What are Mudras?

Stand in front of an old temple image, a bronze Vishnu or a stone Devi with four arms, and look at what the hands are doing. Two of them hold objects you can half-recognise, a disc, a conch, a weapon, a flower. But the other two are empty, and they are not simply resting. One is raised, palm turned toward you, fingers up. The other hangs down, palm open, fingers pointing at the floor. The sculptor took as much care with these empty hands as with the crowned head. They are saying something exact, in a language almost no one in the room can still read.

That language is the language of mudra. And the same hands, making the same shapes, turn up in three other places you might never think to connect: on the fingers of a dancer telling a story with her hands alone, in the quiet gestures a priest makes over a tray of offerings, and in the strange inner “seals” that a hatha yogi uses to lock the breath in the body. One word runs through all four worlds. This is what it means.

The seal

Start with the word, because the word is the key to everything that follows.

Mudra does not first mean “gesture.” Open Monier-Williams, the great Sanskrit dictionary, and the meanings arrive in a revealing order. First: a seal, a signet-ring, any instrument for stamping. Then: the impression that a seal leaves, a stamp, a mark. Then: a lock, a stopper, a closing of the eyes or the lips. Only well down the list does the hand appear, and even there the definition keeps the older sense, calling a mudra “a token or mark of divine attributes impressed upon the body.” A mudra, in its oldest and deepest meaning, is a seal. Everything the word later comes to name, the god’s hand and the dancer’s hand and the yogi’s locked body, is a way of stamping, fixing, closing, sealing.

Where the word comes from is a small, genuine dispute. The Indian grammatical tradition often derives it from the root mud, “to delight,” and there is a genuine old adjective mudra meaning “glad” that appears once in the Atharvaveda, so that a mudra becomes “the giver of joy.” Western philologists, following the great Petersburg dictionary, prefer the root mard, “to press or crush,” which fits a seal better, since a seal presses its image into wax. The tantric texts add their own devotional etymology, in a much-quoted verse of the Kularnava Tantra: a mudra is what “gladdens” all the gods and “dissolves” the mass of sins, and is named mudra for exactly that, sealing the bond between the devotee and the deity. All three are worth holding in mind. Whatever its birth, the word carries a single gravity across every use: to seal.

You can hear that older meaning everywhere once you listen for it. A mudra was a signet-ring, the seal a minister pressed into hot wax to authorise a document, and a whole classical play, Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa, “The Signet of Rakshasa,” turns its entire plot on the theft and misuse of such a ring; Kalidasa’s Shakuntala hangs on the loss of another. A mudra was also a stamped coin, which is why the word still means “currency” in Indian languages to this day. A coin is only a disc of metal until it is stamped, and a stamp does two things in the one motion: it presses in a fixed image, and it seals the metal as true. Both of those meanings travel into the gesture. Some mudras fix a meaning the way a signet fixes an image; others close something the way a seal shuts a jar. The god’s hand and the dancer’s hand mostly do the first. The worshipper’s hand and the yogi’s body do the second. It is one word because it is one act seen from two sides, to stamp and to shut.

That is the thread. In the ritual manuals of the Shakta tantras, the act of forming a mudra is actually called bandhana, “binding”: the fingers are bound into a shape, and in the same motion they bind and fix the living energy of the mantra being spoken. The gesture is a seal pressed onto sound. Once you see that, the four worlds stop looking like four unrelated things and start looking like one idea worked out in four materials: stone, dance, ritual, and the yogi’s own body.

Four things called mudra

Before going further, a knot to untie, because the single word hides at least four quite different things, and mistaking one for another is the commonest confusion in the whole subject.

The first kind is iconographic: the fixed hand-poses of gods and Buddhas in painting and sculpture, the raised palm of reassurance, the downturned palm of giving, the folded hands of meditation. These are gestures made in stone, meant to be read.

The second is the mudra of classical dance, where the hands, there called hasta, form a whole silent vocabulary. A trained dancer can tell an entire story, name a god, plant a forest, or send a river running, with the fingers alone.

The third is ritual: the gestures a worshipper or priest makes during puja (worship) and the recitation of mantras, inviting a deity, offering, sealing, dismissing. Here the hand acts rather than describes.

The fourth is the most technical and the least understood: the yogic mudra of hatha yoga, a “seal” of the whole body rather than a pose of the hand, a lock that traps the inner breath and turns it inward and upward. Khechari, the famous tongue-seal, belongs here, as do the three great “locks” of yoga.

