Garudasana

The Gheranda Samhita describes garudasana as pressing the shins and thighs firmly to the ground, setting the hands upon the knees, and holding the body still. It is one of the plainest descriptions in the second lesson, and it makes no therapeutic claim at all, which is unusual in a text that generally attaches a benefit to each posture it lists.

Garuda is the sun eagle of Indian mythology, the mount of Vishnu and the sworn enemy of serpents, and one of the most widely represented figures in Hindu and Buddhist iconography across South and Southeast Asia. The posture takes his name without the text explaining the connection, which is the ordinary situation in this corpus: the compilers assumed a reader who already knew the figure.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika does not carry the posture, so garudasana belongs to the material that appears only in the later manual. That group is large, roughly two thirds of the Gheranda Samhita's thirty two, and it includes almost all of the prone, standing and half standing forms. Whether those postures were newly composed or drawn from a wider practice that the earlier compiler simply did not record is not settled by the texts themselves, and no manuscript evidence has been identified that decides it. The atlas records the distribution rather than an explanation for it.

Garudasana is widely known today as a standing balance in which one leg winds around the other and one arm winds around the other, the whole body folded in on itself. That posture is not what the Gheranda Samhita describes. The classical garudasana is a settled kneeling or squatting seat with the hands resting on the knees, and nothing in the description involves entwining or balancing on one foot.

The gap is instructive because it runs the opposite way from the usual assumption. It is easy to imagine that the medieval texts were full of demanding shapes that modern practice has softened. In fact the classical repertoire is overwhelmingly seated, the standing and balancing forms that dominate a contemporary class are nearly absent from it, and where a modern posture is harder than its namesake the reason is usually that the name was reassigned rather than that the practice intensified.

Mark Singleton's Yoga Body sets out the documentary history behind that reassignment, tracing the formation of modern posture practice in the early twentieth century out of hatha material, Indian physical culture and imported gymnastic systems. Mallinson and Singleton's Roots of Yoga gives the primary descriptions in translation, which is what allows the comparison to be made at all. The atlas keeps the classical description on this page and notes the modern posture as a separate thing that shares a name.