One Name, Two Postures, and the Nath Behind Them

Bhadra means auspicious, gracious or favourable, and it is a word the Sanskrit tradition attaches freely to things that are well made and well omened. As a posture name it says nothing about the body at all, unlike the animal names that make up much of the later list, so the name records a judgement about the seat rather than a picture of it.

The complication is the second name. The Pradipika states that the yogis also call this posture gorakshasana, after Gorakshanath, the figure the Nath tradition treats as the organiser of hatha yoga and as the disciple of Matsyendranath. The Gheranda Samhita then lists bhadrasana and gorakshasana as two separate postures with two different descriptions. Mallinson and Singleton, translating the hatha corpus in Roots of Yoga, show that this kind of divergence is normal rather than exceptional: the texts were compiled from overlapping earlier material, and a posture name can gather more than one arrangement as it travels between compilations.

The atlas holds the two as separate entries and records the disagreement instead of choosing a winner, which is the only honest option when neither text can be treated as correcting the other. What the doubled name does show is how closely the early asana material sits to the Nath lineage, since a posture in the oldest surviving hatha manual carries the name of that lineage's founding teacher as an alternative title.