The Nath Tradition -- Gorakhnath, Matsyendranath and the Birth of Hatha Yoga

The Nath yogis call Shiva Adinath, "the first lord" -- the original teacher of yoga -- and themselves his heirs. Their tradition, the Nath Sampradaya, is a lineage of ascetic yogis who, roughly between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, gave classical form to hatha yoga: the yoga of posture, breath, bodily locks and seals, and the awakening of kundalini, aimed at perfecting the body as an instrument of liberation.

Their founding legend is about a fish. Shiva was once teaching the secrets of yoga to Parvati on the shore of the sea, and a fish in the water heard everything. Transformed by the teaching, it became the first human guru of the lineage: Matsyendranath, "lord of the fish". His disciple was Gorakhnath -- Goraksha -- the great organiser of the tradition, to whom many of its texts and many of its legends are attributed.

One of the best-loved Nath legends reverses the roles of guru and disciple. Matsyendranath, the story goes, went to a kingdom of women, became its king and forgot his yoga in a life of pleasure. Gorakhnath, hearing of it, entered the palace disguised as a musician or dancer, and through a coded song -- "Wake up, Matsyendra, Gorakh has come!" -- reminded his teacher who he was, and led him back to the path. The saying "Jaag Machhandar, Gorakh aaya" is still quoted across north India.

The Naths are traditionally counted as nine, the Navnath, though the lists differ by region; Matsyendranath, Gorakhnath, Jalandharnath, Kanifnath and Gahininath are among those most often named. In Maharashtra the Navnath are especially honoured, and the lineage runs from Gahininath to Nivruttinath, who initiated his younger brother Jnaneshwar -- the poet-saint whose commentary on the Gita, the Jnaneshwari, is one of the glories of Marathi literature.

The Naths' influence reaches far beyond their own order. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika of Svatmarama, the most widely read classical text on hatha yoga, opens its account of the masters with Adinath and Matsyendranath and lists the great siddhas of the Nath lineage. The vernacular poetry attributed to Gorakhnath, with its scorn for empty ritual and its praise of inner realisation, prepared the ground for the nirguna poets who followed, and the Sikh scripture records a dialogue between Guru Nanak and the siddhas, the Siddh Gosht.

In Nepal, Gorakhnath gave his name, by tradition, to the town of Gorkha and so to the Gorkhas, and Matsyendranath is worshipped in the Kathmandu valley as Rato Machhindranath, whose huge chariot festival marks the coming of the rains. In Gorakhpur, the city named after him, the Gorakhnath temple remains the tradition's most famous seat.

What the Naths offered was a path that took the body seriously. Where much of Indian spirituality treated the body as an obstacle, the hatha yogis treated it as a laboratory: purified, strengthened and mastered, it could become the vehicle of liberation, even of a perfected, deathless state. Much of what the world now practises as yoga -- the postures, the breathing, the locks and seals -- comes down, through many hands, from these split-eared ascetics and their fish-born guru.