Uttana Mandukasana

The Gheranda Samhita describes uttana mandukasana as beginning from the frog. The practitioner takes mandukasana, with the toes turned back and the knees forward, then brings the arms up behind the head and takes hold of it with the elbows, rising up. Uttana means stretched out or raised.

The text gives it a separate entry rather than presenting it as a variation, which is consistent with how this compiler counts throughout. Postures a modern taxonomy would group are recorded separately whenever the arrangement differs, and the list of thirty two is the result of that habit rather than of any attempt to cover a range of movements.

It is one of only three places in the whole classical corpus where a posture is defined by reference to the one it comes out of, alongside the stretched tortoise and matsyasana. All three appear in texts that also list dozens of independent items, and all three describe a change in the upper body over an arrangement of the legs that stays put. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika does not carry the stretched frog, or the frog it builds on; both belong to the material found only in the later manual, which is where most of the kneeling and low squatting forms in the corpus are recorded.

Two animals in the classical corpus have a plain form and a stretched form: the tortoise and the frog. In both cases the second posture takes the first as its base and adds a movement of the upper body, and in both cases the compiler keeps the animal's name and qualifies it with uttana rather than inventing a new image.

That is a naming convention rather than a coincidence, and it tells us something about how the vocabulary was maintained. A compiler who wanted the list to be memorable had two ways to add an item: find a new resemblance, or mark a variation on one already established. Marking a variation costs the reader almost nothing, because the base posture is already in mind, and it keeps the pair together in the list where the relationship can be seen.

The Gheranda Samhita uses both methods, and its thirty two entries are the result: a wide bestiary of independent images, with two small pairs inside it where one shape opens into another. The atlas carries each as its own entry, following the text, and records the relationship in the prose. Mallinson and Singleton's Roots of Yoga gives the primary descriptions in translation, and reading the pairs consecutively is the easiest way to see the compiler's method working.