Introduction
Gordan Djurdjevic
Saying S of g orakhnāth (Gorakh-Bānī) is a title given to a compilation of the late medieval North Indian vernacular texts, in Old Hindi, by and about the Nāth yogis, which were collected, edited, and published by Dr. Pitāmbardatt Baṛthvāl in the mid-twentieth century.1 The main portion of these texts are translated here.2 A good deal of the translations, and in particular the sabads and pads, which are the two largest and arguably most important groups of texts, are also accompanied by short annotations. The principal purpose of this book is to present the translations of these important and often rather enigmatic texts on yoga.
Although the traditional attribution of this literary corpus, as evident in the above title, acknowledges the semilegendary guru Gorakhnāth as its author, this is a claim that cannot be objectively verified. The obvious discrepancy is presented by the fact that Gorakhnāth probably lived circa the twelfth century c.e., while the language of the material in the GorakhBānī, aside from the lack of formal linguistic consistency, appears to be of a later period, most of it typical of the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century
1. See Baṛthvāl (1946). Baṛthvāl also provided loose, descriptive (and incomplete) translations of and commentaries on the texts. These were quite helpful in preparing present translations, and I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge my indebtedness to Baṛthvāl’s scholarship. As Agrawal (2011: 11) rightly states: “It is also widely recognized that Barthwal’s edition of the Gorakh-bānī . . . remains the only decent critical edition of that important text so far published.”
2. To clarify: we have translated all the texts included in Baṛthvāl’s volume (1946: 1–221), except for the three appendices, which we considered less authentic, both historically and with respect to their content.
style of Hindi, and some of it possibly even more recent.3 However, there is no inherent reason to suppose that the older material could not have been adapted in order to reflect subsequent conventions of the spoken language—a practice that is not unusual for, often orally transmitted— vernacular literature.4 A pragmatic attitude, adopted here, is simply to treat Gorakhnāth as the assumed persona of the author or authors of these texts, with the tacit supposition that this is a traditional understanding of the provenance of the bānīs and not a historical fact. But the supposed derivation of the authorial source is not irrelevant. In the pertinent comments of Michel Foucault: irrespective of whether the assumed author of a work is an actual person or not, their name “serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse” and thus “shows that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech,” but is on the contrary “a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status.”5
3. Regarding the historical context of Gorakhnāth’s life, Mallinson (2012: 263) states that the “earliest datable reference to Gorakṣa are found in two texts written in the early part of the thirteenth century. They are from opposite ends of the subcontinent and refer to him as a master of yoga, suggesting that his reputation was already well established.”
4. “The fact that modern forms are included [in Hindi works attributed to Gorakhnāth] provides no conclusive evidence for a late date of composition since scribes occasionally modernized forms when copying texts. Conversely, the inclusion of Tantric Buddhist elements cannot be used as definite proof of the text’s antiquity, for scribes sometimes inserted apparently older concepts” (Offredi 1999b: 270). Ondračka (2011: 130), commenting specifically on the Bengali versions of “The Victory of Gorakṣa” but also on the vernacular North Indian Nāth texts in general, similarly argues that we cannot be certain of the exact date of the composition of these works, since the language was changing over time and these, primarily oral songs transmitted by the lower strata of society, were never fixed in a written form the way more respected poetry was. Lorenzen (2011: 21) surmises as the best estimate that “the earliest surviving Gorakh bani probably date from the thirteenth or fourteenth century or even later. It is also likely that they have been somewhat altered in the process of transmission from manuscript to manuscript.”
5. A more extensive quotation will be appropriate here: “Hermes Trismegistus did not exist, nor did Harpocrates [nor, we may add, Gorakhnāth]—in the sense that Balzac existed—but the fact that several texts have been placed under the same name indicates that there has been established among them a relationship of homogeneity, filiation, authentification of some texts by use of others, reciprocal explication, or concomitant utilization. The author’s name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse: the fact that the discourse has an author’s name, that one can say ‘this was written by so-and-so’ or ‘so-and-so is its author,’ shows that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status” (Foucault 1979: 147).
