The doctrinal core attributed to Gorakhnath and the Nath Sampradaya he organized is a distinctive reversal of an older ascetic assumption that the body is an obstacle liberation must transcend. Nath teaching instead holds that the body itself, properly disciplined through posture, breath control and the manipulation of its subtle currents and centers, nadis and chakras, is the actual instrument of liberation, aiming at siddha deha, a perfected and effectively deathless body rather than only a liberated soul. That teaching, kaya sadhana, body cultivation, positions hatha yoga not as a preliminary stage subordinate to meditation but as a complete path in its own right, an approach that scholars including Geoffrey Samuel and James Mallinson identify as a major turning point in the broader history of Indian yoga and tantra.
Texts of the hatha yoga corpus attributed to Gorakhnath or his immediate tradition, whatever their precise individual authorship, supplied much of the technical vocabulary, postures, breath practices and physiological framework, that later travelled into the very different, modernized yoga systems that spread internationally in the twentieth century, a lineage traced carefully by scholars of modern yoga history including Mark Singleton. Gorakhnath's own historical footprint may be difficult to separate from centuries of accumulated legend, but the vocabulary and physiological model his tradition worked out remains embedded, largely unrecognized by most practitioners, in yoga as it is taught and practiced worldwide today.