The Arms Came Later

In almost every contemporary class gomukhasana involves the arms: one hand reaches over the shoulder, the other comes up behind the back, and the fingers hook together between the shoulder blades. For many practitioners that clasp is the posture, and the leg position is treated as the base it is performed from.

Neither of the surviving classical manuals mentions the arms. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Gheranda Samhita both describe the legs and stop. Whatever the arm position's history, it is not attested in the two texts the tradition itself treats as its handbooks, and the atlas records the classical description rather than assuming the modern form is a recovery of something older.

This is a small case of a general problem in reading posture history. The manuals are terse, often a verse or two per posture, and they were written for practitioners who had a teacher; they are checklists and mnemonics rather than complete accounts. Silence in a Sanskrit verse is therefore weak evidence that a practice did not exist. What it is good evidence for is what the compilers thought worth writing down, and in the case of gomukhasana that was a way of folding the legs and a resemblance to a cow. Mallinson and Singleton's Roots of Yoga presents the primary descriptions in translation and is the basis on which the comparison here is made.