Nath tradition places Matsyendranath as the teacher of Gorakhnath and, through that relationship, as the figure from whom the entire Nath Sampradaya ultimately traces its authority, even where Gorakhnath is credited with the lineage's later organization into a coherent teaching system. Sources associate Matsyendranath with the Kaula current of tantra, an early and influential stream of tantric practice, and credit him with texts including the Kaulajnananirnaya and material later absorbed into the hatha yoga corpus, though as with much of this material, questions of exact authorship and date are difficult to settle with precision given the centuries of oral transmission and textual accretion involved. What remains most stable across the tradition's own account of itself is the teacher-student structure: Matsyendranath as the source, Gorakhnath as the one who received, organized and propagated that teaching into the form that reached later centuries, a relationship the Nath Sampradaya treats as foundational in the way other lineages treat a founding guru and first disciple.
Scholars of Indian tantra and yoga history, including David Gordon White, treat Matsyendranath as a figure whose historical outline is genuinely difficult to separate from centuries of accumulated legend, but who nonetheless functions, across multiple regional and sectarian versions of the story, as the fixed point from which Nath yoga's synthesis of tantric and physical practice is understood to have begun.