Śivasaṃhitā 5.104

The text formally introduces the Maṇipūra cakra — ‘the jeweled lotus’ or ‘city of gems’ — located at the navel, the third center in the ascending hierarchy of cakras. This energetic node governs digestive fire (agni), willpower, and vitality. Its umbilical location connects it to primary nourishment and to the capacity to transform raw experience into usable energy.

The name Varaṇā given to iḍā at this juncture is geographically eloquent: Varaṇā is the river that, together with the Asi, gives Vārāṇasī (Benares) its name. That it ‘flows northward’ (uttaravāhinī) is significant — the Ganges at Benares runs northward, a direction associated with liberation in Indian sacred geography. This is not coincidental toponymy but deliberate sacred cartography.

The superimposition of external sacred geography onto interior subtle anatomy is a consistent hermeneutical strategy throughout the Śivasaṃhitā. India’s great rivers — Gaṅgā, Yamunā, Varaṇā — become names for the nāḍīs, suggesting that the inner pilgrimage through the yogin’s body is equivalent to, and indeed surpasses, physical pilgrimage to external tīrthas.