Siddha Series III: The Fifth Arrangement: Who Was Allowed In?

What you are about to read is from our upcoming book on the Siddha tradition, adapted here as the third in a series of articles. A full video version of this teaching is also available on the Siddha Tantra Arts YouTube channel for those who prefer to hear it taught rather than read it. And if something in this piece challenges what you assumed about ancient spiritual traditions — or raises a question you had never considered — we would genuinely love to hear from you. Leave a comment below. Tell us what landed, what challenged you, what you want to know more about.

The Fifth Arrangement: Who Was Allowed In?

The first article in this series defined what a Siddha is — someone who masters both the world and the spirit simultaneously. The second explored how that mastery unfolds — seven paths, a philosophy of experimentation, and a definition of completion that never stops moving. But there is something we have not yet discussed, and in some ways it is the most extraordinary thing about this tradition. We have not yet asked who was allowed in.

In the ancient world — and, if we are honest, in much of the modern world too — the answer to "who gets access to the highest knowledge?" has almost always been the same: the privileged. The priestly class. Those born into the right family, the right caste, the right gender. The Siddha tradition looked at that answer and rejected it completely.

To understand how radical this was, you need to understand what surrounded it. In the spiritual history of Bhārat — the ancient name for the Indian subcontinent — the most visible and respected traditions were those of the Ṛṣis, the great seers who received the Vedic hymns; the Munis, the silent sages who withdrew into deep contemplation; and the Āraṇyakas, the forest dwellers who left society to pursue truth in solitude. These traditions were profound and produced genuine wisdom. But they operated, largely, within the existing social order — the Varṇa system, the four-fold division of society. Brahmins at the top as keepers of sacred knowledge, then Kṣatriyas as warriors and rulers, then Vaiśyas as merchants, then Śūdras as labourers and servants, and below even the Śūdras, entire communities considered so low they fell outside the system altogether. Who had access to the highest teachings? The Brahmins. Perhaps some Kṣatriyas. For everyone else — the vast majority of human beings — the door was closed. Not because they lacked ability or sincerity, but because they were born into the wrong family.

Some people will argue that the Varṇa system was never meant to be birth-based, that originally it was rooted in karma — in qualities, aptitude, and action — and only became rigid and hereditary later, through corruption. That may well be true. It is a long and complex debate, and this is not the place to have it. What matters for our purposes is simpler: whatever the Varṇa system was meant to be in its ideal form, by the time we look at actual history — at the lived reality of who received what knowledge and who was turned away — it was functioning as a birth-based hierarchy. That is what happened on the ground. And it is on that ground that the Siddhas stood.

They did not enter the debate. They did not argue about what Varṇa should or should not be. They did not try to reform it or restore it to some original purity. They simply built something else. The Siddhas established what they called the Pancham Vyavasthā — the fifth arrangement. Not the first, second, third, or fourth Varṇa. The fifth. Meaning: beyond the entire system. Outside it. Operating on completely different principles. And who belonged to this fifth arrangement? Everyone. Blacksmiths, weavers, cleaners, priests — but also warriors, merchants, labourers, prostitutes, people from communities the caste system had declared untouchable. People who, under the existing order, would never have been permitted to hear a sacred syllable, let alone receive initiation into the highest practices.

The Siddha tradition took them all. Not as a political statement, not as a reform movement, not as an act of charity or social uplift. The Siddhas were not trying to fix the caste system. They were not protesting it. They had simply moved beyond it, into a space where a completely different question was being asked. Not: what were you born as? But: what can you become?

And the answer to that question had only one criterion: mastery. Can you hold the inquiry — not the comfortable questions your social position prepared you for, but the real inquiry, the one that has no safety net, the one that asks who you are when everything you were told about yourself has been stripped away? Can you sustain the practice, not for a week or a year, but across the long, unglamorous stretches where nothing seems to be happening and the only thing keeping you on the path is the quiet certainty that the path is real? Can you meet reality as it actually is — not the version your caste prepared you for, not the version your family expects, not the version your society approves of, but reality in its raw, unfiltered, sometimes terrifying totality? If yes, then the path was open. Fully. Without condition.

This was not a symbolic gesture. This was not a progressive ideal held in theory while practice remained exclusive. The Siddha tradition actually initiated people from every walk of life into its highest practices. A weaver's daughter received the same transmission as a king's son. A cleaner sat beside a Brahmin. What mattered was capacity, sincerity, and the willingness to be transformed. Nothing else. Think about what this means: centuries before the Enlightenment, centuries before the modern world began to articulate ideas about equality, about human rights, about the irrelevance of birth to human worth, there was a tradition in the Himalayas that was already living it. Not writing about it. Not debating it. Living it — in practice, in transmission, in the actual daily reality of who sat in the circle and who received the teaching.

