Chin Mudra is a mudra, a symbolic hand-gesture of the Indian religious traditions, known in Sanskrit as Chin Mudra and signifying the seal of consciousness.
Form and meaning
In this seal it is formed like Jnana Mudra, thumb and index joined, but held palm-down, often resting on the knee. It is used in meditation to settle and ground awareness.
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
Chin Mudra is often taught, particularly within the modern Iyengar and Kundalini yoga lineages, as the palm-down counterpart to Jnana Mudra's palm-up form, glossed as directing awareness inward and downward rather than outward, a pedagogical distinction that is widely repeated in contemporary yoga instruction but is not uniformly or precisely defined in the older Hatha yoga texts themselves, which treat the finger-seal with more variation than the tidy Jnana-versus-Chin pairing modern teaching often presents. The name chin, from chit, consciousness, situates the gesture within the broader Vedantic vocabulary describing awareness rather than within Buddhist iconographic tradition.