Asana
Also known as: Yoga pose, Yoga posture
Sanskrit: आसन (asana), meaning 'seat' or 'posture.'
Asana refers to the physical postures of yoga, the third of Patanjali's eight limbs. Originally describing a stable, comfortable seated position for meditation, the term has expanded in modern practice to cover the wide range of standing, seated, balancing, and inverted poses taught in yoga classes today.
The Yoga Sutras describe asana simply as steady and comfortable, intended primarily to prepare the body for extended meditation. The elaborate physical vocabulary of modern yoga, with hundreds of named poses, developed largely in the 20th century, building on this much older, simpler foundation.
In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, asana referred to a single steady, comfortable seated posture for meditation, not the hundreds of postures practiced today; the expansion into a full physical system happened centuries later, mainly through medieval Hatha Yoga texts like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Modern studio classes in the West often use 'yoga' to mean almost exclusively asana, even though it is only one of eight limbs described in the classical system, alongside ethical conduct, breathing, and meditative practices that a purely physical class may never touch.
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Related Terms
Hatha Yoga
Hatha Yoga is a classical branch of yoga focused on physical practices, including asana, pranayama, and cleansing techniques (shatkarma), used to prepare the body and energy channels for meditation and higher states of awareness. Its core text, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, dates to the 15th century.
Yoga Sutras
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are a foundational text of classical yoga philosophy, composed of 196 concise aphorisms organized around an eight-limbed path (ashtanga) leading from ethical conduct through physical and breath practices to meditative absorption and liberation.