Śivasaṃhitā 2.13

This verse opens the Śivasaṃhitā’s systematic account of the subtle body with a staggering figure: three and a half million nāḍīs within the human frame (dehāntare nṛṇām). Rather than mere numerical excess, this count signals that the energetic body is an infinitely complex interior cosmos, irreducible to the gross anatomical structures visible to ordinary perception.

The Sanskrit sārdhalakṣatraya compounds sa-ardha (with a half) and lakṣa-traya (three hundred thousands), yielding 350,000 — but here the unit is lakṣa itself, giving 3,500,000. This precise compound reveals the text’s care for numerical exactitude even within a symbolic register. The same figure recurs in the Gorakṣaśataka and related Nātha literature, pointing to a shared doctrinal inheritance.

The sheer magnitude of the number functions pedagogically: it humbles the practitioner before the body’s interior vastness. No single lifetime of practice can consciously traverse every channel; hence the tradition wisely identifies a hierarchy of principal nāḍīs that serve as practical entry points for the yogic work described in the verses that follow.