Guru Gorakhnāth is renowned in India as one of the main founders of the Order (sampradāy) of the Nāth yogis,6 who are also popularly known as the jogis, as well as kānphaṭa (“split-eared”), due to the fact that they typically wear earrings subsequent to their initiation into the order. The term “nāth” (Skt. “nātha”) deserves a note of explanation. The most general meaning of the word is “lord” or “master.” Baṛthvāl (1946: 4) takes it as a designation for brahman, which generally refers to the absolute ground of being, often conceived of as impersonal.7 According to Gopinath Kaviraj (1987: 65), the Nāth yogis
speak of the Nātha, the Absolute, as beyond the opposition involved in the concepts of Saguṇa [i.e., possessing describable attributes] and Nirguṇa [without describable attributes] or of Sākāra [possessing of form] and Nirākāra [formless]. And, so to them the Supreme end of Life is to realise oneself as Nātha and to remain eternally fixed above the world of relations.
Sures Chandra Banerji (1992: 29) explains that the “state of Nātha is what is known in philosophy as Kaivalya (detachment of soul [puruṣa] from matter [prakṛti], identification with Supreme spirit).” He further adds (Banerji 1992: 30) that the attainment of the “state of Nātha” is equivalent with the achievement of the perfected body (siddhadeha) and becoming “liberated while living” (jīvanmukta). Kalyani Mallik (1954: 1) defines the term in a similar vein: “These Yogīs worshipped God as ‘Nātha’ or the Supreme Master, who according to their faith transcends not only the finite, but the infinite as well.” Hajāriprasād Dvivedī (1981: 3), in his study of the Nāth Order, relates a fanciful etymology according to which “nā” means “eternal, without beginning” (“anādi”) and “tha” means the “establishing, foundation” (sthāpit) of the three worlds; hence “nātha” means “the eternal dharma, which is the cause of the foundation of the three worlds.”
6. Mallinson has established that it was in the fifteenth century that the order of yogis that came to be known as the Nāths began to attribute Hindi and Sanskrit works to Gorakṣa and to claim him as one of the founders. Based on his research, Mallinson (2012: 263) argues that “there is no evidence for the use of the name ‘Nāth’ to denote an order of yogis until the eighteenth century.”
7. The speculations about the nature of brahman have been a constant feature of Indian philosophy and spirituality since the compositions of the Upaniṣads (the oldest of which could be dated to c. fifth century b.c.e.). For a translation, see (among a dozen others) Olivelle (1996).
According to another similarly fanciful etymology, “nā” stands for the “lord-brahman” (“nāth-brahm”) that gives liberation and “tha” stands for the obstruction of ignorance; accordingly, “nāth” or “nātha” stands for the support in witnessing brahman and obstructing the māyā (Dvivedī 1981: 3). Dharmvīr Bhārti (1988: 257) quotes legendary siddha yogi Kanhapā’s pertinent statement, according to which the Nāth is the one whose mind is still. Mallinson (2012: 263) suggests that prior to the eighteenth century, “the word nātha/nāth, when used in Sanskrit and Hindi works in the context of haṭha yoga and yogis, always refers to the supreme deity.”8
The Nāth yogis are commonly associated with the development of haṭha (“forceful” or “vigorous”) yoga—another important term that calls for a comment. In his comprehensive account of the history of usage and meaning of the term “haṭha” in haṭha yoga, Jason Birch (2011: 531) comments that “the word haṭha is never used in Haṭha texts to refer to violent means or forceful effort” and argues that the “descriptions of forcefully moving kuṇḍalinī, apāna [one of five vital breaths], or bindu [semen] upwards through the central channel suggests that the ‘force’ of Haṭhayoga qualifies the effects of its techniques, rather than the effort required to perform them” (548). Birch notes the earlier occurrence of the term “in the eighteenth chapter of a Buddhist tantra called the Guhyasamājatantra (eighth century), in a discussion of the attainment of a visionary experience (darśana)” (535). More traditionally, and again based on a folk etymology, the term “haṭha” is taken as a compound denoting the union between the Sun (“ha”) and the Moon (“ṭha”). As Gerald Larson (2008: 142) comments, this allows further correlations such as the union between breaths, sexes, between sound and silence, macrocosmos and microcosmos, and finally, between Śiva and Śakti.
