Illustrated manuscripts documenting the physical practice of yoga -- asanas, mudras, and the postural traditions that predate yoga's 20th-century export to the West.
Yoga's postural tradition -- asana -- is far younger than the philosophical and meditative tradition it grew out of; for most of yoga's long history, physical posture was subordinate to breathwork, mental focus, and sound. This Oedio gathers the rare manuscripts that actually illustrate asanas before the 20th century, when hatha yoga's physical dimension began to dominate the wider practice. The Joga Pradipika, an 18th-century text illustrated a century later in 1830, is among the earliest and most complete of these -- 84 painted postures and hand gestures, made a full century before yoga's modern export to the West.