Thirty Two Postures Out of Millions

The posture count is the text's best known feature and its own justification for it is worth attending to. It states that Shiva taught eighty four postures and that of the very many postures existing in the world only thirty two are of use, which is both a claim to selectivity and an acknowledgement that the number is not fixed by anything. That is twice the count of the best known hatha manual and the largest in the classical corpus, and it is still a small fraction of what a modern class contains. The postures themselves are mostly seated or recumbent and are described briefly, in a line or two each, with the effect stated rather than the alignment.

A reader trying to reconstruct a shape from the description usually cannot do it without a commentary or a living teacher, which tells you what the text expected to accompany it. Its date is not settled. It is later than the fifteenth century manual whose material it presupposes, and beyond that the range proposed by scholars is wide, resting on manuscript evidence and on relationships with other texts rather than on anything the work says about itself. The atlas declines to assert a date and records the relative ordering instead, which is what the evidence actually supports, and leaves the narrower question to the manuscript scholarship that would have to answer it.