This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
An asana entry records a specific, named yoga posture, its documented physical form, its earliest textual or teacher attested appearance, and what a tradition says the posture accomplishes, physically, meditatively or spiritually. Mark Singleton's history of modern posture practice shows that many asanas familiar today took their present form far more recently than popular accounts suggest, shaped by twentieth century physical culture movements alongside older textual and oral yoga traditions.
An entry records a posture's documented textual sources where they exist, since asanas are described with real variation across different manuals and teaching lineages, and records honestly where a posture's modern form and its earliest documented form differ, rather than presenting a single account as the posture's unchanging original shape.
Many postures recorded here carry meanings beyond the purely physical, a specific breath pattern, a meditative focus or a devotional association, and the entry records that layered meaning alongside the posture's documented physical form as two separate, both worth recording, facts. Where no early textual source survives for a posture in wide modern use, an entry says so plainly rather than inventing an ancient pedigree the documentary record does not actually support.