Nath Sampradaya: Gorakhnath, the Nine Naths & Nath Yoga

The Nath Sampradaya is an order of Shaiva yogis who trace their teaching to Shiva as Adinath through the legendary gurus Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath. Its ascetics, often called Kanphata or “split-ear” yogis, are known for hatha yoga, the pursuit of a perfected and long-lived body, a monastic network headed by the Gorakhnath Math at Gorakhpur, and a sharp, plain-spoken critique of empty ritual.

The Naths matter far beyond their own numbers. They are the tradition through which much of medieval India learned hatha yoga, their songs helped shape the vocabulary of the Sant poets, and the yoga taught in studios today descends at several removes from texts they transmitted. This guide sets out what the order is, which parts of its history can actually be dated, and what its yogis have taught — building on the biographies of Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath covered elsewhere on this site rather than repeating them.

Nath Sampradaya Kya Hai? What “Nath” Means

Nātha (नाथ) is an ordinary Sanskrit word for “lord”, “protector” or “master”, and in this tradition it is a title earned through initiation: a yogi’s name is completed by it, as in Gorakh-nath or Jalandhar-nath. The guru list begins with Shiva himself as Adinath, the “first lord”, so that the human teachers are links in a chain whose origin is divine rather than historical. A member of the order may be called a Nath, a jogi, a kanphata, an avadhuta or, in older sources, simply a siddha.

The word sampradaya means a tradition handed on — a lineage of transmission rather than a church with a membership roll. That matters, because for most of its history the Nath world consisted of loosely connected bands of wandering ascetics, householder devotees and regional monasteries rather than one centralised institution. Scholars including James Mallinson argue that the Nath Sampradaya as a self-conscious, organised order took shape relatively late, roughly in the 15th to 17th centuries, consolidating older and more diffuse networks of yogis and siddhas under the name of Gorakhnath.

Two distinctions are worth making at the outset. The ascetic Nath order is not the same thing as the devotional Navnath traditions of Maharashtra, which centre on the worship of the nine Naths as saints and are carried largely by householders. And the Naths are not part of the ten Dashanami monastic orders associated with Shankara: they have their own initiation, panths and governing assembly.

Who Are the Nine Naths (Nava Nath)?

The Nava Nath are nine perfected masters treated as the tradition’s founding figures. Every region agrees on Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath; after that the lists diverge, and there is no canonical set of nine. Maharashtrian tradition, shaped by the popular Marathi Navnath Bhaktisar, gives one grouping; North Indian, Bengali and Nepalese sources give others, and some lists quietly swap names to accommodate a local shrine’s patron saint.

Bhartrinath shows how such lists work. He is popularly identified with Bhartrihari, the king of Ujjain who renounced his throne — a story also told of the Sanskrit poet of that name, though the two figures are probably distinct. Treating the Nava Nath as a fixed historical committee of nine misreads what the grouping is: a devotional canon, assembled locally, of masters believed to be still alive and accessible.

The 84 Siddhas: A Traditional Number, Not a Roll Call

Alongside the nine Naths, the tradition speaks of 84 Siddhas — perfected yogis credited with mastery over the body, over time and over death. Here too the number is stable and the names are not. Eighty-four recurs across Indian religion as a conventional figure of completeness: there are said to be 84 asanas, 84 lakh forms of birth, 84 siddha places. Tibetan Buddhist tradition preserves its own list of 84 mahasiddhas, and some names appear on both sides of the Hindu–Buddhist line, which is one reason scholars read the siddha world of roughly the 9th to 13th centuries as a shared milieu rather than as separate sects. For that side of it, see Buddhist Tantra and the mahasiddhas.

David Gordon White’s The Alchemical Body (1996) traces how these traditions combined yoga, alchemy (rasayana) and mercury lore into a single project: making the body imperishable. That project is central to the Naths, who speak of kaya siddhi, perfection of the body. Popular lists of the 84 are best read as devotional inventories; a source offering a single definitive roster is overstating the evidence.

Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath: What Can and Cannot Be Dated

Tradition is clear and history is not. Tradition holds that Matsyendranath received yoga from Shiva and passed it to his greatest disciple Gorakhnath, who then organised the order; the legends — Matsyendra overhearing Shiva teach Parvati from inside a fish, Gorakh calling his guru back from a kingdom of women — are told across India, Nepal and Tibet in many incompatible versions.

What historians can say is narrower. The Kaulajnananirnaya, an early Kaula tantra preserved in a Nepalese manuscript, is attributed to Matsyendranath, which places a figure of that name in the stream of Kaula tantric Shaivism some centuries before the Nath order existed. Gorakhnath is usually placed between the 11th and 13th centuries on the strength of references in later literature, but no inscription or dated manuscript fixes him. Bands of yogis identifying with these names are clearly attested from the 13th century onward, the institutional order later still.

