The Seat the Whole Tradition Draws

Padmasana is the posture most people can picture without being told, because it is the seat Hindu, Buddhist and Jain image makers give to a figure in meditation. Seated Buddhas across Asia are in it. Jain tirthankara images alternate between it and a standing posture. It is on temple walls, in manuscript painting and on the seals of the Indus valley in arrangements that have been argued about for a century.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika describes each foot placed on the opposite thigh with the soles turned upward, the hands crossed and laid in the lap or the arms taken behind the back to catch the toes, the chin drawn toward the chest and the gaze fixed at the tip of the nose. Padma is the lotus, and the upturned soles are the flower's petals.

Svatmarama calls the posture the destroyer of all disease and says that a practitioner who takes this seat and restrains the breath is set free. Those claims belong to the text and the atlas reports them as the text's. What the description makes clear is that padmasana in the manuals is not a shape of the legs alone; it specifies what the hands do, where the chin is and where the eyes rest, which is a fuller account than the corpus gives to almost any other posture.