Matsyendranath to Gorakhnath, and Into Modern Yoga

The lineage traces itself to Matsyendranath, credited with receiving the teaching directly from Shiva, and to his disciple Gorakhnath, who is remembered as having organized the loosely connected yogic and alchemical currents of medieval Shaiva tantra into the more defined monastic order that became the Nath Sampradaya, associated in tradition with a set of nine principal Naths and eighty four Siddhas whose stories circulate widely across North and South Asia.

Modern historical scholarship on the movement situates the Naths within a broader medieval world of Shaiva Siddha traditions that pursued bodily transformation through both yogic and alchemical means, treating the perfection of the physical body and the transmutation of base metal as related expressions of the same underlying doctrine that matter itself, rightly disciplined, can be made incorruptible.

The Naths' emphasis on practice over caste status or scriptural learning gave the order broad social reach historically, and its hatha yoga techniques, detached from much of their original doctrinal framework, became the direct ancestor of the physical postural yoga practiced globally today, even where that later practice no longer shares the Naths' own goal of an immortal, perfected body.