Anjali

Anjali Mudra is a mudra, a symbolic hand-gesture of the Indian religious traditions, known in Sanskrit as Anjali Mudra and signifying salutation and reverence.

Form and meaning

In this seal the palms are pressed together before the heart. It is the gesture of greeting and of prayer across the Indian world, expressing respect, devotion and the joining of the individual to the divine.

Mudras appear across Hindu and Buddhist ritual, iconography, classical dance and yoga, where a fixed position of the hands carries a settled meaning or is held to direct attention and breath. The gesture is described here within those documented traditions.

History and attestation

The Sanskrit root anj, to honour or celebrate, underlies both Anjali and the everyday Hindi and Sanskrit greeting Namaste, with which the gesture is routinely paired, spoken as the palms come together. The seal appears across the whole range of Indian religious practice rather than belonging to one tradition alone: it opens Hindu temple worship (puja), it is the standard greeting bow in Buddhist monastic communities, and its close Zen Buddhist counterpart, gassho, performed identically in Japanese practice, shows the gesture's spread with Buddhism itself out of the Indian subcontinent into East Asia, carrying the same basic sense of respectful acknowledgement across otherwise quite different ritual contexts.

The word mudra covers three bodies of material that get printed together and are neither the same age nor the same kind of thing. The iconographic layer is a hand position that identifies a figure in sculpture and painting, readable from the early centuries CE onward. The textual layer is the mudras named in the hatha and tantric corpus, where a mudra is a whole bodily technique rather than a hand shape. The third is a twentieth century therapeutic literature of finger positions matched to elements and ailments, which borrows the vocabulary of the other two and is continuous with neither.

Anjali Mudra belongs to the first layer. In the record it is primarily something a viewer reads off an image, and the joined-palm salutation is the widest attested gesture of the three layers and the least specialised: it is a greeting, a sign of reverence and a dance hasta at once, named in the classical treatises on drama as well as shown on images. Its ubiquity is why it is the one mudra most readers already know without the word.

The consequence is that the surest evidence for this gesture is material rather than textual. Dated and provenanced sculpture gives a firm floor for when and where it was in use, which is a better class of evidence than most of the mudra literature can offer. Where a modern source attaches a therapeutic or energetic effect to it, that claim comes from the third layer and has been carried across; it is not part of what the iconography attests, and the two should not be read as one testimony.