Ok. Here it is: superimposed on the same Lankan coin (pls. see last Saturday’s post): Maya Devi’s pose, in honor of all women. hurriedly shot during lunch break, wearing the “lucky color of the day”: violet, executed after morning yoga class at the Dojo with yoga teacher Isla Rosete, then getting back to the office and clearing my tray of incoming pending work.
(apologies to the ancients for the execution…i did my best. Horizontal line naman, di ba — i can see a zero-degree straight there; well; i think i leaned forward a little bit to make a flat line with the legs, that’s why it looks like that; just a little teeny weeny bit.)
also known as Lakshmi’s pose, more commonly known as baddha konasana or butterfly or cobbler.
photo right-clicked from Lankan Library Forum, sharpened & lit
…. three favourite poses, sometime, i’ll tell you which ones (poses that ease discomfort), so i researched one of them; turned out to be really ancient.
According to some scholars: this Lankan coin circa 1st Century BC depicts Maya Devi (Buddha’s mother), seated with the soles of her feet together, and that it shows Queen Maya after the “virgin birth of Buddha” (the research has to be verified). whaddyaknow…! (some scholars however refer to another female deity, a heroine)
i guess…
like this…?
(the legs have to form a straight, horizontal line, like in Maya Devi’s pose, knees touching the ground, the more you get there, the more it eases your discomfort)
…. for the general readers/ viewers of this blog: this pose is now called “baddha konasana”; “baddha”, Sanskrit for “bound”, “kona” for angle, “asana” for pose.
Gosh, it’s really an old pose, isn’t it. That makes it more than 2,000 years old, an artist’s rendition supposedly of Buddha’s mother. (the research has to be verified.)
i’m guessing, the Hindus, who named these poses in Sanskrit, just gave the pose a generic name (bound angle pose) instead of giving it Maya Devi’s name, a Buddhist icon. Some writers call this Lakshmi’s pose; Lakshmi is a Hindu goddess. This is one of the few poses named after a female deity.
it’s also now commonly called the butterfly pose maybe because the angle of the folded legs make them look like wings; and it’s also more contemporarily called “Cobbler’s pose” because it looks like the way Indian cobblers sit.
renaming it here — calling it Maya Devi’s pose. Sue me.
(well, at least—- there’s less gibberish when i renamed this pose this time, i based it on research, you should be proud of me)
