Varuna

Varuna Mudra is a mudra, a symbolic hand-gesture of the Indian religious traditions, known in Sanskrit as Varuna Mudra and signifying the seal of water.

Form and meaning

In this seal the tip of the little finger meets the tip of the thumb. Named for the god of the waters, it is linked to the water element and to fluid balance and suppleness.

Mudras appear across Hindu and Buddhist ritual, iconography, classical dance and yoga, where a fixed position of the hands carries a settled meaning or is held to direct attention and breath. The gesture is described here within those documented traditions.

Sources and caution

Varuna Mudra, the little finger and thumb tip pressed together, is presented within the same modern finger-element scheme as governing jala, water, named for Varuna, the Vedic deity of the cosmic ocean and of cosmic law (rita), an old and well-attested figure in the Rigveda, though the specific finger-seal gesture bearing his name is again a modern addition rather than a documented Vedic ritual instruction; the deity's antiquity should not be mistaken for antiquity of this particular mudra-therapy technique. As with the other seals in this set, the deity's antiquity should not be mistaken for antiquity of the specific hand gesture bearing his name.

The word mudra covers three bodies of material that get printed together and are neither the same age nor the same kind of thing. The iconographic layer is a hand position that identifies a figure in sculpture and painting, readable from the early centuries CE onward. The textual layer is the mudras named in the hatha and tantric corpus, where a mudra is a whole bodily technique rather than a hand shape. The third is a twentieth century therapeutic literature of finger positions matched to elements and ailments, which borrows the vocabulary of the other two and is continuous with neither.

Varuna Mudra belongs to the third layer. It is one of a set of finger positions, each formed by joining the thumb to one or more of the other fingers and each matched to an element or a planet, that circulates through modern yoga teaching and through a large popular literature on mudra therapy published from the middle of the twentieth century onward. The set has a genuine root in the older material: the hatha compendia do name five dharana mudras after the elements. But those are concentration practices on the elements, not the finger positions taught under these names now, and the modern set is not found in that form in the classical texts.

This matters for how the claims should be read. The therapeutic effects attached to Varuna Mudra in the popular literature, on digestion, on circulation, on particular complaints, are claims made by that literature and by the teachers within it. They are not claims of the classical tradition, they are not supported by clinical evidence, and the atlas records who makes them rather than making them. Describing the practice accurately and endorsing its stated effects are different jobs, and only the first belongs here.