The Amritasiddhi and the Hatha Yoga Attributions

The most important recent correction concerns hatha yoga, which popular books credit Gorakhnath with inventing. James Mallinson’s research — including his edition and study of the Amritasiddhi, the earliest known text to teach the characteristic hatha techniques, and the survey written with Mark Singleton in Roots of Yoga (2017) — shows that this text comes from a Buddhist tantric milieu of around the 11th century, and that several groups of ascetics developed and exchanged these methods. The Naths became hatha yoga’s most visible carriers, and later hatha works were attributed to Gorakh because his name conferred authority.

None of this diminishes Gorakhnath. It relocates him: he is the tradition’s organising authority and the name under which a whole literature travelled, rather than the single author of it.

Guru Parampara and Nath Diksha: Aughar, Kanphata and the Twelve Panths

Nath guru parampara works like other tantric lineages: authority passes from teacher to disciple by initiation, and the disciple is grafted onto a chain running back to Adinath. As our guide to the guru and diksha in Tantra explains, the lineage rather than the book is what legitimises a practitioner.

Nath initiation is normally described in stages. An accepted candidate is first made an aughar, receiving a new name, a cord and a whistle (singnad) worn at the neck, and the cloth of the order. The second and defining stage is the splitting of the ear cartilage and the insertion of the large earrings — kundal, also called mudra — after which the yogi is a kanphata or darshani. Made of horn, clay, glass or metal depending on panth and period, the rings are treated as an irreversible public commitment rather than an ornament, and they are what made Nath yogis instantly recognisable in medieval India.

The order is traditionally divided into twelve panths (barah panth), sub-lineages named after founding figures; as with the Nava Nath, the lists of twelve differ between sources. An all-India assembly of the panths, based at Gorakhpur, serves as the order’s coordinating body, deciding disputes and recognising heads of monasteries. Naths do not cremate their dead: a deceased yogi is buried seated in meditation posture and a samadhi shrine is raised over the site, which then becomes a place of worship in its own right — many rural Nath establishments began as exactly this. Historically the order recruited across caste boundaries, and in some regions Muslim jogi groups have also claimed Nath affiliation; how far that openness translated into social equality is debated.

Gorakhnath Temple, Gorakhpur and Other Nath Centres

The best-known Nath institution is the Gorakhnath Math in Gorakhpur, eastern Uttar Pradesh — the city takes its name from the saint. The temple complex around the shrine is a major pilgrimage destination, busiest at Makar Sankranti in mid-January, when a long-established fair is held and devotees offer khichdi. The Math’s head carries the title of mahant or peethadhishwar.

Other significant centres include the Kadri Math at Mangaluru in Karnataka, which has a visibly Buddhist architectural heritage and installs a Nath mahant; the Nath establishment at Tryambakeshwar near Nashik; Caughera in the Dang district of Nepal, the subject of Véronique Bouillier’s fieldwork; Devi Patan in the Balrampur district of Uttar Pradesh; and Tilla Jogian in the Punjab, now in Pakistan, remembered in Punjabi literature as the hill of Balnath. Nath yogis also maintain a presence at major pilgrimage fairs and at several Shakta and Shaiva sacred sites.

Nath Teachings: Hatha Yoga, Laya, Nada and the Subtle Body

What unites the Nath literature is a conviction that the body is not an obstacle to liberation but the instrument of it. Where much earlier tantric practice worked through mantra and deity worship, Nath practice works through breath, posture, seals and the deliberate cultivation of a body that does not decay. The vocabulary is the one mapped on our page on chakras, nadis and kundalini: the central channel and its two companions, the wheels along the spine, and the ascent of energy through them.

Hatha: Mudras and the Preservation of the Drop

Early hatha teaching is organised around mudras — mahamudra, mahabandha, khechari, viparita karani and the three locks — rather than the postures that dominate modern classes. The rationale in the oldest layer of texts is the preservation of bindu, a vital drop understood to reside in the head and to be steadily lost downward; inverted postures and seals are said to reverse that loss and so arrest ageing. A later and now more familiar model explains the same practices as the raising of kundalini. Nath texts contain both explanations, sometimes on the same page — one of the clearest signs that the corpus was assembled over centuries.