And when it comes to women, the matter runs even deeper. There was no need to "invite" or “allow” women into the Siddha tradition. Women were not later additions. They were not beneficiaries of reform. They were founders. Āgama and Nigama — the very scriptural streams of Tantra — arise from the dialogue and dance of Śiva and Śakti. She is not peripheral to this system. She is not symbolic. She is integral, creative, generative — the system itself is born through her. She births the creeds. She births the paths. She births the methods. So naturally there are teachings for every caste, every creed, every yoni — because the source of the system is not exclusion but creation. From founders to guardians, from lineage bearers to practitioners, women have stood at every level of the Siddha transmission. Not as exception. As origin.

This also meant that in practices like Ḍākinī sādhana and Vajra Yoginī sādhana — among the most profound and powerful in the entire Tantric world — where women did not merely participate equally, but they made use of their constitution and resources, thus holding even more prominent roles than men. These are practices in which the feminine is not honoured in the abstract, not praised as a "principle" or a "cosmic force," but actively cultivated in actual women, producing actual results. Women who undertook these practices became more sovereign over their own bodies, their own minds, their own spiritual authority. More free-thinking. More capable of seeing through the structures that were designed to contain them.

Imagine what this looked like to a society built on the assumption that women should be contained. A woman who cannot be controlled — not because she is rebellious, but because she has done the inner work that makes control irrelevant. A woman whose spiritual attainment is undeniable. A woman who answers to a lineage that predates and supersedes the social rules designed to keep her small. That was profoundly threatening. Not because the women were dangerous, but because their very existence disproved the lie that the social order was built on.

This is why the Siddha tradition was opposed — not because it was wrong or corrupt or harmful, but because it was inconvenient. If a weaver could attain what a Brahmin could attain — not in theory but in demonstrable, visible, undeniable practice — then the entire basis of caste superiority collapses. If a woman's spiritual realisation surpassed that of the men who claimed authority over her — not in poetry or mythology but in lived, witnessed power — then patriarchy has no ground to stand on. The Siddha tradition did not just challenge the social order. It disproved it, quietly and repeatedly, through generation after generation of practitioners who were never supposed to reach those heights.

The opposition, when it came, did not arrive as honest disagreement or intellectual debate. It arrived as suppression, marginalisation, and dismissal. The Siddha tradition was framed as folk practice, as fringe mysticism, as something not quite respectable — because dismissing it was easier than confronting what it actually implied. Most Siddha practitioners learned this early and made a practical decision: they did not reveal their ways to mainstream society. They practised quietly, taught in closed circles, and moved through the world without announcing what they were. Not out of shame. Out of wisdom. The knowledge was too precious and too powerful to subject to the hostility of a world that was not ready for it.

And then the world got harder. By the middle ages, Bhārat was in crisis — invasions, wars, famines, the collapse of old kingdoms, the clash of civilisations grinding against each other for centuries. When survival becomes the primary concern of an entire people, the first things to suffer are the things that require sustained effort, stability, and inner freedom. Sādhana — sincere, disciplined spiritual practice — requires exactly the conditions that crisis destroys: time, safety, guidance, the internal spaciousness to hold deep inquiry without collapsing under the weight of daily survival. As those conditions disappeared for most people, the rigorous paths of Tantra and the Siddha tradition became inaccessible to the general population. Not because the knowledge was lost, but because the capacity to receive it was eroded.

Society adapted, in the way societies always adapt when the difficult path becomes too difficult. It simplified. If you cannot sustain the full inquiry, you choose one part. If you cannot hold all four capacities, you hold the one that requires the least external support. If you cannot do the practice, you do the prayer. Communities gathered to sing the holy names. Devotion — Bhakti — became the dominant spiritual mode. And there is nothing wrong with devotion; it is one of the four capacities described in the first article of this series, it is real and powerful, and it sustained millions of people through genuinely terrible times. But devotion alone, elevated to the only path, creates a distortion. When an entire civilisation tells itself that Bhakti is enough — that singing, praying, and surrendering to God's will is the whole of spiritual life — the other three capacities begin to atrophy. Inquiry becomes threatening. Subtle perception becomes suspicious. Rigorous practice becomes unnecessary. And the traditions that cultivated all four begin to look not just different, but dangerous.

