Key idea of the Yoga Sūtras
āsana · posture, seat
The seat for practice, steady and easeful.
Āsana means a seat: the position you sit in to practise. The Yoga Sūtras give it three sūtras. Posture is steady and easeful (2.46). It comes by relaxing effort and by meeting the boundless (2.47). Then one is not struck by the pairs of opposites (2.48), which Vyāsa glosses as cold, heat and the like. With posture in place, breath control follows (2.49). Among the eight limbs it comes third, after the restraints and observances (2.29). Its purpose is to support the work of the mind. A seat that is steady does not distract, and a seat that is easeful does not need constant effort to hold. Vyāsa names a list of postures, among them the lotus, the hero and the staff, but Patañjali describes none of them. His interest is in the quality of the seat, not its shape. That makes the teaching portable: any posture held for practice can be tested by the two qualities named in 2.46.
Vyāsa
“For example, the lotus-posture and the hero-posture and the decent-posture and the mystic-diagram and the staff-posture … the seated curlew and the seated elephant and the seated camel, the even arrangement, the stable-and-easy … and others of the same kind.”
Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya in J. H. Woods' translation (1914), p. 191.
How it has been read
Ananta in 2.47 can mean 'the boundless' or Ananta, the serpent who holds up the world. Vyāsa does not explain the word; Vācaspati Miśra takes it as the serpent, while many modern translators read it as the infinite.
A common misreading
Āsana is now widely equated with yoga itself. In the sūtras it is one limb of eight (2.29), a steady and easeful seat for meditation (2.46), and the flowing sequences of modern classes come from much later traditions.
Where the text defines it
- 2.29 Restraints, observances, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation and absorption are the eight limbs.
- 2.46 Posture is steady and easeful.
- 2.47 By relaxing effort and meeting the boundless.
- 2.48 Then one is not struck by the pairs of opposites.
- 2.49 With posture in place, breath control is the cutting off of the flow of in-breath and out-breath.