Named for a Shape, Not for a Purpose

Gomukhasana is one of the postures the Hatha Yoga Pradipika describes and then declines to justify. The right ankle is set beside the left buttock and the left beside the right, so that the legs cross closely and the knees stack. Svatmarama offers the resemblance as the whole reason for the name, go mukha, the face of a cow, and says nothing about what the posture is for.

That restraint is rarer in the corpus than it sounds. Most entries in the posture chapters of both surviving manuals pair a description with a claim, usually the destruction of disease or the kindling of the digestive fire. A posture given without a claim is a posture presented purely as a way to sit, and the small group of such entries is a reminder that the hatha compilers were describing a range of seats among which a practitioner could choose, not a graded sequence with fixed outcomes.

The cow's face is the standard explanation and it is the one the text gives, though the manuals do not say which part of the arrangement is the face. Readers have proposed the narrow crossing of the shins tapering toward the feet, and the wide knees above with the ankles below. The atlas records that the Pradipika names the resemblance and does not specify it further. The Gheranda Samhita carries the posture among its thirty two, and the two descriptions agree closely, which is not true of every posture the manuals share.