From within the Siddha tradition, this period is remembered very differently from how mainstream history presents it. Mainstream history calls it a golden age of saints and poets, and some of those saints were genuine — some were Siddhas in their own right. But for the tradition itself, this was a time of profound loss. Not because devotion emerged — devotion was always part of the path — but because everything else was abandoned. Society became more rigid, more orthodox, more hostile to practices that asked for more than prayer. The rich, complex, multi-dimensional traditions of Tantra were flattened into a single word, and that word became a slur. Tantra got a bad name — not because Tantra was corrupt, but because a society that had lost the ability to hold complexity needed to sort everything into simple categories: good or bad, pure or impure, safe or dangerous. And Tantra, with its embrace of the full spectrum of reality — including the body, including power, including everything that orthodoxy wanted to push away — could not survive that kind of flattening.

Here is where something unexpected happened. When Siddha practitioners were confronted by a regressing society — when they were told to abandon their Tantric ways, to submit to Brahminical authority, to fall in line — many refused. But rather than fight a battle they could not win within a society that had turned against them, some Siddha Dharma practitioners made a striking choice: they publicly adopted Buddhism. You may have encountered this in Tibetan sources — Hindu Paṇḍits or Siddhas credited with strengthening Vajrayāna Buddhism. The Vajrayāna, the Diamond Vehicle, which is in fact the hallmark of the Siddha tradition, became Buddhified. Śiva and the various forms of Śiva within the Tantric systems were renamed as Buddha. The iconography changed. The philosophical framing shifted. But the underlying architecture — the practices, the Yānas, the Ḍākinī and Yoginī sādhanas — carried forward. Changed, adapted, incomplete perhaps, but alive. This did not begin only in the middle ages; the roots go back before the seventh century, when certain Siddhas — referred to as Muktak Siddhas, liberated Siddhas — came together and made a deliberate decision to separate their outward identity from Siddha Dharma, establishing what became known as the Guhya Samāja. That is a whole other story for another time. But it matters here because it shows you something about the Siddha character: when the conditions demand it, adapt. Do not cling to form. Preserve the essence. Prayog Dharma — even in how they survived.

So through Buddhism, at least a portion of this Tantric wisdom was carried forward, transformed and reframed but alive. And in Hindu society? The Ḍākinī temples disappeared. The Vajra Yoginī temples were lost. The practices that empowered women, that broke caste, that held all seven paths — these were pushed out of mainstream religious life almost entirely. The consequences of that loss are still visible: a civilisation that speaks with immense pride about an ancient heritage, while the living traditions that actually embodied that heritage were driven underground centuries ago. The pride is real. But it is pride in something that most people no longer have access to. And that gap — between the pride and the actual knowledge — is one of the quiet tragedies of the subcontinent's spiritual history.

But the Siddhas did not vanish. They retreated — into remote caves, into the high Himalayas, into lives lived incognito within the very society that had rejected them. They continued their practice. They continued their transmission. They held the precious jewel of this wisdom in their hearts and passed it forward, generation to generation, through lineages that chose invisibility over confrontation. Whatever authentic Tantric Siddha temples people know of today — the rare places where genuine practice still occurs — these are the practising places of those Siddhas and their lineages. Not of the society that rejected them. The society lost the thread. The Siddhas held it.

This, then, is the full picture — or as full as three articles can make it. A tradition that mastered both world and spirit. That held seven paths without building walls between them. That experimented rather than believed. That defined wholeness as something that never stops moving. And — perhaps most remarkably — a tradition that opened its doors to every human being willing to do the work, regardless of birth, regardless of gender, regardless of what the rest of the world said they were allowed to become. The Siddhas did not fight the world's dismissal with arguments. They did not campaign for acceptance. They did not seek approval from the systems that rejected them. They answered with results — with practitioners whose attainment could not be denied, with a lineage that survived everything: invasion, suppression, orthodoxy, the flattening of complex wisdom into simple slogans. They answered by still being here.

There is one final thing to say about what a Siddha is. In the Siddha understanding, certain beings carry an aṃśa — a portion — of a cosmic principle. Not fully human in the ordinary sense. Not divine in the otherworldly sense. Something that participates in both without diminishing either. Creative wisdom. Sustaining balance. Transformative intensity. The Siddha is the living point where the human and the divine overlap. This is what makes the tradition so different from paths that promise escape: the Siddha does not leave the world behind, does not transcend into some other realm and wave goodbye to the rest of us. The Siddha becomes the place where the world and its source meet. And that place — that meeting point between the human and the sacred — is not a monastery, not a cave, not a temple. It is a person. A person who did the work.

If you wish to reference this article:

APA: Nath, A. (2026). The fifth arrangement: Who was allowed in? Siddha Tantra Arts. https://www.siddhatantraarts.com/articles/the-fifth-arrangement

Chicago: Mahayogi Ashutosh Nath. "The Fifth Arrangement: Who Was Allowed In?" Siddha Tantra Arts, 2026. https://www.siddhatantraarts.com/articles/the-fifth-arrangement