And then, set apart from all four, there is a fifth sense that is a pure coincidence of language and belongs in a different article entirely. In the left-hand tantric rite of the five makaras, the “five Ms,” one of the five is mudra, and there the word does not mean a gesture at all. It means parched or roasted grain, a ritual foodstuff. The great translator H. H. Wilson actually read that “mudra” as a gesture rather than as grain, so even the scholars have tangled the two, which tells you how slippery the word is. When you read “mudra,” in short, you have to ask which of five things is meant. This account takes the four gesture-senses in turn, and leaves the parched grain to the study of tantric ritual.

The hands of the gods

Return to that four-armed image, because its empty hands are the easiest mudras to learn, and once you can read them, half the sculpture of India opens up.

The raised hand, palm out and fingers up, is abhaya mudra, from a-bhaya, “no fear.” It is the gesture of reassurance and protection, the god saying do not be afraid. The sixth-century astronomer and polymath Varahamihira, describing how to make images of Vishnu, already names this hand and calls it the bestower of peace. It is one of the most widespread gestures in all of Asian art, worn by Vishnu and Devi and Ganesha and by the standing Buddha alike.

The downturned hand, palm out and fingers pointing to the earth, is varada mudra, the gesture of boon-giving, of dana or charity. It is the god’s hand held open to give. And here is the single most useful thing a temple-goer can learn: on a standing deity, these two very often come as a pair. The lower right hand gives abhaya, be not afraid; the lower left gives varada, receive what you ask; and the upper hands hold the weapons and emblems that tell you which god this is. Fear removed and boon granted, with the god’s identity in the raised hands above. Learn that one pairing and you can walk up to almost any standing image in the subcontinent and read its first sentence.

Three more will carry you a long way. Anjali mudra is the two palms pressed together at the chest, the gesture the whole world now knows from the greeting namaste. In sacred art it is a posture of reverence, and tellingly it is made by devotees and attendants and lesser divine beings facing the god, and almost never by the supreme deity itself, because it is the gesture of the worshipper, not the worshipped. It is among the oldest gestures on Indian soil, appearing on terracotta figurines from as early as the age of the Indus cities. (The site has a whole essay on namaste and this gesture, and how the sacred anjali and the everyday greeting came to share one shape.)

Dhyana mudra is the meditation seal: both hands resting open in the lap, one cupped in the other, palms up. It is the pose of the meditating Buddha, of the Jain Tirthankaras, and of Vishnu shown as a yogi, and some would trace it as far back as the cross-legged seated figure on a famous Indus-civilisation seal, older than any scripture, though that reading goes back to the archaeologist John Marshall and is still contested. And jnana mudra, also called chin mudra, is the seal of knowledge: the tip of the thumb and the tip of the forefinger joined in a circle, the other three fingers open. The joined thumb and finger are read as the meeting of the individual self and the absolute, the small jiva touching the great Brahman. It is the hand of Dakshinamurti, the form of Shiva who teaches the highest truth in silence, sitting with this seal at his knee and saying nothing at all. One caution: this same teaching gesture is called chin in one text, jnana in another, and vyakhyana, “exposition,” in a third, so do not be thrown when the books disagree on its name.

There is one more that most people look straight past. Kataka mudra is a loosely curled hand, the fingers bent to leave a small hole through the fist, and its purpose is startlingly literal: a real flower or a fresh garland was meant to be slipped through the hole, so that the goddess in the bronze could hold a living blossom that was replaced each day. It is the characteristic hand of the great goddesses, and once you know it you will see it everywhere you had never noticed it.

A word on the neighbours. Several of the most famous “mudras” people can name are in fact chiefly Buddhist, and it helps to keep them apart from the Hindu temple set. Bhumisparsha mudra, the earth-touching gesture, where the right hand reaches down over the knee to touch the ground, is the Buddha at the moment of his awakening, calling the earth itself to witness. Dharmachakra mudra, both hands at the heart with thumbs and forefingers forming interlocking wheels, is the Buddha turning the wheel of the teaching at his first sermon, the gesture of the serene fifth-century preaching Buddha of Sarnath, one of the most famous images in all of Asian art. Vitarka mudra, a single hand raised with thumb and forefinger touching, is the gesture of teaching and debate. You will meet all three in any museum of Asian art, and being able to name them is part of literacy in this language, but they belong first to the Buddha’s story.

