Asanas

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

An asana entry records a specific, named yoga posture, its documented physical form, its earliest textual or teacher attested appearance, and what a tradition says the posture accomplishes, physically, meditatively or spiritually. Mark Singleton's history of modern posture practice shows that many asanas familiar today took their present form far more recently than popular accounts suggest, shaped by twentieth century physical culture movements alongside older textual and oral yoga traditions.

An entry records a posture's documented textual sources where they exist, since asanas are described with real variation across different manuals and teaching lineages, and records honestly where a posture's modern form and its earliest documented form differ, rather than presenting a single account as the posture's unchanging original shape.

Many postures recorded here carry meanings beyond the purely physical, a specific breath pattern, a meditative focus or a devotional association, and the entry records that layered meaning alongside the posture's documented physical form as two separate, both worth recording, facts. Where no early textual source survives for a posture in wide modern use, an entry says so plainly rather than inventing an ancient pedigree the documentary record does not actually support.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

James Mallinson and Mark Singleton's sourcebook on the roots of yoga gathers actual textual evidence for how asana practice developed across many centuries of Sanskrit and vernacular sources, showing a documented history considerably more varied, and in its earliest layers considerably more austere, than the flowing sequences familiar from a modern studio.

That documented variety matters for an asana entry because it means a single posture can carry genuinely different instructions, purposes and even names across different manuals and lineages, a seated meditation posture in one text becoming a preparatory or minor posture in another, and an entry keeps that documented variation visible rather than flattening it into one standard account.

An asana entry therefore treats a posture's textual history as its own documented record, distinct from how a modern teacher or a modern studio may present it today, since both the older textual layer and the newer modern development are genuinely part of the posture's own real, checkable history. That same discipline applies to every posture recorded here, whatever period its documented form actually comes from, since a posture drawn from a nineteenth or twentieth century manual is just as much a genuine part of yoga's documented history as one drawn from an earlier Sanskrit source.