Matsyendrasana

Of the fifteen postures the Hatha Yoga Pradipika describes, fourteen are named for shapes, animals or qualities. One is named for a man. Matsyendrasana carries the name of Matsyendranath, whom the Nath tradition counts among its founding masters and holds to be the teacher of Gorakshanath.

The description has the foot placed at the root of the thigh, the knee taken across the body, and the trunk turned toward it, held with the arm. It is the seated spinal twist, and it is the only rotational posture in the earlier manual. Svatmarama attaches to it the claim that it kindles the digestive fire and puts an end to disease. That is the text's claim and the atlas reports it as such.

The presence of a personal name inside a technical list is a marker of provenance. David Gordon White's study of the medieval siddha traditions in The Alchemical Body sets out the world these texts came from, in which lineages of accomplished practitioners transmitted alchemical, tantric and yogic technique together, and Geoffrey Samuel's account of the emergence of yoga and tantra places the same milieu behind the hatha corpus. A posture bearing a founder's name in the oldest surviving hatha manual is that lineage signing its own work, and it is the strongest internal evidence in the text for where the material came from.

Matsyendranath is a figure of tradition rather than of documented biography. The Naths hold him to be the first human teacher of their line, the recipient of teaching from Shiva himself, and the master of Gorakshanath, who is credited with organising hatha yoga into a system. His name means lord of fishes, and the stories told about him include the account of his overhearing Shiva's instruction to Parvati while in the body of a fish. Dates, place and historical detail are not recoverable from the sources, and the atlas does not supply them.

What is recoverable is the shape of the tradition around him. David Gordon White's The Alchemical Body reconstructs the medieval siddha world in which the Naths operated, where mercurial alchemy, tantric ritual and yogic physiology were pursued as one enterprise aimed at a perfected and immortal body. Geoffrey Samuel's Origins of Yoga and Tantra situates the same movement in the longer development of Indic religion.

The hatha corpus is the technical residue of that world. It reaches later readers as a set of manuals about postures, breath and inner locks, with the metaphysics largely stripped out, and the personal names embedded in it are among the few traces left on the surface of the texts of where the material came from. Two postures in the classical corpus carry Nath names, this one and gorakshasana, and they carry the teacher and the disciple respectively.