Kneeling, Sitting, and Which Hero Is Meant

Several twentieth century lineages teach virasana as a kneeling seat, with the knees together and the feet drawn out beside the hips so the practitioner sits between them. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika describes a cross legged arrangement with one foot on a thigh and the other beneath it. These are different shapes, and the atlas records the classical one rather than harmonising the two.

The divergence is ordinary in this vocabulary and the reasons are documented. Mark Singleton's Yoga Body traces how the modern repertoire was assembled and how Sanskrit names travelled onto shapes drawn from several sources, and Mallinson and Singleton's Roots of Yoga makes the medieval descriptions available in translation so the comparison can be checked rather than asserted.

The name itself is worth a moment. Hero postures appear in the sculptural and epigraphic record of India in another sense entirely, in the hero stones raised across the Deccan and the south to commemorate men who died in battle or in defence of cattle, which show the dead figure seated or standing in a fixed convention. The manuals make no connection, and the atlas asserts none. It is recorded here only because a reader encountering vira across several kinds of Indian material will meet it in that register too, and knowing that the yoga texts are silent on the point is part of reading them accurately.