Adinatha Sampradaya

The Adinatha Sampradaya, or Adinath Sampradaya, was a sadhu sub-sect within the broader Nath tradition of Hinduism. Its members received Sannyasa diksha, renouncing householder life to live as naked sadhus, and held that a practitioner should live in isolation, dwelling in caves, huts or abandoned structures away from populated areas, until achieving the spiritual goal of the path. The lineage is recorded among the traditional Nath sub-sects named in Rajmohan Nath's 1964 listing and in the 1891 Punjab Census Report, and it effectively ended when its last authentic guru, Shri Gurudev Mahendranath, who died in 1991, declined to grant sannyasa diksha to any successor, choosing instead to establish a separate Western householder variant of the Nath tradition. The name Adi Nath, meaning first or original Lord, functions as a synonym for Shiva, tracing the sect's origin to the supreme yogic deity. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/