Gomukhasana

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.

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.