Laya and Nada: Dissolution and Inner Sound

Laya yoga is the yoga of dissolution: the practitioner allows mind, breath and the sense of separate selfhood to merge into their source rather than building anything up. Closely linked is nada practice, attention to the unstruck inner sound. The fourth chapter of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika describes a sequence in which the yogi listens inwardly, following the sound as it grows subtler until attention dissolves in it. Nath vernacular poetry returns constantly to this imagery of the anahad nad, and to the “inverted” yogi who drinks nectar rather than losing it.

Sahaja and the Critique of Ritualism

The word sahaja — “innate”, “spontaneous”, “born-with” — names the goal in much Nath poetry: not an attainment bolted onto a person but their natural condition, uncovered when contrivance stops. From that standpoint the Gorakh Bani and related verses mock the machinery of religion: pilgrimage, bathing at holy places, scriptural learning, caste marks, matted hair, even elaborate yoga itself once it becomes display. This is a recognisably tantric move — the internalisation of ritual — pushed further than most lineages take it and expressed in vernacular verse instead of Sanskrit commentary, which is why poets outside the order read the Naths so attentively.

How the Naths Relate to Tantric Shaivism

The Naths grew out of tantric Shaivism and then travelled some distance from it. What they kept is substantial: Shiva as the source of revelation, initiation by a guru, the subtle-body cosmology, and the doctrine of pinda and brahmanda — the individual body as a small replica of the cosmos — which the Siddhasiddhantapaddhati works out in detail.

What they set aside is equally telling. Elaborate deity worship, long mantra liturgies, the yantra-centred ritual described on our page on tantric sadhana and the transgressive rites of the earlier Kaula streams all recede; in their place stands an ascetic discipline of body and breath. Where a Kaula practitioner sought identity with the deity through worship, the Nath yogi sought it through the transformation of his own substance. So the Naths sit awkwardly on the usual maps — not a school of scriptural Shaivism, not a Shakta lineage like Sri Vidya, not a bhakti movement, yet in conversation with all three, and related to the history traced on our origins of Tantra page by descent and divergence at once.

The Naths in Sant and Bhakti Literature

Few groups left a deeper mark on North Indian devotional poetry. The Naths gave the Sants a ready-made vocabulary — inner sound, the inverted body, the guru as the only real authority, contempt for ritual display — and a sparring partner.

• Kabir argues with the jogis constantly, borrowing their images while rejecting the claim that bodily technique can secure liberation; a body of vernacular literature stages these encounters as dialogues between Kabir and Gorakh.
• Guru Nanak’s Siddh Gosht, preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib, is a sustained dialogue with Nath siddhas in which the yogis’ powers are acknowledged and their path answered with one of remembrance and honest householder life.
• Marathi tradition links the poet-saint Jnaneshwar’s lineage to Gahininath through his elder brother and guru Nivruttinath, connecting the Naths to the Varkari stream.
• Bengali and eastern literature preserves the Gorakha-vijaya cycle of songs about Gorakh’s rescue of his guru.
• Regional ballads of Bharthari, Gopichand and Puran Bhagat, still sung by itinerant performers in Rajasthan and Punjab, are Nath renunciation stories in folk form.

The Hindi critic Hazariprasad Dwivedi argued that this Nath layer is the hinge between tantric religion and the Sant poetry that followed it — a reading still influential in Hindi literary history.

Nath Influence on Modern Yoga

The line from the Naths to a modern yoga class is real but indirect. The texts inherited by nineteenth- and twentieth-century teachers as the classical statement of hatha yoga — above all the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, with the Shiva Samhita and Gheranda Samhita — belong to the Nath-affiliated hatha corpus, and they are where asana, pranayama, bandha, mudra, nadi and kundalini reached a wide readership.

At the same time, Roots of Yoga makes clear that modern postural yoga is not simply the Nath system continued: the number and prominence of standing postures, the sequencing, the physical-culture influences and the therapeutic framing are largely twentieth-century developments. Many contemporary schools also claim Nath descent, some with documented initiation and some without, and the claim is easy to make and hard to check. A useful habit is the one recommended in our guide to learning Tantra authentically: ask who initiated the teacher, into which panth, and whether anyone in that lineage will confirm it.

Books on the Nath Sampradaya: Where to Start

The literature divides neatly. For the order as a living institution: George Weston Briggs’s Gorakhnāth and the Kānphaṭa Yogīs (1938), dated in its attitudes but rich in detail, and Véronique Bouillier’s Monastic Wanderers (2017). For the siddha world the Naths came from: White’s The Alchemical Body. For the yoga: Mallinson and Singleton’s Roots of Yoga. For the poetry: the Gorakh Bani in Barthwal’s edition and Dwivedi’s Hindi study. Our reading list sets these among wider recommendations.