Muktasana

The second lesson of the Gheranda Samhita describes muktasana as placing the left heel at the base of the perineum and the right heel above it, with the head, neck and body held in one straight line. Mukta means freed or released, from the same root as moksha, the liberation that the wider tradition treats as the goal of religious practice.

A posture named for the goal is doing something different from a posture named for a frog. The classical corpus contains a small group of these: the auspicious, the accomplished, the hidden, the liberated. They are all low bound seats, they are all described with unusual precision about where the heels go, and they all belong to the part of the repertoire meant to be occupied for long stretches while the breath practices are carried out. The name records what the seat is understood to serve rather than what it looks like.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika does not name muktasana. It belongs to the material carried only by the later manual, which is true of roughly two thirds of the Gheranda Samhita's thirty two. Within the seats, however, the two texts are describing recognisably the same family, and the later compiler's additions are largely finer distinctions inside it rather than a different kind of posture.

Muktasana, siddhasana and guptasana are described in the same lesson of the same text and differ only in where the heels rest and which foot lies above the other. A modern taxonomy would treat them as three variants of one seat. The Gheranda Samhita treats them as three postures, and the atlas follows the source.

The decision is not arbitrary. In a practice where a seat is held motionless through extended breath restraint and the application of the inner locks, the exact placement of a heel against the perineum is the point of the posture rather than a detail of it. The compilers recorded the distinctions because the distinctions were the content. Collapsing them into a single entry with a note about variations would discard the only information these entries carry.

It also shows how the traditional counts work. The Gheranda Samhita opens its list by reporting that postures are as numerous as living species, that eighty four are the best, and that thirty two are useful in this world. Figures like these are inherited and formulaic rather than arrived at by counting. What fills the list is a compiler's judgement about which differences deserve a name, and a text that names three near identical seats separately is telling the reader how fine that judgement was. Mallinson and Singleton's Roots of Yoga sets the descriptions side by side and makes the comparison possible in translation.