James Mallinson (2016) has demonstrated that the twelfth-century Dattātreyayogaśāstra, “the first text to teach the practices of haṭhayoga under the name of haṭha,” already borrows technical and theoretical aspects of teachings from the Amṛtasiddhi, a text composed in the Buddhist tantric (Vajrayāna) milieu. According to Mallinson, this latter text is of seminal importance and was the first to include a number of important concepts germane to haṭha yoga. His conclusions are extremely cogent in the
8. It could be argued that at least several instances of the term nāth that are found in the Sayings of Gorakhnāth more likely refer to a yogi rather than a deity, but the point is somewhat moot since in most of those instances such yogi has either achieved immortality or is sufficiently advanced on the path of yoga that he can be deemed godlike.
present context: “Because they share traditions of the 84 siddhas, several scholars have posited connections between Vajrayāna Buddhists and the Nāth yogis, with whom the practice of haṭhayoga has long been associated. The Amṛtasiddhi’s Vajrayāna origins and its borrowings in subsequent haṭhayogic texts, some of which are products of Nāth traditions, provide the first known doctrinal basis for this connection and a stimulus for its further investigation.”9
In order to fully appreciate the significance of haṭha yoga, it is important to bear in mind its distinctive qualities that separate it from the classical yoga, which is commonly associated with the worldview articulated in Yoga Sūtra by Patañjali, probably composed in the early centuries of the Common Era. There are several elements constitutive of this distinction: temporally, the haṭha yoga emerges in the medieval period, while the classical yoga is already mentioned in the late Upaniṣads (composed around the beginning of the Common Era); sociologically, it is not an exclusive prerogative of priests (brahmins) or even aristocracy (kṣatriyas), as it is also practiced by what are often considered lower classes, some of them at least nominally Muslim (while in a sense, the jogis consider themselves a separate denomination); methodologically, it focuses not on the discipline of the mind but on the body and its occult centers of power. These distinctive elements will be elaborated upon in due course.
According to a well-known legend, the original founder of this yogic order was in fact the great god Śiva himself, who is for that reason referred to as the Original Master (Ādi Nāth). Śiva’s immediate disciple was supposed to be the guru Matsyendranāth, whose yogic career is somewhat controversial and who may have been associated with a particular style of practice that privileges the engagement with female yoginis, human or divine (or both). His foremost disciple was Gorakhnāth. It hardly needs highlighting that this account of the origin and the chain of transmission (parampar) is mythical and not historical. Based on what we know, Matsyendranāth and Gorakhnāth, if indeed historical personages at all, lived several centuries apart. Be that as it may, the popular story of the origin of the Nāth Sampradāy could be summarized as done below.
Ṡiva’s wife Pārvatī asked him once to explain to her the secrets of yoga. Acquiescing, he took her to an uninhabited island and expounded the teachings about the haṭha yoga there, in the seclusion. In the meantime
9. For the translation of the Dattātreyayogaśāstra, see Mallinson (2013); for the Sanskrit text with a Hindi gloss, see Avasthī (1982).
Matsyendranāth, in the form of a fish or swallowed into the belly of a large fish (depending on the version of the story), overheard the dialogue and thus learned the secrets of yoga (Matsyendranāth, also known as Mīnanāth, means the “Fish-lord”). Later, while on a pilgrimage, Matsyendranāth enjoyed a hospitality of a brahmin couple and as a sign of appreciation, upon hearing that they were childless, gave to the woman a piece of magical ash (vibhūti) to eat. He explained that in this fashion she would conceive of a child. The woman was, however, persuaded by her friends not to eat it and instead threw the ashes on a cow-dung heap. After twelve years Matsyendra returned and inquired about the child; the woman confessed what she had done. The yogi went to the place where the ashes were thrown and called to the child. From the bottom of the hole filled with the cow-dung a voice replied, and when the place was cleared, a beautiful boy was found sitting in the yogic posture. Matsyendra gave him the name Gorakhnāth (Skt. Gorakṣanātha), which may be translated as “The Master Protected by Cows,” or “The Master Who Protects the Cows.” (The metaphorical underpinning of the name lies in the fact that a “cow” is also an expression for the senses.)10
