Origin 1000 to 1500
Hastijihva, whose name means elephant's tongue, is one of the fourteen principal nadis of classical yogic physiology described in the Yoga Upanishads alongside Ida, Pingala and Sushumna. The texts that describe it do not agree on where it ends.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin Period Origin PeriodNamed within Tantric literature from the eighth century CE, and given its classical systematisation in the hatha yoga corpus between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries CE. 1 Place of OriginThe Indian subcontinent. 1 Origin of the NameNadi is Sanskrit for a tube, pipe or channel, from a root meaning to flow. It is not the word for a nerve, and the channels of this physiology are not nerves; the nerve reading is a modern Western gloss. 1 Disputed
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe Yoga Upanishads disagree sharply on where Hastijihva ends. The Trishikhibrahmana Upanishad stretches its course as far as the tip of the big toe of the right foot, while the Darshana Upanishad instead gives the right eye as its terminus, a genuinely different location rather than a variant description of the same one. No harmonised reading appears anywhere in the corpus. 4 Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThe channels of this physiology are widely presented in modern wellness and yoga material as an anatomical or neurological system. They are not: no channel corresponds to a nerve, a vessel or any identified structure, and the classical descriptions belong to a religious physiology worked with in practice rather than a claim about the body's neuroanatomy. 3 Connections
Associated With
Per the fourteen-nadi scheme of the Hatha and Yoga Upanishad literature, Hastijihva is described as terminating at the right eye; the atlas records the general eye correspondence since no left/right eye entities exist separately.
Source The Yoga UpanishadsT. R. Srinivasa Ayyangar (translator), edited by S. Subrahmanya Sastri
Originates in Language
Source Roots of YogaJames Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.)
Sources
1. Roots of Yoga
James Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.), Penguin Classics, 2017View the Source 2. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century
Geoffrey Samuel, Cambridge University Press, 2008
3. Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice
4. The Yoga Upanishads
T. R. Srinivasa Ayyangar (translator), edited by S. Subrahmanya Sastri, The Adyar Library, 1938View the Source Reader Challenges (0)
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