Padmasana

← Encyclopedia

Padmasana is the cross-legged seated posture of Indian meditation, in which each foot is drawn up onto the opposite thigh so that the soles turn upward and the crossed legs form a closed, symmetrical base. The name is Sanskrit for “lotus seat,” and the arrangement of the upturned feet, read as petals, gives the posture both its name and its place in religious art. It is the seat in which the meditating Buddha and a host of Hindu and Jain figures are most often shown.

The posture belongs to a wider Indian science of bodily seats. The Sanskrit word āsana means simply “seat” or “sitting,” and in the disciplines that grew up around yoga it came to name the deliberate postures held for meditation and, later, for the work of the body itself. Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, the early codification of the practice, says only that the seat should be steady and comfortable — sthira and sukha — without naming particular postures; the named catalogue of seats belongs to the later hatha-yoga manuals. The Haṭhayogapradīpikā, a fifteenth-century text, places padmasana among the principal seats and prescribes the exact crossing of the legs and the placing of the hands. Practitioners held that such a seat, locked and erect, steadied the breath, and that steadied breath in turn steadied the mind — the posture treated less as exercise than as the ground of everything that followed.

Across the traditions the seat carries the same role with different doctrine behind it. In the yogic systems it is the base for prāṇāyāma, the regulation of breath, and for the long sittings of meditation that the practice aims at. In Buddhist contexts the same crossed-legged seat is the posture of dhyāna, the absorbed concentration from which the Buddha is said to have reached awakening, and the iconography fixes him in it. The lotus imagery runs deeper than the legs: the flower that roots in mud and opens clean above the water is, across Indian religion, a standing figure for a purity unstained by its surroundings, and the meditator seated as a lotus is meant to embody that sense.

What scholarship can establish is narrower than what the manuals claim. The posture is ancient in Indian art and is described in the medieval hatha texts with some precision; the physiological effects asserted for it — that it conducts or seals subtle energies, that it alone makes deep meditation possible — are tradition-internal claims, framed within the yogic account of the body rather than demonstrated outside it. In the twentieth century the posture traveled west under the name “the lotus position,” detached from most of that framework and absorbed into modern postural yoga, where it survives chiefly as an image of meditation itself. The seat outlasted the systems that explained it.

→ In the library: The Hathayogapradīpikā (Sinh, 1914) · The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (Johnston, 1912)