Gorakshasana

Only two postures in the classical hatha corpus are named after people, and both belong to the same lineage. One is matsyendrasana, after Matsyendranath. The other is gorakshasana, after Gorakshanath, whom the Nath tradition holds to be Matsyendranath's disciple and the figure who organised hatha yoga into a system.

The Gheranda Samhita's description sets the feet between the knees and the thighs with the soles turned upward, and covers the ankles with the hands. It is a low bound seat of the same family as siddhasana, muktasana and guptasana, which differ from one another chiefly in where the heels are placed and which foot lies above.

The naming is the significant fact. Geoffrey Samuel's account of the emergence of yoga and tantra places the Nath siddhas at the centre of the milieu from which the hatha corpus came, and Mallinson and Singleton's survey of the primary literature in Roots of Yoga shows the Nath connection running through the texts themselves rather than being imposed on them by later tradition. A posture named for Gorakshanath in a manual of this kind is not a dedication added by an admirer; it is the tradition marking its own foundation inside its technical vocabulary, in the same way that a school of law carries the name of the jurist it descends from.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika uses the name gorakshasana, but not for the arrangement the Gheranda Samhita describes. Svatmarama gives a posture with the soles of the feet together in front of the perineum, calls it bhadrasana, and adds that the yogis also call it gorakshasana. The Gheranda Samhita then lists bhadrasana and gorakshasana separately, with different descriptions for each.

Two texts, two arrangements, one name shared between them and a second name shared as well. There is no way to reconcile the accounts without deciding that one compiler was mistaken, and nothing in the manuscript record supports that decision. The atlas therefore carries bhadrasana and gorakshasana as two entities and states the conflict on both, which is the same treatment it gives to any claim where the sources genuinely differ.

The underlying situation is well described in the scholarly literature on the hatha texts. These manuals are compilations, drawing on earlier verse material that circulated in more than one recension, and the posture chapters in particular gather items whose descriptions had already diverged before the compilers reached them. A name in this corpus identifies an entry in a list as reliably as it identifies a shape, and readers who expect a single fixed vocabulary will find the texts disagreeing with each other constantly. That disagreement is data about how the tradition was transmitted, and suppressing it would cost more than it saved.