There are several features in this mythic story of origin that deserve comments and elucidation. To start with, there is the mytheme of a divinely instituted tradition. This is a widely attested motif, which obviously aims to lend legitimacy to a particular social or religious institution. A well-known and illustrative example of such legitimizing strategy is observable in Buddhism, where both Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna divisions, emerging respectively (and approximately) five and ten centuries after the life of the historical Buddha Śākyamuni, argued that their teachings were in fact originally promulgated by the founder of the religion himself (and only “hidden” from general populace until the time for their revelation
10. This summary is based on Gautam (1998 [1981?]: 5–9), whose source of information was most probably Candranāth Yogi’s Yogisaṃpradāyāviṣkṛti. See also a summary of the story in Tantreś (1993: 28–31). The earliest, and in some important details different, version of the story is given in the 16th Chapter of Kaulajñānanirṇaya, traditionally attributed to Matsyendranāth, which Bagchi places in the mid-eleventh century and Kiss (2010: 26) “as composed before 1300 a d ” There, it is narrated how a book containing the secret knowledge of the Kaulas (early Śaiva Tantric group) was stolen by Śiva’s son Kārttikeya, and thrown into the sea. Śiva rescued it by catching and killing the fish that ate the book, and for that reason he was also called Matsyaghna (“fish-killer”), an alternative name for Matsyendranāth. See Bagchi and Magee (1986). On Matsyendranāth, see Karambelkar (1955); Bagchi and Magee (1986: 6–22, and passim); and Kiss (2010). White (2003) also contains a good deal of relevant information about Matsyendra and an extensive discussion on, and interpretation of, the Kaulajñānanirṇaya.
was “ripe”). It can be safely argued that such legitimizing strategies are universal in the history of religions. Returning to the Nāths, the additional element that is of relevance in the present context is the widely assumed notion that Śiva is a supreme master of yoga himself: to be engaged in the practice of this spiritual discipline thus amounts, among other things, to an imitatio Dei.
The fact that Śiva takes his wife to an isolated island in order to expound the teachings about yoga underscores the importance of secrecy in the transmission of this spiritual discipline: yoga is an esoteric tradition, on which we’ll see more later. I have argued in earlier writings that an appropriate and useful theoretical model, which could be adopted in order to approach and understand traditions of yoga and tantra, is the model of esotericism (otherwise mostly associated with the academic study of Western esotericism), and which also includes, or overlaps, categories such as magic and the occult.11 A significant, though by no means the most important, aspect of esoteric teachings and practices is precisely the element of secrecy. Such teachings are not intended for everyone—they presuppose initiation, an intimate and often exclusive teacher-disciple relationship, they are expressed in a coded discourse (such as the “twilight language,” sandhyā bhāṣā12), and they are therefore typically secret. Joseph Alter in fact argued that “all techniques of yoga were conceived of as quintessentially secret, being imparted by a guru only to select highly adept disciples.”13 Some other constitutive aspects of esoteric worldview will be addressed in more detail subsequently.
Jogis are widely believed to be engaged in magic and perceived as miracle-workers. Arguably, the most peculiar ability that they are associated with is the power of engendering children through nonsexual means. In addition, they are often, and in particular at the level of popular culture, seen and feared as ambivalent and even negative characters. To take advantage of David Gordon White’s recent study and its title, they are not rarely perceived as “sinister yogis.”14 We see all of these notions displayed in the segments of the story under discussion: Matsyendra possesses a
11. See Djurdjevic (2008; 2014).
12. Alternatively construed as “intentional language,” sandhā bhāṣā
13. Alter (2005: 121). For the role of secrecy in (what I call) Indian and Western esotericism viewed from a comparative perspective, see Urban (1997; 2003).
14. See White (2011b).
magic powder that can produce a child when consumed, while the brahmin woman, although barren and desiring children, is easily persuaded against eating the vibhūti, afraid that Matsyendranāth might be one of those “sinister” characters intent on harming her. The power of his magic manifests itself, nevertheless, and the child is indeed produced, even though not through the agency of a human mother.
