Lotus

Lotus Mudra is a mudra, a symbolic hand-gesture of the Indian religious traditions, known in Sanskrit as Padma Mudra and signifying the blooming lotus of the heart.

Form and meaning

In this seal the heels of the hands, the thumbs and the little fingers stay joined while the other fingers open like petals. It represents the opening of the heart and the lotus rising unstained from the mud, an emblem of purity and devotion.

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.

History and attestation

Lotus Mudra, or Padma Mudra, in which the hands are held together at the wrists and base while the fingers spread outward like opening petals, is widely taught in contemporary yoga as a gesture for opening the heart centre (anahata chakra) and cultivating compassion. Its documented history is considerably shallower than that of the classical Buddhist iconographic seals or even of the Hatha yoga text-attested Yoni Mudra: the lotus is an ancient and pervasive symbol across Indian religious art generally, but Padma Mudra as a specific named hand position taught in group yoga classes is a largely modern, twentieth-century addition to the wider repertoire of hand gestures rather than an old scriptural instruction.

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.

Lotus Mudra belongs to the first layer. In the record it is primarily something a viewer reads off an image, and the opening lotus belongs to the iconographic and the dance repertoires, where a cupped and opening hand is one of the standard named shapes. It circulates in modern yoga teaching as well, and the modern use is continuous with the older vocabulary in form even where the framing around it is new.

The consequence is that the surest evidence for this gesture is material rather than textual. Dated and provenanced sculpture gives a firm floor for when and where it was in use, which is a better class of evidence than most of the mudra literature can offer. Where a modern source attaches a therapeutic or energetic effect to it, that claim comes from the third layer and has been carried across; it is not part of what the iconography attests, and the two should not be read as one testimony.