Padmasana

Padmasana is the posture most people can picture without being told, because it is the seat Hindu, Buddhist and Jain image makers give to a figure in meditation. Seated Buddhas across Asia are in it. Jain tirthankara images alternate between it and a standing posture. It is on temple walls, in manuscript painting and on the seals of the Indus valley in arrangements that have been argued about for a century.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika describes each foot placed on the opposite thigh with the soles turned upward, the hands crossed and laid in the lap or the arms taken behind the back to catch the toes, the chin drawn toward the chest and the gaze fixed at the tip of the nose. Padma is the lotus, and the upturned soles are the flower's petals.

Svatmarama calls the posture the destroyer of all disease and says that a practitioner who takes this seat and restrains the breath is set free. Those claims belong to the text and the atlas reports them as the text's. What the description makes clear is that padmasana in the manuals is not a shape of the legs alone; it specifies what the hands do, where the chin is and where the eyes rest, which is a fuller account than the corpus gives to almost any other posture.

Padmasana does more work in the classical corpus than any other posture, because several entries are defined as things done from it. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika describes kukkutasana as the lotus lifted onto the hands, and uttana kurmasana as that lift rolled back onto the spine. The Gheranda Samhita enters matsyasana from the bound lotus. In each case the entry assumes a reader who already has the lotus and is being told what to do with it.

That dependency has a consequence the manuals never state: a practitioner who cannot take padmasana cannot take any of them as the texts describe them. The classical repertoire is not a flat list of independent options. It has a small number of load bearing seats, and the lotus carries more weight than the rest.

Padmasana is also one of the four postures Svatmarama singles out from the eighty four, with siddhasana, simhasana and bhadrasana, and the corpus treats it as the seat for the breath practices that occupy the later chapters. Mallinson and Singleton's Roots of Yoga traces the early history of asana across the primary literature and shows the seated postures dominating the material until comparatively late; Mark Singleton's Yoga Body follows what happened afterwards, when the balance of the practice shifted decisively away from sitting. The lotus is where the older centre of gravity is most visible.