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

—also teaches that Hatha Yoga is completed through the union of ha, the sun, and ṭha, the moon. The Gita itself says of sun and moon:

Gām āviśya ca bhūtāni dhārayāmy aham ojasā /
puṣṇāmi cauṣadhīḥ sarvāḥ somo bhūtvā rasātmakaḥ //
Ahaṃ vaiśvānaro bhūtvā prāṇināṃ deham āśritaḥ /
prāṇāpāna-samāyuktaḥ pacāmy annaṃ catur-vidham //
“Entering the earth, I sustain all beings with my power; becoming Soma, whose nature is sap, I nourish every plant. Becoming the universal fire and dwelling in the bodies of living beings, united with the ascending and descending breaths, I digest the four kinds of food.”

The second Brāhmaṇa of the Bṛhaj-jābāla Upaniṣad gives a deeply suggestive explanation of the solar and lunar principles.¹

Sun and moon have yet another meaning: Shiva and Shakti. Moon is nectar; sun is the fire of time. The moon is situated in the sahasrāra, just beneath the thousand-petalled lotus and facing downward. The sun is in the foundation region at the navel, facing upward. There are two colours of bindu in the body: the pale bindu and the red. The former is semen, the latter the great generative blood. The pale bindu belongs to the moon and the red to the sun. Moon is semen, hence Shiva; sun is generative blood, hence Shakti.

The Buddhist Tantras and Buddhist Sahajiya songs place the sun in the Emanation-body and the moon, in the form of the awakening mind, within the uṣṇīṣa lotus. The Gorakṣa-vijaya describes the solar and lunar principles in many forms. Of the several interpretations of the moon's union with the sun, the first and most important is the union of Shiva and Shakti in the sahasrāra—