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Nadis

Shankhini

shahn-KHEE-nee

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Origin 1000 to 1500

Shankhini is one of the fourteen principal nadis of classical yogic physiology, described in the Yoga Upanishads alongside Ida, Pingala and Sushumna. The Upanishads that describe it place its terminus in two entirely different regions of the body.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1000 to 1500 1
Origin Period
700 to 1300 CE 2
Origin Period
Named 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 Origin
The Indian subcontinent. 1
Origin of the Name
Nadi 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
Language
Sanskrit 1
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
The 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
Status
Status Today
Living tradition, practised today 1
Disputed
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Shankhini receives two incompatible locations in the Yoga Upanishads. The Yogachudamani Upanishad places it in the anus, while the Shandilya Upanishad instead has it go upward to the end of the left ear, an entirely different region of the body. The corpus offers no resolution between the two accounts. 4
Cross-Tradition Connections

Originates in Language

Sanskrit, Languages
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
Mark Singleton, Oxford University Press, 2010View the Source
4. The Yoga Upanishads
T. R. Srinivasa Ayyangar (translator), edited by S. Subrahmanya Sastri, The Adyar Library, 1938View the Source
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