Which Layer Anjali Mudra Belongs To

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.