THE NAMES OF THE ASANAS

twenty foundational poses: Sanskrit, the searchable spelling, the English name — and how old each one is

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: body and care · beginners · reference · gym

Names, English names and dates from the survey table “List of asanas” (Wikipedia, read 2026-08-13) and the texts it cites; word meanings from the Sanskrit entries of Wiktionary. This sheet gives the names, not the technique — poses are learned with a teacher.

NINE OF THESE TWENTY ARE TWENTIETH-CENTURY

9 of these 20 names — mountain, standing forward bend, triangle, warrior, downward dog, the caturaṅga of every vinyasa — are first described only in the twentieth century, in the teaching of Krishnamacharya and his pupils.

The ones with the longest paper trail are the ones you hold still in: corpse and bound angle in a fifteenth-century manual, staff pose in an eighth-century commentary, lotus and cow-face in a 4th-century one.

On the sheet

Names, English names and dates from the survey table “List of asanas” (Wikipedia, read 2026-08-13) and the texts it cites; word meanings from the Sanskrit entries of Wiktionary. This sheet gives the names, not the technique — poses are learned with a teacher.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 8 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

THE NAMES OF THE ASANAS

NINE OF THESE TWENTY ARE TWENTIETH-CENTURY

On the sheet

Printing

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