Śivasaṃhitā 5.126

This verse performs a striking etymological inversion: the sacred city of Vārāṇasī (Benares) is decoded as the inner space between the rivers Varaṇā (iḍā) and Asī (piṅgalā). The holiest pilgrimage site in India is thus relocated within the practitioner’s own body. The true Kāśī is not a geographical destination but an interior threshold between the two principal nāḍīs.

The identification of iḍā with Varaṇā and piṅgalā with Asī exemplifies the Śaiva strategy of internalizing sacred geography. Iḍā is the lunar, cool, left-side channel; piṅgalā the solar, warm, right-side channel. The space between them — corresponding to suṣumṇā — becomes the antarāla, the liminal zone where opposites dissolve and transformation occurs.

The verse’s second movement introduces a concrete prāṇāyāma technique: blocking the breath’s entry with the thumb to arrest the body’s prāṇic current. This abrupt shift from cosmological allegory to physical instruction is characteristic of the Śivasaṃhitā’s dual register — it functions simultaneously as metaphysical treatise and practical manual, grounding abstract doctrine in embodied technique.