Gorakhnāth is thus a “yogic-child” par excellence, having no human parents. His birth was not occasioned by an ordinary sexual act. He is conceived out of the magic “ash,” and he gestated in, and was born from, the earth. All of these elements constitute significant aspects of the Nāth worldview. According to them, the human sexual act is the principal cause of aging and ultimately death, since it implies the loss of semen, which they associate with the “elixir of immortality,” amṛt. From their androcentric point of view, the jogis believe that amṛt resides on top of the (male) head and that in the form of a bindu (“drop”) it trickles down the spinal column, until it is ejected through the sexual act in the form of semen. This is the reason the yogis urge that the bindu needs to return back to its place of origin (through the practice of yoga) and as a consequence, sex is discouraged and the vagina is portrayed as a “vampire.”15 The ashes, widely used by Śaiva ascetics and devotees (as a bodily adornment and a sign of sectarian identity), among other things symbolize the burned semen and as such they signal victory over sexual drive. I am inclined to interpret this segment of the story as a reference to Gorakhnāth as the child of Śiva (symbolized by the ashes, the burnt “semen”) and his śakti (symbolized by the earth) from one point of view, and also as the “child” of the contact between two cakras, the highest and the lowest, from another.16
In order to introduce the reader to the conceptual world of the Sayings of Gorakhnāth, an exposition of the basic doctrinal features associated with the yoga of the Nāths is in order. I have treated extensively the hermeneutics of the Nāth haṭha yoga in a previous work.17 The interested reader is also invited to consult the literature that focuses more fully on the historical and anthropological approach to the Nāths, admirably presented in the
15. See, as an example, Gorakh Bānī, pad [henceforth, GBP] 48, in chapter 2 of this volume.
16. The conjoining of the opposites, represented inter alia by these two cakras, is a typical methodological principle in tantra. See the relevant discussion on the “Polarity Symbolism in Tantric Doctrine and Practice” in the classical study by Bharati (1965: 199–227).
17. Djurdjevic (2008).
monographs by Briggs (1973 [1938]), Dasgupta (1995 [1969]), Gold (1992), Bouy (1994), White (1996), Bouillier (1997; 2017), and Mallinson (2007).
It has already been established by Dasgupta that the Nāth haṭha yoga represents an internalization of the principles of Indian alchemy, rasāyan. 18 In this context, instead of searching for the elixir of immortality by working on external substances, the yogis attempt to achieve the same goal by manipulating the bodily fluids and energies of the subtle body. This last-mentioned term deserves to be explained more fully. André Padoux (Padoux and Jeanty 2013: 9) comments that the specific form of yogic body, consisting primarily of cakras and conduits of energy, which is “imagined, visualized, even sometimes ‘felt’ as present (‘intraposed’) within the physical body of the yogin, is usually called ‘subtle body’ in English.” He prefers not to use the term, because in “all Sanskrit texts, the term sūkṣmaśarīra (or sūkṣmadeha) designates not this structure but the transmigrating element in the human being, which is made up of different tattvas and therefore has no shape, no visible aspect. It cannot be visualized as is the inner structure of cakras and nāḍis” (Padoux and Jeanty 2013: 10; emphasis in the original). I continue to use the term subtle body nonetheless, among other reasons in order to acknowledge the commonality with the variously imagined subtle body in Western esotericism (the common element being the notion of the existence of another body superimposed, or “intraposed,” within the physical).19
The most important aspect of the Nāth sādhanā consists of the transformation of the sexual fluids (often glossed as the “drop” of the sperm, bindu) into the nectar of immortality (amṛt). This is in practice achieved by the assumption of bodily postures (āsan), breathing exercises (prāṇāyām), chanting of the mantras (jap), and by meditation (dhyān). In addition, and as already suggested, it may be argued that the ideological universe of the Nāth yogis may appropriately be described as a form of esotericism, and even as a form of magic. In the words of George W. Briggs, in his pioneering work on the jogīs, “Quite in keeping with the claims to supernatural power, which skill the Yoga is supposed to confer, is the popular belief that Yogīs work in magic.”20 The social orientation of the Nāths is
18. For a useful and informative summary, see White (2011a).
19. For a classic but rather dated study of the ideas regarding the subtle body in the Western culture, see Mead (1919); for a recent collection of essays that explore the subject from a multicultural perspective, see Samuel and Johnson (2013).
