Drawing the Bow

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika gives dhanurasana in a single verse and supplies its own gloss on the name in the same breath. The toes are caught in the hands and one foot drawn back toward the ear, and the text says the body is held as an archer holds a bow at the draw. Sanskrit posture names are frequently left unexplained in the manuals, so a text that states the image it intends is doing the reader an unusual favour.

The archery figure is more specific than it looks. A bow at full draw is not a curved object at rest; it is a thing under tension, held still by opposing forces, and released. The Pradipika's image is of the arms pulling one way while the trunk resists, not of a body arched backward. That is a different mechanical description from the one the name usually calls to mind.

The Gheranda Samhita includes the bow among its thirty two, and the posture therefore belongs to the small set carried by both surviving manuals. That set is worth attending to, because a posture in both texts has a stronger claim to belonging to the shared hatha inheritance than one that appears in the later compilation alone. Mallinson and Singleton's translation of the corpus in Roots of Yoga sets the two descriptions side by side, and the overlap between the fifteen of the Pradipika and the thirty two of the Gheranda Samhita is the clearest evidence of a common stock of postures behind both.