The Posture That Carries a Founder's Name

Only two postures in the classical hatha corpus are named after people, and both belong to the same lineage. One is matsyendrasana, after Matsyendranath. The other is gorakshasana, after Gorakshanath, whom the Nath tradition holds to be Matsyendranath's disciple and the figure who organised hatha yoga into a system.

The Gheranda Samhita's description sets the feet between the knees and the thighs with the soles turned upward, and covers the ankles with the hands. It is a low bound seat of the same family as siddhasana, muktasana and guptasana, which differ from one another chiefly in where the heels are placed and which foot lies above.

The naming is the significant fact. Geoffrey Samuel's account of the emergence of yoga and tantra places the Nath siddhas at the centre of the milieu from which the hatha corpus came, and Mallinson and Singleton's survey of the primary literature in Roots of Yoga shows the Nath connection running through the texts themselves rather than being imposed on them by later tradition. A posture named for Gorakshanath in a manual of this kind is not a dedication added by an admirer; it is the tradition marking its own foundation inside its technical vocabulary, in the same way that a school of law carries the name of the jurist it descends from.