20. Briggs (1973 [1938]: 128).
characterized by the critique of the traditional supremacy of the brahmins and the associated varṇāśramadharma system (the doctrine of the hierarchical ordering of society in accordance with social class and one’s stage of life). In this respect, many of the poems in the collection resemble the content and tenor of Kabīr’s poetry. The Nāth yogis eschew easy classification: they are both similar and distinct from the classical yogis, tāntrikas, bhāktas, sants, Sikhs, and Indian sūfis. In a sense, they are, and often consider themselves to be, a unique social and religious group.21
Major Themes in the Sayings of Gorakhnath
The ideological universe of the Sayings of Gorakhnāth is circumscribed by the focus on yoga. This type of yoga, as already mentioned, takes the body as a primary instrument of achievement. Here the mastery of the body does not exactly refer to an ability to assume a number of postures,22 but, more importantly, it implies an ability to redirect the flow of the bindu and thus to escape or “trick” death. Alternatively expressed, the engagement with the body starts at the physical level, while the mark of adeptship lies in the mastery of the subtle body and its properties. The process of yoga is often referenced through the metaphor of “cooking,” a notion associated with the concept of the ascetic “heat,” tapas, which is of fundamental importance in Indian spiritual culture.23 An important leitmotif of the Sayings of Gorakhnāth is that the scale of values among yogis is not the same as the normatively established social scale of values characterized by the superiority of the brahmins. Erudition and social class mean nothing when compared with the real knowledge that is, in their opinion, exclusive to the yogis. And this knowledge is primarily the knowledge of the occult properties of the body.
There is a cluster of related terms that are fundamental to the Sayings of Gorakhnāth: bindu, sabad, nād, and amṛt. Bindu is the “drop” of immortality that ordinary and ignorant people waste in the form of semen ejaculated in sexual activity, thus falling into the claws of death. Instead, the
21. For an extensive discussion of this topic, see Lorenzen (2011).
22. There is a growing consensus among scholars that the postular yoga, as it is currently known and widely practiced in the West, did not emerge prior to the nineteenth century. See, in particular, Singleton (2010).
23. See, as an illustration, Gorakh Bānī, sabad [henceforth, GBS] 191, in chapter 1 of this volume.
bindu needs to be controlled through celibacy and returned to the top of the head through the process of yoga. Sabad and nād are related terms: on the one hand, they represent an encapsulation of the yogic gnosis in the form of the word (sabad) and sound (nād); on the other hand, they are the acoustic and verbal equivalents of the bindu in its subtle transformations. At the highest station, on the top of the head, the bindu turns into the elixir, amṛt. In its itinerary, from the bottom of the spine to the top of the head, the bindu passes through a set of cakras. In particular, the subtle center associated with the so-called third eye receives a great deal of attention, while its location is esoterically glossed as the confluence of the “three rivers” (triveṇī).
As is typical of Indian traditional culture, particularly within the milieu of yoga and tantra, the role of the spiritual teacher, guru, is of singular importance. The guru is a person who performs the ceremony of initiation to a disciple, and who in the process imparts the secrets of yoga. To paraphrase Gorakhnāth: only the person who has a guru can hope to drink the elixir of immortality; the one who is without a guru remains thirsty.24 Several poems in the collection address somewhat unusual dynamics between Gorakhnāth and his own teacher Matsyendranāth. According to a well-known narrative, Matsyendranāth in the course of his career temporarily forgot about his yogic identity while living in the country of women, married to their queen, enjoying the pleasures of sensual and familial life. He is brought back to his yogic vocation only after Gorakhnāth personally intervened—disguised as a female dancer!—and through a series of poems imparted the teachings of yoga back to his own teacher.25
A number of poems are enigmatic and display characteristics of the “twilight language,” sandhyā bhāṣā. The symbolic capital inherent in such poems simultaneously attracts the attention of the listener, as all mysterious things do, while it also draws a line of demarcation over which the erudition of the scholars (paṇḍits) cannot cross: the solution to the enigmas of the Nāth lore lies not in books but in the practice of yoga and mastery of the body (kāyā sādhanā). The employment of enigmatic discourse, the “twilight language,” is otherwise typical of esoteric rhetoric, and its use among the Nāths and tāntrikas in general exhibits a strong formal resemblance to the vocabulary of Western alchemy and the so-called language of
24. See GBS 23.
25. One of the earliest treatments of this episode is given in the Maithili verse-play Gorakṣavijaya (“The Victory of Gorakṣa”) by the medieval poet Vidyāpati. See the appendix.
the birds employed in the occult circles. A comparative study of the two is a desideratum.
