Svastikasana

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.

Svastika is built from su, well, and asti, it is: a word meaning well being or good fortune. In Indian usage it names a mark of auspiciousness drawn at thresholds, on account books and on ritual vessels, and it is old in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain practice alike, long predating any European contact. As a posture name it means the auspicious seat, and it belongs with bhadrasana and the other quality names among the earliest layer of the vocabulary.

The word's twentieth century history in Europe is a separate matter and does not reach back into the Sanskrit texts. The atlas notes the point because a reader meeting the transliterated name for the first time will meet it with that history attached, and because the posture entry and the symbol's modern career are genuinely unconnected: the Hatha Yoga Pradipika was compiled centuries before, in a religious world where the word carried the sense it still carries in South and East Asian practice.

Naming the difficulty is more useful than avoiding the word. The atlas records what the term means in its own tradition, what the posture is, and that the two things a reader may be holding in mind here are not the same thing. Suppressing the name would misrepresent the source, and using it without comment would leave the confusion in place.