Hatha Yoga Pradipika

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika is the tradition's own primary manual of hatha yoga, and this record states its content plainly rather than smoothing over what the text itself does: it asserts that eighty-four asanas exist but actually describes only about fifteen, and no surviving text names the full eighty-four before the seventeenth century, a gap between the tradition's own claim and its own documented content. As a primary text it is authoritative for what this specific manual itself teaches and claims, not for whether its historical claims about the asana count are accurate, which the text's own numbers do not support. Use it to establish what this foundational hatha yoga text itself states; a claim about the historical development of the full eighty-four asana count needs a dedicated scholarly source such as Singleton's Yoga Body.