An important formal device is employed through the “upside-down” (ulṭa bāmsī) poems. The relevance of this stylistic device, which inverts the logical, causal, or chronological structure of the described content, lies in its association with the fundamental methodological orientation of the Nāth yogis. The project of the Nāth yoga is not only the “cultivation of the body” (kāyā sādhanā) but equally so the “cultivation of the reversal” (ulṭā sādhanā). The world (saṃsār) is a current that inevitably flows to death and annihilation, just as on the microcosmic level the same predicament is the result of the drainage of the bindu, which trickles from the top of the head toward the destructive heat of the gastric fire and ejaculation in the act of sex. The way out, the Nāths urge, consists in the reversal of this process: the flow of the bindu needs to be reversed, which procedure also entails the reversal of the ordinary way of looking at things. This apparent psychological paradox finds its expression in the ulṭa bāmsī poems. This same discursive strategy marks the boundary between the jogīs and ordinary people: their perception of truth and scale of values are mutually at odds.
In what follows, the major themes and concepts that are relevant for understanding the worldview of the Sayings of Gorakhnāth will be given more extensive treatment.
The Practice of Reversal: Ulta Sadhana
The most distinctive methodological principle in the spiritual project associated with the Nāth yogis is arguably the practice of reversal, the ulṭā sādhanā. This principle is evident in several aspects of the Nāth worldview. First and foremost, it relates to their fundamental insistence that the goal of yogic practice necessitates the reversal of the natural trajectory of the bindu: while in the case of ordinary people the bindu is wasted after it trickles down from its presumed source at the top of the head, and is either burnt in the gastric fire or ejaculated in the sex act, the Nāths attempt to push it back to its place of origin, the full success in which operation amounts to the achievement of immortality. To reach the state of immortality is thus the ultimate goal of this form of yoga, at the accomplishment of which the successful adept (siddha) becomes a “second Śiva.” Incidentally, this accomplishment signals a different goal from the traditional orientation prevalent in Indian spirituality, whose aim is liberation (mokṣa). Such a differently
conceptualized goal connects the Nāths with the tāntrikas: not an escape from the world but its conquering through divinization is the desired outcome of the practice. The connection between the successfully performed redirecting of the path of the bindu and divinization is aptly addressed in Dasgupta’s (1995 [1969]: 246) summary: “It has been emphatically declared in all texts of yoga that he, who has been able to give an upward flow to the [seminal] fluid is a god, and not a man.” In the words of a sabad from the Sayings of Gorakhnāth: “The yogi who holds above what goes below/ Who burns [the god of] sex, abandons the embrace [of a woman]/Who cuts through māyā / Even Viṣṇu washes his feet!”26
A larger issue concerns the fact that the habitual trajectory of the bindu corresponds paradigmatically to the orientation and predicament of the embodied existence as such: the path of the bindu coincides with the path of saṃsār, and to redirect its flow coincides with an attempt to oppose and conquer the force of saṃsār. This implies a lifestyle conducted “against the grain.” It is equivalent to swimming against the current of saṃsār that otherwise carries ordinary people toward certain death and inevitable (and unwanted) rebirth. Here we encounter what is both an archaic and fundamental notion in Hinduism: the tendency toward liberation from the saṃsār is not commensurable with the conventions of ordinary life. In its most radical form, the path of mokṣa is set not only apart but even against the path of dharma, which is evident inter alia by the fact that a person adopting the lifestyle of renunciation (saṃnyās) ritually enacts this decision by cutting off the sacred thread that otherwise serves as an indication of his “second birth” into one of the three higher classes of Hindu society: such a person is subsequently considered as dead to the world.27 According to some interpretations, Hinduism as a culture is in itself an attempt to reconcile the tension between dharma and mokṣa by integrating the latter into the former in such a way so as not to disrupt the regular functioning of the society (for example, by suggesting that renunciation is to be undertaken only after the person has fulfilled his social obligations by study, marriage, and fathering of children).