Finally, the richest single case of hands-as-language in all of Indian art is Shiva as Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance, whose four hands are a complete sentence. The upper right holds the small drum whose beat is the first sound of creation; the upper left holds the fire of dissolution; the lower right is raised in abhaya, be not afraid, even here in the whirl of destruction; and the lower left sweeps across the body to point down at the raised foot, which is the promise of refuge and release. The site has a fuller account of the dancing Shiva elsewhere. For our purpose he is the proof that a god’s hands are meant to be read like a text.

The language of the dancer

Now take the same hands off the statue and set them moving, and you have the second world of mudra: the hasta, the hand-gesture of classical Indian dance.

Here the hands are a full language, codified in writing more than a thousand years ago. In the grammar of the treatises the hands are the heart of angika abhinaya, expression through the body, one of the four kinds of expression a performer commands, alongside the words spoken, the costume worn, and the involuntary signs of true feeling. The scholar Kapila Vatsyayan spent a lifetime tracing how that bodily grammar binds the treatises, the temple sculpture, and the living dance into a single tradition. The foundational text is the Natya Shastra of Bharata, the vast old treatise on drama and dance, which sets out the gestures of the hands among the movements of every limb. The practical handbook, the one dancers still learn from, is the Abhinaya Darpana, the “Mirror of Gesture,” attributed to Nandikeshvara, and there is a graceful public-domain English translation of it made by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Gopala Kristnayya Duggirala in 1917.

The gestures divide into two families: the asamyuta hastas, made with a single hand, and the samyuta hastas, made with both hands together. How many there are depends on which text you follow, and the manuals simply differ. The Abhinaya Darpana counts twenty-eight single-hand gestures; the older Natya Shastra counts twenty-four; a later manual, the Nartananirnaya, counts thirty-eight. This is not muddle so much as living tradition, each lineage refining its own list. The single hands have vivid names: pataka, the flag, a flat hand with the fingers held together; tripataka, the three-part flag; ardhachandra, the half-moon; mayura, the peacock; hamsasya, the swan’s beak, thumb and finger delicately joined for holding fine and subtle things.

And this is only one lineage of the dancer’s hands. The dance-dramas of Kerala, Kathakali above all, follow a different handbook again, the Hastalakshana Deepika, the “lamp of hand-gestures,” which builds a vocabulary of some four hundred and seventy signs out of just twenty-four basic shapes, while Odissi and Kathak keep vocabularies of their own. There is no single canon of the hand. There is a whole family of them.

The genius of the system is a principle called viniyoga, the “application” of a gesture. A single hand-shape does not mean one fixed thing. It carries a whole list of meanings, and context chooses among them. The flag-hand pataka can be a cloud, a forest, a river, the night, a stream of moonlight, a wave, a refusal, a blessing. The hand is a word, and the sentence around it decides what the word says. This is why two dancers can make the identical shape and mean utterly different things, and why the same gesture that plants a forest can, a moment later, be a river running through it.

And how does the audience know which meaning is intended? Through the most quoted verse in the whole tradition of Indian dance, from the Abhinaya Darpana, in Coomaraswamy’s rendering:

“For wherever the hand moves, there the glances follow; where the glances go, the mind follows; where the mind goes, the mood follows; where the mood goes, there is the flavour (rasa).”

Hand, then eye, then mind, then feeling, then rasa, the “flavour” or distilled emotion that is the whole aim of the art. The gesture is only the first link in a chain that runs from the fingertip to the heart of the watcher. The hand leads the eye, the eye leads the mind, and the mind arrives at the feeling. A mudra, on this understanding, is the first link in a current that ends in the watcher’s own emotion, and never mere decoration.

There is a last, quiet beauty in this. The dancer’s hands and the god’s stone hands speak the same language. The sculptors of the old temples were expected to know the treatises on dance as well as those on image-making, and the same named gestures appear in both. At the great temple of Chidambaram, the hundred and eight fundamental units of dance are carved in stone in the passages of its towering eastern gateway, a choreography frozen in rock. The dancer’s living hand quotes the god’s carved one, and the god’s carved hand is a dancer stilled. It is one gestural language, spoken in flesh and in bronze at once.

The gestures of worship

The third world is the quietest, and you will only catch it if you watch a careful worshipper’s hands during puja.

In the older forms of worship a deity is received exactly as an honoured guest is received in a home: invited in, given a seat, offered water and food and light, and finally, when the rite is done, respectfully asked to depart. Each stage has its gesture. There is a mudra of avahana, invocation, the two hands cupped and drawn inward to call the deity into the image; a mudra of sthapana, seating; and a mudra of visarjana, dismissal, at the very end. The deity is invited, seated, and released, partly through the hands.

