shared with Vedic, Puranic and folk sources, and they sit alongside material in the same texts that subordinates all such results to liberation. Treating the promises as the essence of Tantra is like treating the penalty clauses as the essence of a legal code.

In the Nath and Siddha traditions the siddha ideal is central. The eighty-four Siddhas, Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath, and the alchemical rasa siddha lineages are all built around figures said to have transcended ordinary limits, including death. Read as hagiography — which is the genre — these stories make a theological point about the freedom of the realised person rather than offering a historical record of feats. The same caution applies to modern accounts collected in our page on notable masters: devotional biography is not evidence.

Are Siddhis Real? An Honest Answer

Three things can be said clearly.

There is no reliable evidence that anyone possesses such powers. Claims of levitation, materialisation, bodily transformation and action at a distance have been investigated repeatedly and have never survived controlled examination. Decades of parapsychological research have produced no result that replicates dependably. The honest position is not that such things have been disproved in principle, but that nothing has ever been demonstrated.

The traditional literature is not making a laboratory claim. Classical texts were not written to describe repeatable experiments, and the genres they belong to — Purana, sutra with commentary, hagiography, ritual manual — each have their own conventions for describing the extraordinary. Reading a verse about becoming atom-sized as an engineering specification misreads it as badly as reading a psalm as a weather report. Several traditional commentators themselves take the powers symbolically, as descriptions of a consciousness no longer bounded by the body.

Claimed miracles have a long history as instruments of fraud. This is a documented pattern, not a suspicion. Figures claiming supernatural attainment have used those claims to attract followers, extract money, secure sexual access and silence criticism, in India and elsewhere; Indian rationalist organisations have spent decades publicly reproducing famous “miracles” with ordinary conjuring technique. Anyone who advertises siddhis, offers to transmit them, or charges for a course in acquiring them should be assumed to be selling something. Our guides on how to learn Tantra authentically and on the fear of black magic set out practical tests for judging teachers and for resisting exploitation built on fear.

None of this requires dismissing the tradition. The classical position and the sceptical position converge on the same practical advice: do not chase powers. One reaches it through metaphysics and the other through evidence, but they agree.