Chapter Three: The Madhura Disposition in India's Inner (Esoteric) Religious Disciplines

—and a considerable degree of similarity arose. All esoteric disciplines exhibit a strange, unbroken uniformity of two kinds: (1) a complex system of conduct and (2) yogic practice.

Legend and oral tradition say that while this secret was being related to the Goddess in the Ocean of Milk, Matsyendranath, in the form of a fish, was the first to receive the secret knowledge. Before him stands the guru Adinath, who is Shiva to Hindus and Buddha to Buddhists. The current of yogic practice began from this Guru Adinath.

Like Buddhists, the Naths call the highest state of accomplishment the state of innate absorption. A verse describing that innate state occurs in the Akulavīra Tantra, attributed to Matsyendranath. It clearly says that innate absorption is a condition of supreme peace and supreme nonduality, in which the yogi's mind becomes even and profound like a waveless sea and the entire world becomes one within it. The practitioner is then himself the Goddess, the God, the guru, the disciple, meditation, the meditator, and the Lord of all.¹

The Naths locate every place of pilgrimage within the body itself: seats, subsidiary seats, sacred fields, subsidiary fields, places of conjunction, and so on. They enumerate eighty-four Siddhas and nine Naths. Among the Siddhas, the syllable ra occurs pervasively in a mysterious sense.

The doctrine of sun and moon

Sun and moon are mentioned repeatedly in Tantra and Yoga, and their union is called yoga. They ordinarily mean the two channels on the right and left. Their union brings prāṇa and apāna into equilibrium.

The Siddha-siddhānta-paddhati, attributed to Gorakh, states that the material body is formed through the coordination of five elements or causes: action, desire, moon, sun, and fire.² The first two, action and desire, are causes of the embodied form, while the other three—sun, moon, and fire—are its root causes. Sun and fire are one principle, so the two principal elements among the three are moon and sun. Moon is the principle of essence or Soma; sun is the principle of fire. The body is thus a union of Soma and fire. Essence or Soma is what is enjoyed, and fire the enjoyer.

In the gross world, fire and moon manifest respectively as the father's semen and the mother's generative blood, and this body arises through their union.³ The Haṭha-yoga-pradīpikā—