Bhadrasana

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika does not treat its postures as equals. Having reported that Shiva taught eighty four seats, Svatmarama singles out four as the ones that matter, and bhadrasana closes that short list behind siddhasana, padmasana and simhasana. Everything else in the chapter is described once and left; these four are the seats the rest of the book assumes.

That distinction is worth stating plainly, because the posture chapter of the Pradipika is brief and instrumental. It exists to arrive at a body that can be sat in without moving while the breath practices, the locks and the seals that fill the remaining chapters are carried out. A posture the text elevates is one it expects to be occupied for a long time rather than passed through, and the four it names are all low, bound and symmetrical arrangements that hold the spine upright without the hands doing any work.

To bhadrasana Svatmarama attaches the claim that it destroys every disease. That claim is the text speaking, and the atlas records it as the text's rather than as a finding. Claims of this kind are ordinary in the hatha corpus, which routinely presents a posture together with what it is said to accomplish, and reading them as therapeutic statements in the modern sense mistakes the genre. The Gheranda Samhita, working two centuries or so later, keeps bhadrasana among its thirty two but describes a different arrangement of the feet, which is one of the clearest cases in the corpus of a name outliving the shape it was attached to.

Bhadra means auspicious, gracious or favourable, and it is a word the Sanskrit tradition attaches freely to things that are well made and well omened. As a posture name it says nothing about the body at all, unlike the animal names that make up much of the later list, so the name records a judgement about the seat rather than a picture of it.

The complication is the second name. The Pradipika states that the yogis also call this posture gorakshasana, after Gorakshanath, the figure the Nath tradition treats as the organiser of hatha yoga and as the disciple of Matsyendranath. The Gheranda Samhita then lists bhadrasana and gorakshasana as two separate postures with two different descriptions. Mallinson and Singleton, translating the hatha corpus in Roots of Yoga, show that this kind of divergence is normal rather than exceptional: the texts were compiled from overlapping earlier material, and a posture name can gather more than one arrangement as it travels between compilations.

The atlas holds the two as separate entries and records the disagreement instead of choosing a winner, which is the only honest option when neither text can be treated as correcting the other. What the doubled name does show is how closely the early asana material sits to the Nath lineage, since a posture in the oldest surviving hatha manual carries the name of that lineage's founding teacher as an alternative title.