The Frog Raised Up

The Gheranda Samhita describes uttana mandukasana as beginning from the frog. The practitioner takes mandukasana, with the toes turned back and the knees forward, then brings the arms up behind the head and takes hold of it with the elbows, rising up. Uttana means stretched out or raised.

The text gives it a separate entry rather than presenting it as a variation, which is consistent with how this compiler counts throughout. Postures a modern taxonomy would group are recorded separately whenever the arrangement differs, and the list of thirty two is the result of that habit rather than of any attempt to cover a range of movements.

It is one of only three places in the whole classical corpus where a posture is defined by reference to the one it comes out of, alongside the stretched tortoise and matsyasana. All three appear in texts that also list dozens of independent items, and all three describe a change in the upper body over an arrangement of the legs that stays put. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika does not carry the stretched frog, or the frog it builds on; both belong to the material found only in the later manual, which is where most of the kneeling and low squatting forms in the corpus are recorded.