International Journal of Tantric Studies

Mainly on the basis of Sanskrit sources, the consolidation of the Nāthyogīs’ tradition into the Nāth sampradāya, a religious order that came to express its identity also by a distict set of sectarian marks, has been tentatively dated around the eighteenth century.

The paper supplements the textual testimonies in Sanskrit by pointing to western and eastern Hindi sources, notably poetry from the Sant tradition and Malik Muhammad Jāyasī’s Padmāvat. The earliest vernacular testimony for those Nāthyogic characteristics dates anterior to 1539. Beyond identifying the various years of literary occurrence of one mark or the other, it is crucial to consider the literary character of the sources themselves. All of them represent poetry of a highly formulaic kind that draws on common clichés, hence on well-established popular notions. Facts and imagery to freeze into clichés presupposes that the phenomena they depict have existed for some time. If that unknown time of literary digestion is granted, the various Nāthyogic sectarian marks or organizational features must have been popularly known even anterior to the sixteenth century.

After a brief review of the problematic in the first section, the second section of the paper presents the Hindi sources in the original and translation. Several of these are brought to academic attention for the first time. In the third section, the cited sources are brought into historical and literary perspective.

Nāthyogīs in the sense of ascetics paying allegiance to a genealogical line of Nāths with Śiva as the supreme Nāth appear in written sources from the thirteenth century.1 The identity of those yogis remained, however, for a long time fluid and overlapping with that of various other groups of ascetics. While the sect’s “first historical gurus, Matsyendranātha and Gorakṣanātha, lived […] probably in the 9th and 12th centuries, […]”, the consolidation of a regular Nāth sampradāya may have taken several centuries and been spurred by rivalling ascetic groups, on their part eager to draw sectarian boundaries.2