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.