The Nath tradition's central aim is a perfected, deathless body, siddha deha, achieved through hatha yoga practices that treat the physical body as raw material to be refined much as an alchemist refines base metal, controlling breath, semen and the subtle channels believed to run through the body in order to reverse ordinary decay and attain liberation, jivanmukti, while still embodied rather than only after death. This alchemical framing of yoga, developed most fully in Nath and closely related circles, later fed into widely read manuals such as the fifteenth century Hatha Yoga Pradipika.
Initiation into the order is marked by a distinctive physical rite, the piercing of the cartilage of both ears to insert large earrings, kundal or mudra, which gives initiated ascetics their common name, Kanphata, split ear, yogis, a mark that remains visibly, permanently different from the ear piercings of ordinary lay Hindu practice. The order organised itself historically into twelve panths, or sub branches, spread across North India, and its influence reached well beyond its own initiates, leaving a clear trace in the vocabulary of later bhakti and Sant poet saints such as Kabir and Guru Nanak. Nath monasteries, maths, continue as living institutions today, most prominently at Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, keeping the tradition's hatha yoga practice and Kanphata initiation in active, ongoing use.