Gorakṣaśataka 20–28: Cloth, Pull and Breath in a Difficult Passage

tan nāḍīṃ is an unusual combination of forms; I provisionally relate tan to the feminine nāḍīṃ. Exactly what is wrapped and held remains insufficiently specified in the working text. The translation does not fill this gap with modern anatomy.

The source specifies two muhūrtas. The German rendering calls these “periods of time”; the English retains the traditional unit muhūrta. The passage provides no sufficient basis for prescribing a present-day practice duration. nirbhayāt is formally ablative and is understood adverbially.

Suṣumnā is the central channel of the yogic model of the body. kuṇḍalīgatām is ambiguous; I first translate its recognisable formation without fixing an anatomical interpretation of the process.

I take the unexpressed subject of jahāti to be the breath: it leaves its previous location and enters the central channel. This accords with the context in Mallinson 2012, pp. 267–268. Its resumption by prāṇaḥ remains in the Sanskrit. This does not settle the exact physical execution of the pull and throat lock.

The Sanskrit source brackets part of this passage; a bracketed clause also continues in 26. I translate all the active wording, including its repetitions. The source brackets remain visible in the Sanskrit. In the German and English translations, square brackets enclose only supplied words, not these transmitted passages. Mallinson’s printed translation (2012, pp. 267–268) brings the sequence together without the repetition. The working text’s direction “up to the chest” also differs from his “up from the chest”; here I retain the closer correspondence to the words.

The bracketed passage in the working text is translated; its source brackets are not transferred as supplementation brackets into the translation. śabdagarbhā, “containing sound”, refers to Sarasvatī. The exact connection between channel, sound and manual action remains unresolved by this description alone.

The disease names belong to a historical medical system. Their equivalence with present-day diagnoses is not established. The list shifts between grammatical cases; its sentence ends in 28. The asserted cure is translated as a claim of the text.

The two half-verses address different topics: the end of moving the power and the beginning of the teaching on breath. I retain the working text’s number while making the thematic transition visible. The source reads “sarve te śakticālena rogā”; that word order is binding for the base text.