The loveliest of these is dhenu mudra, the “cow” gesture. The fingers of the two hands are interlaced and turned to imitate the udder of Kamadhenu, the wish-granting cow of plenty, and the shape is held over a vessel of water or milk while a mantra is spoken. The gesture is understood to transform the ordinary liquid into amrita, the nectar of the gods, sanctifying the offering before it is given. An everyday cup of water is sealed, by a hand shaped like a sacred cow, into nectar.

Even the telling of beads has its seal. When a devotee turns a mala, a rosary of a hundred and eight beads, through the fingers in japa, the murmured repetition of a holy name, the strand is cradled on the middle finger and each bead is rolled past by the thumb, while the forefinger is kept carefully off the beads. The reason is the very symbolism that reads jnana mudra: the forefinger stands for the ego, the separate and self-asserting “I,” and in the act of remembering God one does not let the ego touch the count. The praying hand is arranged so that the small self keeps its distance.

And then there is the practice where mudra and mantra fuse most completely, called nyasa, “placing.” The worshipper touches parts of the body in turn, the fingers, the heart, the head, the shoulders, the eyes, and with each touch installs a syllable of mantra and a form of the deity onto that spot. In its full form the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet are set one by one onto the body, so that the practitioner is inscribed all over with sound and divinity, the body remade into a temple, a living yantra, a diagram of the divine. Here the “seal” meaning of the word is at its most vivid: the hand stamps the god and the mantra directly onto the flesh. The same logic, turned outward and scaled up, is what brings a temple image to life. In the rite of prana-pratishtha, the “establishing of the breath,” a priest uses mantra and mudra to transfer breath, life, and the senses into the murti, the image, so that a shaped stone becomes a living presence a community can worship. (The site treats nyasa more fully in its own right; here it is enough to see that it is mudra and mantra sealed together on the body.)

There is a last ritual world of mudra, the most esoteric of all, and it belongs to the Shakta worship of the Goddess. In Srividya, the tradition that adores Lalita Tripurasundari through the Sri Chakra, the great diagram of nine nested enclosures, the worshipper offers the Goddess a fixed set of ten secret hand-seals, the dasha-mudra, “the ten mudras.” Nine of them belong to the nine enclosures of the chakra, each the seal of the power that guards that ring, with names like Sarva-samkshobhini, “she who agitates all,” and Sarva-vashankari, “she who brings all under sway”; the tenth crowns the set as the sign of the Goddess’s own consent to be worshipped. So central are they that the Lalita Sahasranama, the thousand names of the Goddess, calls her Dasha-mudra-samaradhya, “she who is worshipped by the ten mudras.” These seals are shown privately to the deity, learned only after initiation, and never made for display; the scholar Gudrun Bühnemann has done the careful academic work of setting them out. Two of the ten even share their names, khechari and yoni, with the hatha seals we are about to meet, but here the sense is wholly symbolic, the union of Shiva and Shakti and the womb-source of all things, and carries no bodily technique at all.

The seals of the yogi

The fourth world is the strangest, because here a mudra is not a hand-pose at all. It is a seal of the entire body, and it belongs to hatha yoga. These seals are a signature of hatha in particular, and a relatively late arrival in the long history of yoga. The older eight-limbed path of Patanjali has no mudras in it at all. They appear only with the hatha stream, whose scriptural voices include the Yoga Upanishads, the Yogatattva and the Darshana among them, and whose later handbooks set beside the work of meditation a body of frankly physical techniques for operating on the subtle body directly.

To understand it you have to understand the model of the body that hatha yoga works with, and here I will describe the aim of these practices without giving any method, because several of them are genuinely dangerous and are meant to be learned only from a living teacher. In this model, the body is a vessel that constantly leaks. The vital breath, the prana, disperses and drains away; and a subtle nectar, the amrita or bindu, is imagined to drip continually from a “moon” in the head, only to fall into a “sun” of fire at the navel and be burned up. That slow leak and burn is what aging and death actually are. The whole art of the yogic mudra is to seal the vessel so that nothing escapes: to close the openings, trap the breath and the nectar inside, and force the sealed energy to concentrate and rise up the central channel of the spine, waking the coiled power called Kundalini. This is why the word is mudra, a seal. You are sealing a pot so its contents cannot spill.

These seals are counted as a distinct limb of practice, separate from posture and breath-control, because they do something those cannot: they operate directly on the inner circuitry. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the classic fifteenth-century manual, lists ten of them and attributes them to Shiva himself, promising that they conquer old age and death, and warning that they must be kept secret “as one keeps one’s box of jewellery.” A later text, the Gheranda Samhita, lists twenty-five. One point of vocabulary trips up almost every modern student: the three great “locks” of yoga, the root lock, the upward-abdominal lock, and the throat lock, are simply three of the mudras in the classical texts, and not a separate category at all. The modern habit of teaching “bandhas” as one thing and “mudras” as another is a later convenience the old books do not share.

