The First Posture in the Oldest Manual

Svastikasana is where the Hatha Yoga Pradipika's posture chapter begins. The body is held straight and the soles of the feet are tucked in between the thighs and the calves, so that neither foot rests on top of the other. Svatmarama presents it plainly as a comfortable seat and makes no claim for it at all, which is unusual enough in this corpus to be worth marking.

Opening a list is not the same as being the most important item on it, and the Pradipika later singles out four other postures as the essential ones. But the placement is not nothing. A compiler beginning a chapter on seats with the simplest available cross legged arrangement, described without promises, is establishing what kind of thing a posture is before moving to the ones that carry claims.

The Gheranda Samhita includes svastikasana among its thirty two. It belongs to the group of interchangeable cross legged seats that the manuals treat as available for long sitting, and the corpus leaves the choice among them to the practitioner rather than prescribing one. That permissiveness is easy to miss in a literature otherwise full of exact instructions, and it is the reason the earlier text can carry several near equivalent seats without any sense of redundancy.