The Entwined Balance Is Not in the Text

Garudasana is widely known today as a standing balance in which one leg winds around the other and one arm winds around the other, the whole body folded in on itself. That posture is not what the Gheranda Samhita describes. The classical garudasana is a settled kneeling or squatting seat with the hands resting on the knees, and nothing in the description involves entwining or balancing on one foot.

The gap is instructive because it runs the opposite way from the usual assumption. It is easy to imagine that the medieval texts were full of demanding shapes that modern practice has softened. In fact the classical repertoire is overwhelmingly seated, the standing and balancing forms that dominate a contemporary class are nearly absent from it, and where a modern posture is harder than its namesake the reason is usually that the name was reassigned rather than that the practice intensified.

Mark Singleton's Yoga Body sets out the documentary history behind that reassignment, tracing the formation of modern posture practice in the early twentieth century out of hatha material, Indian physical culture and imported gymnastic systems. Mallinson and Singleton's Roots of Yoga gives the primary descriptions in translation, which is what allows the comparison to be made at all. The atlas keeps the classical description on this page and notes the modern posture as a separate thing that shares a name.