Yogasana

Yogasana closes the Gheranda Samhita's posture list. The feet are turned up onto the thighs, the hands turned up on the knees, and the breath drawn in and held. The description is short, and it is the only entry in the list that includes the breath as part of the posture itself rather than leaving breath work to a later lesson.

The name is the practice's own. Where the other thirty one are named for animals, objects, qualities or people, this one is called simply the posture of yoga, and the text presents it as the arrangement in which yoga proper is performed rather than as one more shape beside the others.

Its position at the end of the list is part of the framing. The Gheranda Samhita is organised as seven lessons, a progressive scheme running from purification through posture, seals, withdrawal, breath, meditation and finally absorption, and the posture lesson ends by handing the practitioner to what comes next. Placing an entry named for the whole practice in the final slot marks the transition. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which is organised differently, gives that role to siddhasana instead, elevating it above the other fourteen as the seat always to be practised.

The seven lessons of the Gheranda Samhita are ordered as a course of preparation: cleansing, posture, the seals, the withdrawal of the senses, breath restraint, meditation and absorption. Naming the text a book of the body made ready, rather than a book of postures, describes it more accurately, and the placement of yogasana at the close of the second lesson is the point at which the reader is handed on to the rest.

An entry named for yoga itself, describing a seat with the breath held in it, is the clearest statement the classical corpus makes about what its posture lists were for. The postures are not the practice. They are the arrangement of a body that makes the practice possible, and the practice is what the remaining lessons of the Gheranda Samhita and the remaining chapters of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika describe: breath restraint, the inner locks, the seals, and the states the tradition says follow from them.

That ordering is visible everywhere in the texts once it is looked for. The posture chapters are short. The seats are described with great precision about where a heel goes and cursory indifference to anything that does not affect long sitting. The claims attached to individual postures are about heat, disease and the channels of the subtle body, which are the concerns of the breath chapters.

Mallinson and Singleton's Roots of Yoga sets the primary literature out in translation and shows how small a proportion of it asana occupies. Mark Singleton's Yoga Body follows the reversal, in which posture became the visible whole of the practice for most of the world during the twentieth century. Yogasana, sitting at the end of a list and named for the thing the list serves, is where the older proportion is stated in the corpus's own voice.