Yoga glossary of Sanskrit terms

This yoga glossary exists because of a specific moment I have watched many times: somebody in their first class hears four Sanskrit words in the first two minutes, decides the room contains a body of knowledge they do not have, and never comes back. The words are not a test. Most of them are ordinary descriptions of ordinary things, and several are simply the name of an animal followed by the word for seat.

More than a hundred terms are below, grouped by where you will meet them: the words a teacher actually says while you are on the mat, the parts that posture names are built from, breath and energy, the philosophy, and the texts and traditions. Where a full page exists on this site, the term links to it.

One note on spelling. Sanskrit is written in Devanagari and every Roman spelling is an approximation, so you will see shavasana and savasana, pranayam and pranayama, vrikshasana and vrksasana. None is wrong. This site drops diacritical marks throughout for the simple reason that URLs and search boxes do.

Almost every asana name is a compound: a describing word plus asana. Learn about fifteen fragments and you can decode most of a class list without ever being taught it.

Once those are in place, a name like utthita parivritta parsvakonasana stops being frightening and becomes a set of instructions: extended, revolved, side angle posture.

The eight limbs in the middle of that table have a page of their own, in plain language and without the sermon.

That is a hundred and seven terms, and there are thousands more in the tradition. You will need perhaps twenty of them to follow an ordinary class comfortably, and the rest will arrive on their own if you keep turning up.

Some of these words are ideas and some of them are things you do. The ones you do are written up in full elsewhere on this site, and this is the index into them.

Postures. Tadasana, mountain pose. Trikonasana, the triangle. Vrikshasana, the tree. Bhujangasana, the cobra. Adho Mukha Svanasana, downward dog. Balasana, child's pose. Savasana, the corpse pose, which is the most misleading translation in the whole vocabulary.

Breathing. Anulom Vilom and Nadi Shodhana, which are related and not identical. Bhramari, the humming bee. Ujjayi, the ocean breath. Kapalbhati, which is technically a cleansing practice rather than a pranayama at all.

Sequences and traditions. Surya Namaskar, the salute to the sun, and hatha, the word under which most of this is taught in India.

Every glossary gives the meanings and none of them gives the sound, which is the thing that actually stops an adult using a word. People read paschimottanasana, decide they will mispronounce it in front of a room, and say the seated forward bend for the rest of their lives. So here are the rules, and there are only six of them.

• Every letter is said. Sanskrit has almost no silent letters, so bhu jang gas ana has all of its syllables. Nothing is swallowed the way it is in English.
• The a at the end is short, and it is there. Asana is aa sa na, not a saan. It is closer to the u in but than to anything else in English.
• A doubled or lengthened vowel is genuinely held longer. The first a in asana is long and the other two are short, which is why the word sounds top heavy.
• The h after a consonant is a puff of air, not a separate sound. Bh, dh, th and ph are single consonants breathed out. Bhujangasana starts with a b and a breath, not with a b and an h. Hatha is hut ha, not hath a.
• Stress sits on the long syllable, not on the first. Tadasana is taa DAA sana. Trikonasana is tri KOH nasana. Savasana is shaa VAA sana. Get the long syllable in the right place and the rest is forgiven.
• V is soft, closer to a w. Vinyasa, vrikshasana and savasana are all softer in the mouth than an English v.

Applied to the four names people avoid most: paschimottanasana is pash chi mot taa naa sana; adho mukha svanasana is a dho moo kha shvaa naa sana; ardha matsyendrasana is ar dha mats yen draa sana; ujjayi is oo jaa yee, with the j doubled and held.

One reassurance, from a teacher who has heard every possible version of every word. Nobody in an Indian hall is grading your Sanskrit, and regional pronunciation varies enormously across this country anyway. Say it approximately and confidently. That is what everybody else in the room is doing, and it is a great deal better than not saying it.

A glossary is a reference and not a way of learning a vocabulary. What actually happens, and it happens fast, is that a teacher says the Sanskrit, then the English, and by the fourth class about fifteen words have attached themselves to movements you have made with your own body. That is a different kind of knowing from reading a table, and it takes weeks rather than months.

Two words are worth learning ahead of your first class because they are instructions rather than names, and hearing them cold is disorienting. Drishti means the gaze point, and being told to fix it is the single most useful correction in any balance. Savasana is the lying rest at the end, and knowing that it is a posture rather than a break stops people packing their bag during it.

Everything else can wait. The words for breath, puraka and rechaka and kumbhaka, arrive when the breathing does. The philosophy vocabulary arrives if you go looking for it, and the eight limbs page is where that starts. The posture names arrive one at a time, which is the only way they ever stick.

If it is the vocabulary rather than the postures that has been putting you off walking in, that is worth saying out loud, because it is the commonest reason people give and the easiest to solve. Come and sit at the back of a beginners' batch, listen for an hour, and count how few words there actually are. The timetable for the hall in north Bangalore and for the online batches is on the classes page, and a first class where the whole room is new is the one where nobody minds a mispronounced posture. The other thing that stops people, more often than the Sanskrit, is a stiff back, and yoga for back pain is the honest place to start reading if that is the reason you are here.