Kapalakuruntaka’s Hathabhyasapaddhati
Asana Sequence Reconstruction
musings by Philippa Asher
Please note, I am not using diacrital marks for Sanskrit terms that have been transliterated from Devanagari to Roman script
the above image tandavasana (Siva’s dance pose) is from the film entitled ‘Hathabhyasapaddhati: A Precursor of Modern Yoga’
Yoga practitioner: Philippa Asher Film Director: Jacqueline Hargreaves © 2018
ekena padena sthatavyam utthatavyam tandavasanam bhavati
[The yogi] should stand on one leg and raise [the other. This] is [Siva’s] Tandava-dance pose.
Hathabhyasapaddhati asana description number 80
(translated by Jason Birch in 2013), published in ‘The Proliferation of Asana-s in Late Mediaeval Yoga Texts’ (2018)
The Hathabhyasapaddhati is one of ten Sanskrit texts critically edited and translated as part of the Hatha Yoga Project at SOAS, University of London. Led by Dr Jim Mallinson, with Dr Mark Singleton, Dr Jason Birch (and others) between 2015 and 2020, the Hatha Yoga Project charts the history of physical yoga practice using philology and ethnography.
It was a great honour to be involved with the reconstruction and filming of asanas from the Hathabhyasapaddhati, which (as well as giving instruction on other aspects of the practise of hatha yoga) describes 112 postures that are divided into six groups, possibly sequences:
Supine (1 to 22)
physical culture exercises and yoga asanas where the chest, hips, shoulders or face are generally upwards and often with part of the back on the ground
Prone (23 to 47)
movements and poses that mimic things in nature, where the hips, belly and gaze are generally downwards
Stationary (48 to 74)
familiar and rare asanas (many of which are quite complicated) that are generally held on one spot
Standing (75 to 93)
dance movements, obscure physical culture gestures and complex asanas that are generally performed in an upright position
Postures with Ropes (94 to 103)
elaborate methods of climbing, ascending and balancing on rope
Postures which Pierce the Sun and Moon (104 to 112)
advanced yoga asanas that are recognisable in today’s modern postal yoga practice
Experience of practising the Hathabhyasapddhati postures
To play around with such an atypical selection of asanas and to move in a completely new way was enormous fun and quite a challenge given that I had about eight weeks to study and figure out over a hundred postures, from a transliterated and then translated 18th century Sanskrit manuscript. As a comparison my daily asana practice (which I have been doing since the late 1990s), is the Ashtanga vinyāsa method. It took fifteen years for me to learn/master the Primary, Intermediate Advanced A and Advanced B Series directly from my teachers in India (that's around two hundred asanas), perfecting one posture, before learning the next - so the process was completely different. It is also important to note that specific Sanskrit asana names aren’t necessarily understood to represent the same postures in all hatha yoga traditions. Names and asanas can vary considerably.
Obviously without having a strong daily asana practice and years of experience with postures on a deep level, it would be tricky to fathom the asanas in the Hathabhyasapaddhati, let alone do them. Some are quite complicated, others are simply movements that I’ve never needed to do before and some are influenced by physical culture, gymnastics, martial arts and dance. Having a more sophisticated understanding of asanas, how to perform them and indeed express them within logical sequences, makes the intelligent guess work that is involved when reconstructing from a page, more likely to be accurate.
Experimenting with the diverse range of postures described in the text and observing similarities and differences between what we consider to be asana today is deeply fascinating. A few of the Hathabhyasapaddhati postures focus on strength, others on flexibility or balance and then there are obscure asanas such as the curlew pose (103) which I interpreted as: whilst squatting, hold a stone weight with the teeth, loop your arms behind the calves and squeeze the outer shins with the forearms, place a vertical rope in each fist and then climb up said ropes). Also the polestar (89) in the standing section, might not seem out of place in a 1830s Parisian can-can dance performance. Encouragingly several poses described in the text, have evolved into postures that are part of today's Ashtanga Primary, Intermediate, Advanced A, B and C asana Series (and probably other posture-based systems too).
Having studied dance anthropology, history and performance at university, I found the eclectic element of the sequences intriguing. Given that some descriptions suggest movements that don’t seem like asanas at all, it begs the question when does a movement become an asana? For me it is when there is perfect synchronisation of breath, movement and gaze point, the physical alignment is perfectly at ease (allowing free-flow of prana) and there is stillness of the mind. With this in mind and given that I have encountered several agile adolescents across India who could demonstrate the shapes described in the Hathabhyasapaddhati with ease, I wonder if executing a posture when concentration, breathing, technique and state of mind are less steady, is better described as exercise (rather than hatha yoga)?
Approach to learning the Hathabhyasapddhati postures
I spent a lot of time studying the translated textual descriptions of the asanas, then worked out how they could be transferred to the physical body. I tried to avoid being influenced by the illustrations in the Sritattvanidhi, as there's a lot of artistic licence in the drawings (which seemed to be morphed to fit tidily into boxes with disproportionate body parts). Some depictions involve defying gravity and dislocating joints and none of the illustrations indicate where the floor should be. I’m not sure how helpful they are, but as art, are wonderfully enthralling.
So I played around with each asana of each section (one by one) and then flowed them together as a dynamic sequence. After working out all sections, I then practised each from start to finish (as described in the text): supine, prone, stationary, standing, (I didn’t have access to a vertical rope), those that pierce the sun and moon.
