Śivasaṃhitā 3.37

The text transitions without break from dietary to ethical restrictions, and that very continuity is the teaching: eating mustard and stealing are equally vighnāni for yoga, obstacles to the same energy. This equation does not trivialize morality but affirms something deeper: ethics has concrete energetic effects. Hiṃsā (violence) generates contraction in the prānic field; dveṣa (enmity) fragments attention; ahaṅkāra (egoism) is the radical obstacle from which all the others derive.

Steya (theft, from root stī-, to take away) is the first of Patañjali’s yamas in negative form (asteya). Ahaṅkāra (literally «the maker of I») designates the function of the mental apparatus that constructs the illusion of a separate ego — one of Sāṃkhya-Yoga’s central concepts. Anārjava (lack of rectitude, crookedness) is the quality opposite to ārjava (straightforwardness, honest transparency in dealings).

The Śivasaṃhitā’s integration of ethical conditions into a technical prāṇāyāma teaching reveals the holistic vision of medieval tantric yoga: no separation exists between the quality of actions and the quality of breathing. The Yogasūtras of Patañjali already established this with the yamas as the building’s foundation; the Śaiva text integrates it organically into technical instructions without creating a separate moral category.