The most famous of the seals is khechari mudra, whose name means “moving in the sky.” It is the tongue-seal: the tongue is turned back and lifted to close off the passage at the roof of the mouth, so that the dripping nectar is caught at its source and not lost. The classical texts exalt it above all others and claim it defeats hunger, disease, and death itself. They also describe, quite openly, the extreme discipline by which the tongue is slowly freed over months to reach that position, which is exactly why this account gives the aim and stops there, and notes that the tradition offers a gentle substitute, nabho mudra, in which the tongue is simply turned up to the palate with no severity at all. Others in the family are gentler and more inward: shambhavi mudra, a fixing of the gaze toward the brow while the attention turns inward, aimed at the still, thought-free state the texts call unmani, the “no-mind”; the meditative jnana seal; and the shanmukhi or yoni seal, in which the fingers rest lightly over the openings of the face, the ears and eyes and nostrils and lips, closing the outer senses so the hearing can turn inward upon the subtle inner sound.

One of the ten, vajroli mudra, deserves a plain and sober word, because its history is a study in embarrassment. It is a seal concerned with retaining the vital essence, resting on the same doctrine that the loss of bindu is death and its preservation is life. It is textually rare, missing from several early yoga manuals, and it was so troubling to modern editors that the first English translators simply cut it out, one calling it obscene, another “obscure and repugnant.” Serious scholarship, above all James Mallinson and Mark Singleton’s Roots of Yoga, has since restored these practices to the historical record and traced their strange careers plainly, which is the right register for them: they are part of the real history of yoga, they are extreme, they are rarely practised, and they are not something to reconstruct from a paragraph. The point for us is only that this whole austere family, the tongue-seal and the locks and the reversals, are all called mudra for one reason: each one seals the leaking vessel of the body.

The fingers and the elements

There is one modern layer that has to be handled carefully, because it is now the most popular idea about mudras and it is also the least ancient.

You will find, all over the wellness world, a neat chart: the thumb is fire, the forefinger is air, the middle finger is space, the ring finger is earth, the little finger is water, and by touching this finger to that one you “balance” an element and cure an ailment, from insomnia to indigestion. This is often presented as timeless Vedic science. In truth, the specific therapeutic chart is largely a twentieth-century systematization, popularised above all by the teacher Acharya Keshav Dev, drawing on the flavour of Ayurveda. It does not appear in the classical hatha texts, which describe the yogic seals in terms of breath and nectar and the waking of Kundalini, and never as a matter of pressing a finger to cure an organ. The health claims made for it have not been established by any rigorous clinical evidence; the handful of small studies that exist, mostly from yoga-therapy journals, are too slight and too tangled up with the slow breathing that goes along with the gestures to prove much on their own.

None of this means the idea is worthless or dishonest. The deeper notion behind it, that the hand is a small model of the cosmos and the fingers can stand for the elements, does have some genuine grounding in the older interpretive tradition, and the classical reading of jnana mudra, the joined thumb and finger as the union of the self with the absolute, is a real and beautiful piece of symbolism. It is only the fixed clinical chart, finger to element to cure, that is modern. It is best received as a contemporary practice with an old flavour, taken up for the calm and focus it can bring, rather than as an ancient medicine. Said plainly, that is no insult to it. It is only the date-stamp.

The sealing hand

So there is one word, and there are these four worlds, and now the thread that runs through all of them is easy to feel.

The god’s stone hand seals a promise: fear not, and receive. The dancer’s hand seals a world into being, a forest, a river, a god, and sends it as a current from her fingers to the watcher’s heart. The worshipper’s hand seals the deity into the image and the mantra onto the body. And the yogi’s whole body becomes a sealed vessel, closed so that nothing of the inner life leaks away. Devotion, art, ritual, and yoga each took the same simple human thing, a shaped hand, and made it a seal, a way of pressing an unseen meaning into the seen world and holding it there.

That, across all four worlds, is the thread the word keeps. A mudra is the moment the body stops being only a body and briefly becomes a stamp, pressing the mark of something sacred, a god’s mercy, a story’s feeling, a mantra’s power, into the world and into itself. The tradition never treated the hand as a small or ordinary thing. It treated the hand as a place where meaning could be sealed.