Performing all sequences consecutively was quite demanding (mainly because I was working in a new way and we only had eight weeks before filming). In the Ashtanga asana system, one methodically perfects each posture before learning the next and only when this is synchronised with tristhana, vinyasa and safe physical alignment, does the practice become a moving meditation. It takes decades to experience this. Thus I felt it vital to learn, memorise and practise all sequences in the Hathabhyasapaddhati many times, in order, to feel the progression and flow of each section (and also to experience the counter poses and to understand how the postures work dynamically and energetically on the body, as well as with the mind and breath). Unfortunately without having a dangling rope to hand, I couldn't play around with and feel the rope sequence, so had to mark the postures on the ground. I suspect these were influenced by movements from the Indian sport Mallakhamba and might have come in handy for climbing trees (or scaling walls during British Rule?)
The process for me was rather like lifting a piece of dance from a Benesh notation score (five line staves with bars, upon which movement is notated), but without having the choreographer present - so there’s plenty of room for interpretation. I would suggest that if you give the Hathabhyasapaddhati asana descriptions to six different experienced asana practitioners, you would see six different expressions of each posture.
For example with Matsyendrapitham (105), the Sanskrit description when translated is curious, as it states that the left heel is on the navel and the right foot on the left thigh, but the right foot is also below the left knee (!) and that you clasp the outside of the right knee with the left hand and hold the toes of the left foot:
“Having put the left heel on the navel [and] the other foot on the [opposite] thigh, clasping the outside of the right knee with the left hand and holding the toes of the [right foot, which are] below the left knee, [the yogin] should remain [thus. This] is Matsyendra’s seat.”
It makes more sense (to me) as:
“Having put the left heel on the navel [and] the other foot OUTSIDE the [opposite] thigh, clasping the outside of the right knee AND with the left hand holding the toes of the [right foot, which are] below the left knee, [the yogin] should remain [thus. This] is Matsyendra’s seat.”
I went with the Ashtanga Advanced A Series’ purna matsyendrasana, with my left foot in the navel, right foot on the floor outside the left leg and my left hand holding the right foot and right hand on my left thigh. Jason tweaked this, so my right hand was on the floor behind me (as in the Sritattvanidhi illustration).
Another instance is tanasana (112) which I interpreted as samakonasana (side splits in the Ashtanga Advanced B asana Series), but Jason thought it was literally just stretching the legs (as in after waking up) from the previous posture (savasana). Jason’s interpretation makes sense if the posture directly follows savasana, but the sentence ‘having stretched apart both legs’ makes me wonder otherwise. However if this is the case, why would it follow savssana? Could it be that ’stretching out the legs pose’ might actually have come before sukyasanam (110) ‘oyster pose’? As someone who practises ‘oyster pose’ regularly, or kandapidasana as it is known in the Ashtanga Advanced C Series, I can share that the hips need to be incredibly open (accomplished through mastery of side splits). In the Ashtanga asana system, samakonasana is practised two asanas before kandapidasana.
Just one of the many absorbing questions that this type of reconstruction invites …
Challenges and differences compared with my daily asana practice
On a practical level, I’m a forty-something year old Western female, trying to make sense of a transliterated and translated text, probably composed by an Indian male a couple of hundred years ago, in a context and culture that is very different from mine. I have also observed over the twenty years that I’ve spent living in South India and learning yoga from gurus there, that the way of expressing things in their language is very different from mine. Thus when lifting an asana from an Indian text, I would suggest that maybe taking each word literally and then translating it as it is, might not always be what the authour/teacher/practitioner is attempting to convey? Perhaps there are challenges when using Sanskrit vocabulary to describe movement? A further example is the description/translation for krauncasana (103): ‘having passed the fists through the thighs and knees’, obviously you can’t literally do that.
The text offers very limited information on the postures, which raises the following questions for me:
* Was the text actually written down by the visionary behind the sequences, or even by an accomplished asana practitioner?
* Is the numbering within the sequences/order of the asanas reliable?
* Are the descriptions of how to execute each individual asana accurate?
* It’s one thing to be able to proficiently demonstrate an asana, but it is another skill entirely to eloquently and succinctly use precise vocabulary to describe how to perform a posture.
* Why is there no guidance on drishti?
* How long are the postures meant to be held for?
* Do you perform certain asanas on each side?
* Should you master one posture before learning the next?
* How would you practise: a separate section each day for six days, the whole thing daily, or are the sections for different practitioners? If so, for whom/why etc?
* Would women have learned/been taught these postures?
* Would the practitioner continue with these sequences during different life stages, or were they used in a bespoke manner as the individual matures?
* How does a pose ‘pierce the sun and moon’? What is this referring to?
* Would this be a solitary practice?
Experience of the Hathabhyasapddhati asana sequences as a practice
The sequences in their entirety are fun to practise and collectively invite equal levels of strength, flexibility, balance, stamina and concentration. However they are not as refined and elegant as those of the Ashtanga asana system that I practise daily (which took Pattabhi Jois fifty years to perfect). I would need to practise the Hathabhyasapaddhati sequences for a long time to know whether they have the same effect mentally, physically and energetically as the Ashtanga asana sequences: to see if it’s possible to reach the state of a moving meditation. Also, without being able to go back in time to experience first hand how the sequences described in the Hathabhyasapaddhati were taught/learned, we'll never really know how they were practised.
It is of course wonderful to have access to an historical text that describes a wealth of asanas in a potentially dynamic sequence, which includes several postures that appear in Krishnamacharya's Yoga Makaranda, as well as many of those now the in Ashtanga asana system of Pattabhi Jois (and other modern hatha yoga methods).
It seems possible that if Krishnamacharya did have access to the Hathabhyasapaddhati, the Sritattvanidhi and other movement works, he was likely to have been inspired by them and consequently these absorbing texts have probably shaped many of today’s modern postural yoga practices.
above is an example of asana illustrations from the 19th century South Indian iconographic treatise the Sritattvanidhi, published in Norman Sjoman’s ‘The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace’ (1996)
top left (55) shows the artist’s impression of tandavasana
‘Stand on the foot with the other raised. This is tandavasana, the asana of the fierce dance of Siva.’