Bindu

Bindu (बिन्दु, "point" or "drop") is, in the tantric and Hatha-Yogic body-map, the seed drop — the same refined essence as shukra understood as a discrete locatable unit rather than as a tissue.

The classical description: bindu is seated at the crown of the head (the bindu-visarga point, behind and slightly above the brain stem) and naturally flows downward through the central channel. At the throat, it would normally be consumed by the inner heat (agni); the residual escapes through the reproductive organs and is lost.

The entire structure of Hatha Yoga is, on the technical reading of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the redirection of bindu back upward:

• Khechari mudra (the tongue-lock practice) closes off the throat passage so the descending bindu is captured rather than consumed
• The three bandhas — mula, uddiyana, jalandhara — create the pressure conditions for the upward redirection
• Viparita karani (the inverted posture) literally reverses the gravitational influence on the downward flow

The text of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika is unusually explicit on this point: "As long as bindu remains in the body, where is the fear of death?" (III.87). The conservation of bindu is, in this tradition, the central biological project of the discipline.

Primary sources

• Hatha Yoga Pradipika, chapter III — the bindu doctrine and the redirection practices
• Goraksha Samhita — the bindu cosmology
• Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe), The Serpent Power — the most scholarly English-language treatment

In motion

• See brahmacharya for the broader discipline of which bindu conservation is the technical heart.
• See ojas for what the conserved essence becomes once it reaches the brain.
• See kundalini for the energetic-channel mechanism that does the redirecting.