Śivasaṃhitā 3.35

The word param (supreme, maximum) before any list of obstacles is a deliberate alarm in the text. The Śivasaṃhitā does not present a collection of moral conventions: these vighnāni (impediments) are functional barriers to the accumulation and circulation of prāṇa. The master speaks with Śiva’s own authority, and the implicit promise is that those who abandon them cross the ocean of existential suffering.

Varjya (what must be avoided, what is prohibited) is the technical term for prohibitions in dharmaśāstra texts and tantric discipline. Yogavighnakara — literally “what makes obstacles for yoga” — is a revealing compound: the impediment is not external to practice but constitutive of it. Deficient practice does not merely fail to eliminate obstacles: it actively generates them.

The literary genre of varjya-niyama (restrictions and observances) is traceable to Patañjali’s yama-niyama and further back in the Buddhist śīla. The Śivasaṃhitā adapts this tradition to the tantric prāṇāyāma context, creating a code of conduct specific to the practitioner of the breath path where the dietary, the ethical, and the energetic form a single functional category.