Reclined vs supta vs supine vs prone

For years I’ve wondered about the etymology of “supine” vs “reclined” in yoga pose names. We have the idiomatic “supine figure four” and “reclined bound angle” – why not “reclined figure four” and “supine bound angle” instead? The alternatives seem equally valid. So, I started pulling on this thread and went down a bit of a rabbit hole.

Supta

The common Sanskrit prefix for many of the relevant yoga poses is “supta.” In his 1966 book Light on Yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar says “[s]upta means lying down” … helpful, but leaves room for interpretation:

• Supta matsyendrasana - supine spinal twist
• Supta baddha konasana - reclined bound angle

So it appears that whoever started using the terms in English picked one for a given pose and for whatever reason certain usages have stuck around within the lexicon.

Supine vs prone

The concept of supine is clearest to me when contrasted with prone, as in “supine ball pose” (lying on your back) vs “prone half frog” (lying on your belly).

A Sanskrit term sometimes used for the latter is “adva,” meaning “prone” or “face-down.” Consider “advasana” (reverse resting pose), the prone counterpart to shavasana. But “adva” is much less common than supta. Belly-down poses like floor bow and locust pose are simply the unprefixed dhanurasana and salabhasana, for example.

Proto-Indo-European

Curiously, despite their phonetic similarity, “supta” and “supine” do not appear to share the same root in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language.

• Supta comes from Sanskrit supta, the past participle of svap (“to sleep”), which derives from the PIE root *swep- (“to sleep”). This is the same root that gives us English words like “somnolent” (via Latin somnus, from an earlier form of the same root).
• Supine comes from Latin supīnus (“lying face upward, thrown backward”), which is generally traced to the Latin preposition/prefix sub (“under”) or related to super (“above, over”), ultimately from PIE *upo- or *sup- (“under, up from under”).

Thus, the similarity in sound is largely coincidental, though both Proto-Indo-European roots do start with s- followed by a vowel and p.

Ancient words, modern taxonomy

How much weight should we give these Sanskrit pose names when investigating yoga etymology?

Though yoga emerged as a broad category of meditative practice millennia ago, the current use of the Sanskrit pose names was formalized and greatly expanded by Iyengar and his teacher Krishnamacharya in the mid-20th century – that’s right, less than a century ago.

The earliest documented use of “supta” in a yoga pose name appears in Krishnamacharya’s 1934 text Yoga Makaranda: “supta utthita dakshinapada janusirsasana,” or “reclining extended right foot head to knee pose.”

Honestly that name is wild. In retrospect, it’s clear these guys were basically stitching together ancient words in a descriptive way. Certainly in part to be educational, as the long names are super precise. But also to lend their approach an air of ancient authority.

It’s kind of like paleontologists naming dinosaurs with Latin words. No one in the Roman era used the term “tyrannosaurus rex” in their own speech or writing. Modern people have co-opted individual words from a dead language to build new names for novel concepts. Which is fine: scientists don’t use these names to suggest enduring legitimacy that extends back to Rome.

But yoga teachers sometimes do use Sanskrit in this way, which I find invites an impression of antiquity that isn’t historically accurate. For example, it is factually incorrect to say something like: “now we’re going to try supta baddha konasana, which is the ancient Sanskrit name for this pose.” People simply were not saying these phrases and moving their bodies accordingly in the Indus River Valley thousands of years ago. The timeline is more like:

• Pre-500 BCE – Early yogic and ascetic practices existed in oral traditions, notably predating the standardization of Sanskrit.
• ~500 BCE to ~500 CE - Sanskrit was spoken as an elite language, “yoga” referred to seated meditation, breath control, philosophical contemplation, etc.
• _~1000 CE onward - Sanskrit was no longer vernacular but continued as a prestige literary and scholarly language. Limited physical asanas emerged and were documented, mostly standalone seated postures.
• 1920s-1960s - Krishnamacharya and Iyengar built a library of new poses and gave them names using Sanskrit.

So when we ask about the etymology of reclined vs supine in pose names and turn our attention to Sanskrit, it’s important to be clear-eyed that it only takes us back a few decades, not millennia.

The value of Sanskrit

That said, I still see a few reasons to use Sanskrit.

The first is ancient history: while Sanskrit pose names are not thousands of years old, the individual words themselves are, and they do come from a society where early yoga was practiced (though it was not the society that founded the practice).

The second is modern history: we can trace current yoga practice back to Krishnamacharya and Iyengar and their use/misuse of Sanskrit. These are the original names within modern postural yoga, though they aren’t as ancient as they might appear.

The third is universality: a yoga teacher in Tokyo and a yoga teacher in São Paulo can both say “trikonasana” and mean the same thing. That’s neat.

And the fourth is aesthetic: the language just sounds cool, and composes well.

So we’ll see. I don’t currently teach using Sanskrit or particularly care to hear it when practicing, but maybe it’s something I’ll grow into over time.