Ethically, this means, in the context of the worldview of the Nāths, that the morality of the world is at odds with the morality of the yogis. The
26. GBS 17.
27. “Renunciation was considered the ritual death of the renouncer; that a renouncer is a ritually dead person, even though he is physically alive, is a significant aspect of the Brāhmaṇical theology of renunciation” (Olivelle 1992: 89–90).
latter are “neither smeared by sin, nor overcome by virtue”—a phrase often repeated in the literature of the Nāths that has its locus classicus in the Bhagavad Gītā. 28 This position creates a condition of moral relativism that advocates a philosophy “beyond good and evil,” since both good and evil refer to the categories that are intrinsic to saṃsār. As Gorakhnāth puts it, “The sin and the virtue are the house of karma.”29 It is thus no surprise that such gesturing away from the consensual morality lead to the perception of yogis as sinister characters, as recently explored in a study by White (2011b). But an additional qualification is in order. The path of power (siddhi) is also in and of itself to a large degree distinct or even opposed to the path of liberation (mokṣa) just as both of these paths, attempting to transcend the force of saṃsār, differ from the rules and regulations of ordinary, this-worldly, lifestyle dominated by the requirements of dharma. The “path of power,” typical of tantra, stands in contradistinction to the “path of purity” that is characteristic of the brahminical scale of dharmic values (Sanderson 1985). I have argued elsewhere (Djurdjevic 2008) that the path of power is also typical of magic, as a form of religious belief and practice, where power is approached as a manifestation of the sacred.
The practice of reversal also finds its echo in certain characteristic features of yogic discourse, where some of their poetic compositions are expressed in the form of “upside-down” poetry characterized by an inverted logic. To provide an example, we are told in a pad from the Sayings of Gorakhnāth that “The cuckoo is flowering/The mango is scattering the perfume./The fish in the sky/Swallows the heron.”30 Significantly, the employment of inverted logic does not only indicate that the Nāths do things differently: it also suggests, through mirroring, that the ways of the world are actually upside-down and the message of yogic poetry expressed in this literary idiom serves as a reminder and an invitation to realize the foolishness of a secular lifestyle and thus, by implication, to redirect the attention of the audience to the path of yoga. “Those who reverse the breath, say reversed things,/Who drink the undrinkable: they are the ones who know brahman.”31 The same principle of reversal is also observable
28. Bhagavad Gītā 5:10: “lipyate na sa pāpena”—“he is not smeared by sin,” referring to a person, contextually a yogi, who acts without attachments.
29. “The String of Breaths,” v.2.
30. GBP 60:2.
31. GBS 90. To “drink the undrinkable” is a reference to the “elixir of immortality,” the amṛt.
in an unusual element concerning the yogic hierarchy, where the student Gorakhnāth chastises and effectively assumes the role of a teacher to his erstwhile guru Matsyendranāth, a “fallen” yogi!
The most characteristic feature of the practice of reversal, as already indicated, concerns the redirecting of the flow of the bindu. The bindu itself is a complex subject with a polyvalent range of meanings. In the parlance of the jogis, it refers mostly to the “drop” of seminal fluid with potentially ambrosial properties. “Where the bindu dwells, there is life,” states a sabad from the Sayings of Gorakhnāth. 32 In the ordinary circumstances, people waste their bindu through sexual activity and seminal emission: a lamentable state of affairs from the yogic viewpoint. “Bindu in the mouth of the vagina becomes [like] mercury in the mouth of fire,” warns Gorakhnāth.33 Hence the need to not only preserve it through sexual abstinence but, more importantly, to redirect it toward its place of origin at the top of the head. “In the circle of the sky [i.e., in the cakra on top of the head], there is an upside-down well/There the nectar [amṛt] resides.”34 In theological terms, the importance of the bindu as well as the often-understated significance of the feminine menstrual blood— is made evident in the verse that proclaims: “Śakti is [manifest] in the form of menstrual blood /Śiva is [manifest] in the form of semen [bindu].”35 And once the bindu has reached its point of origin, the achievement manifests, or rather, it is symbolically connoted, as the vision of the eternal child (buḍhā bāl, “old youth”) in the act of speaking that is beyond names and words: “In the summit of the sky, a child, who cannot be named, is speaking.”36
The Cultivation of the Body: Kaya Sadhana
Aside from being engaged in the practice of reversal, the Nāth yogis are also distinguished by the cultivation of the body (kāyā sādhanā) for the purpose of achieving their spiritual goals. As is very well known, “there
32. GBS 57. 33. GBS 142.
34. GBS 23.
35. GBP 12:5. See also Gorakṣa Vacana Saṃgraha 38 (in Banerjea 1999 [1962]: 335): “Bindu is Śiva, menstrual blood is Śakti.”
36. GBS 1. See also Baṛthvāl’s (1946: 1) pertinent comments on this verse.
