Mayurasana

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika describes mayurasana as the palms placed on the ground, the elbows planted against the sides of the navel, and the whole body raised horizontal and straight like a staff, carried on the arms alone. The Gheranda Samhita carries it too, so it belongs to the shared stock behind both manuals.

Svatmarama then makes the strongest claim in his posture chapter. He says the posture destroys disorders of the spleen and the stomach, overcomes disease arising from imbalance of the humours, and digests even food that is deadly. The atlas records those as the text's statements. They are not repeated here as effects, and nothing in this entry should be read as a health claim; the atlas describes what a fifteenth century Sanskrit manual asserts about a posture, which is a fact about the manual.

The claim is worth noticing precisely because it is extreme. Assertions of this kind are a feature of the genre, and they sit alongside the corpus's wider promises about the perfected body, freedom from ageing and freedom from death. Reading them as pharmacological statements misunderstands what the compilers were doing, and reading them as mere hyperbole misses that the tradition meant them. The historian's job here is to report the claim accurately and to say who is making it, which is what this entry does.

Mayura is the peacock, and the image behind the name is a bird standing with its long tail carried out behind it, level with the ground. The posture puts the legs in that position: the body is horizontal, balanced across the elbows, and the feet trail behind like the train. It is one of the more transparent of the classical resemblances.

The peacock is also the mount of Kartikeya, the war god, and it appears widely in Indian art and in the iconography of several deities. The manuals make nothing of that, and the atlas does not attach it to the posture as an intended meaning. The naming here works by shape, as it does for the cockerel, the locust and the crocodile.

What makes mayurasana notable within the corpus is that, with kukkutasana, it is one of only two postures in the earlier manual that ask the arms to carry the whole body. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika is otherwise a book of seats. The presence of two arm balances in a list of fifteen is a reminder that the early repertoire was not exclusively meditative even at its narrowest, though the balance of it is overwhelmingly so. Mallinson and Singleton's Roots of Yoga collects the primary descriptions in translation and lets the proportions of the early corpus be read directly rather than inferred from later practice.