Just 100 km away from Kolkata, on the banks of the Bhagirathi River, is a town called Navadvipa, well known as the birthplace of the great Vaiṣṇava saint, Caitanya Mahāprabhu, and the seat of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism. Less well known is the fact that, long before…

Jaiminīya Upaniṣad Brāhmaṇa (JUB), is the oldest known Upaniṣad and yet not many people are aware of it. The primary reason is that the Vedāntins do not recognise JUB as a Upaniṣad and so awareness of it has been confined to the small circle of people…

What was Indian society like in 1000 BCE? What did people do in their daily lives? Given the paucity of textual and archaeological records, any answer to these questions necessarily involves a lot of conjecture. Indian history only begins to emerge with some…

Yoga evolved from Hinduism’s Vedic background at least 2500 – 3000 years ago; however, its more physical form, commonly called Haṭha yoga, only came into prominence about 1000 years ago, at least as far as our literary and archaeological records show. The…

Not many people are aware that, between the fifth and thirteenth centuries, Śaivism—or Śiva Dharma—was the most dominant religious tradition within Hinduism. During this period, most of the Indian kings were Śaiva and patronized Śaiva institutions. For much…

Nātha sampradāya is a millennia-old Śaiva ascetic tradition of yogīs. It is believed that the foundation of the sampradāya took place from the 11th to 12th centuries with the amalgamation of various tantra and Śaiva traditions. The geographical expanse of the…

Deep into the heartlands of Madhya Pradesh, somewhere between Gwalior and Guna, sits an ancient village called Ranod. To get there, one has to leave the Mumbai-Agra National Highway, which cuts across Madhya Pradesh, and drive for several hours along a small…

Matsyendranātha is considered the first Gurū of the Nātha sampradāya. According to the tradition, he had encompassed the knowledge revealed by Ādinātha (Śiva) during his conversation with Girijā, disguised as a fish. Therefore, all the names of…

About 107 km from Pune and 64 km from Satara, there are two towns called Phaltan and Malthan, both situated on the banks of River Banganga. The river divides the place into two halves: the settlement situated on the eastern side of the river is known as…

In the 11th century, probably somewhere in Gujarat, a Śaiva ascetic wrote a short pithy text, of little over 100 slokas, called the Amanaska Yoga. This was a period in the history of Hinduism when Śaivism was flourishing and asceticism becoming…

Manur-Nagnath, a village located in the Beed district of Maharashtra, is an archaeologically important site. It is situated at a distance of 52 km from Beed and 70 km from Ahmednagar on a ‘Mankarana’ riverbank. There are several legends about the site, some…

Yoga Bīja is an early Haṭha yoga text (14th century approx.) belonging to the Nātha Sampradāya. The text, a dialogue between Adinātha Śiva and the Devi, belongs to a period when the tension between the Vedāntic and yogic methods of liberation had to be…

In the 16th century something remarkable happened in a small verdant region of Northern India: the city of Kṛṣṇa’s youth, Vrindavan, finally emerged into Hindu consciousness. Bhakti found its most sensuous and passionate manifestation in the Braj region. The…

In the Buddhist Pali text, there is a dialogue between King Prasenjit and his wife Mallikā, that is remarkably similar to the Yajñavalkya-Maitreyī dialogue in the Bṛhadārṇayaka Upaniṣad. So similar are these two dialogues that it is likely that Upaniṣad was…

There are various theories about exactly when postural yoga practices emerged. The various postures usually associated with Haṭha yoga are missing in Vedic, Purāṇic and Tantric texts which usually focus on breath control, visualisation, and meditation as a…

Amṛtasiddhi is a foundational text of early forms of Haṭha Yoga attributed to Virūpākṣanātha, one of the famous siddhas of what would later become the Nātha lineage of yogis. Nāthas, who emerged from the tradition of tantric Śaivism, were pioneers of Haṭha…

Kashi appears in the archaeological and literary records from the 13th century BCE onwards but, for Hindus, this city is as old as time. The earthly home of Śiva on the banks of Ganga has been a place of pilgrimage and veneration for Indians since the time of…

Philosophers over the ages have tried to capture the transcendence of the Absolute through words, but few succeed. Language is inherently dualistic. There is the word, and there is its object, however, the absolute is non-dual, beyond description. The most…

Since the Vedic period, certain phonetic sounds, when repeated in specific pre-fixed patterns, were thought to have a powerful effect on the speakers’ body and environment. These mantras were associated with the primal uncreated Word, called the vāc, the…

Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita, active at the Nāyaka Court in Madurai in the early 17th century, was one of the most prolific poet-scholar of the age. Born into the family of great scholars, he was a grandnephew and a disciple of the great Appaya Dīkṣita. Among…

Ever wondered why Lord Vishnu carries the discus or why Brahma has four faces, or why Shiva has a snake, Vāsuki, on his neck? Every such iconographic element in Hinduism has a precise symbolic meaning underlying it. This essay will unpack the meaning of the…

Just before the Turkic invasion in 1204 CE, Bengal experienced an astonishing period of creative activity and a great flourishing of classical learning. The last two Sena kings of Bengal, Ballālasena and Lakṣmaṇasena, not only patronised a large number of…