Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Mudras

Apana

Also Known As Apana Mudra

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The thumb meets the tips of the middle and ring fingers with the index and little fingers extended. It is worked with for apana vayu, the downward-moving current that the tradition assigns to elimination and release, and it is used accordingly at the close of a session and in practices concerned with letting go rather than with gathering.

Facts
Attributions
Associated ChakraSourced to the subject's own account
Sacral 1Tradition: Modern yoga practice
Finger TechniqueSourced to the subject's own account
Thumb touches middle and ring fingertips; index and little stay extended 1Tradition: Modern yoga practice
Origins
Origin of the Name
Sanskrit apana, the downward vital air (apa-, away or down, plus an, to breathe). 2
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceSourced to the subject's own account
Worked with for apana vayu; used to close a session, for release 1Tradition: Modern yoga practice
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The Apana Mudra

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

Form and meaning

In this seal the tips of the thumb, middle and ring fingers are joined. It is associated in yogic practice with the downward-clearing energy of the body and with cleansing.

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

Apana Mudra, thumb touching middle and ring finger, is presented in the same modern finger-element system as Prana Mudra, here associated with the downward-moving apana vayu, one of the five vital airs (pranas) described in classical yogic physiology, a genuinely old concept the modern mudra scheme borrows and reapplies to a specific finger position. As with the other seals in this set, the concept of apana vayu itself has real classical grounding in Hatha yoga and Ayurvedic sources, but the specific instruction to form this exact finger seal to influence it is documented mainly in modern popularised mudra-therapy literature rather than in the older primary texts.

Which Layer Apana Mudra Belongs To

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.

Apana 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 Apana 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.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Belongs to Tradition

Related To

Every named mudra is an instance of the broader discipline of mudra practice. Direct correspondence: the discipline is defined by this class of gesture.

Pranayama, Disciplines

Apana mudra is named for and traditionally associated with pranayama practice. Specific thematic correspondence beyond the general Mudra Practice link.

Source Asana Pranayama Mudra BandhaSwami Satyananda Saraswati
Sources
1. Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha
Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Bihar School of Yoga, 1969View the Source
2. A Sanskrit-English Dictionary
Monier Monier-Williams, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1899On the Sanskrit termView the Source
Mudra: A Study of Symbolic Gestures in Japanese Buddhist Sculpture
E. Dale Saunders, Princeton University Press, 1960On the iconographic hand gestures, their Indian antecedents, and their fixed associations in Buddhist sculptureView the Source
Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice
Mark Singleton, Oxford University Press, 2010On the twentieth-century formation of the modern yoga repertoire, against the antiquity commonly claimed for itView the Source
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