Surya Namaskar: The Sun Salutation

In a thousand studios at the same grey hour before dawn, people are moving through the same shape. Arms sweep up, the body folds down, a leg shoots back, the chest lifts, the hips rise, and the whole thing runs in reverse and begins again. They call it yoga, and they are half right. What they are doing is the Surya Namaskar, the Sun Salutation, and it is one of the most performed sequences of movement on the planet.

Two things about it would surprise almost everyone on those mats. The first is that it began as a prayer, a literal act of bowing to the sun, older than any gym and older than any studio. The second is that the flowing sequence they are doing, the one linking pose to pose on the breath, is not ancient at all. It is barely a hundred years old.

Both of those are true, and holding them together is the only honest way to tell this story.

Three things with one name

The confusion around Surya Namaskar comes from a single word doing three different jobs, so it is worth separating them at the start.

The first thing is yoga in its classical sense, the yoga of the Yoga Sutras. That yoga, as we have written elsewhere on this site, was never about physical movement. Patanjali defines it in his second verse as chitta-vritti-nirodha, the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. In that system a posture, an asana, was a steady and comfortable seat, a way to sit still for a long time so the mind could grow quiet. It was one minor limb of eight, and it was the opposite of a workout. Nobody flowed. Surya Namaskar, a sequence of dynamic movement, is not that yoga, and this account will not pretend it is.

The second thing is the worship of the sun, and this is where Surya Namaskar actually comes from. Long before anyone linked postures on a breath, Hindus rose before dawn, faced east, poured water toward the rising sun, and greeted it with mantras. To salute the sun, to bow to it, is one of the oldest religious acts of the tradition. Namaskar means exactly that, a bowing, a salutation. This is not the yoga of stilling the mind. It is devotion, the act of a worshipper before the one god they can see with their own eyes.

The third thing is the modern exercise, the flowing twelve-pose sequence assembled in the twentieth century, which took the ancient name and, later still, was placed under the enormous modern umbrella called “yoga.”

Keep those three apart and the whole subject clears. What the world does in studios is the third thing, wearing the name of the second, filed under the first. The rest of this article is the story of how that came to be, and of the real prayer underneath it.

The old prayer: bowing to the god you can see

Of all the gods of Hinduism, Surya is the one you can point at. He is the pratyaksha devata, the perceptible deity, the divine that is not hidden behind an image or a story but crosses the sky every day in plain sight, giving light and warmth and the very possibility of life. A tradition that saw the sacred everywhere saw it most obviously there, in the burning disc that no eye can hold. To worship the sun is the most natural devotion there is, and it is among the oldest.

That worship has ancient and well-worn forms. In the daily rite of sandhya-vandana, performed at the junctions of the day, a worshipper offers arghya, water poured from cupped hands toward the sun at its rising, and recites the Gayatri, the great verse of the Rigveda addressed to Savitr, the solar power that impels all things to life and thought. On the battlefield of the Ramayana, when Rama stands exhausted before his last fight with Ravana, the sage Agastya teaches him a hymn to the sun, the Aditya Hridayam, and it is with the sun’s names on his lips that he lifts his bow. The sun is saluted, praised, offered to, and bowed before, across the whole length of the tradition.

And the number twelve, which will matter for the sequence, is itself ancient and solar. The tradition speaks of the twelve Adityas, the twelve forms or faces of the sun, one for each month of the solar year. The sun that seems to be one is, in the old vision, a company of twelve, turning through the wheel of the year. When the modern sequence settled on twelve movements and twelve names, it was reaching, knowingly or not, for a number the sun has always carried. The sun’s own chariot, in the old images, rides on a single wheel with twelve spokes, the twelve months of the turning year, so that to move through twelve salutations is, in a sense, to turn the solar wheel once in the body.

So the salutation of the sun is real, and it is old. That is the root. What grew from it in the last century is another matter.

The new sequence: an honest history

Here is the claim that surprises people, and it should be made carefully, because it is easy to state it too strongly. The specific flowing sequence of postures that the world calls Surya Namaskar, the linked chain of twelve movements done on the breath, is not found in the classical texts of yoga. The scholar Joseph Alter, who has studied the practice’s history, puts it plainly: the Sun Salutation was not recorded in any hatha yoga text before the nineteenth century. The great manuals of hatha yoga, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Gheranda Samhita, the Shiva Samhita, describe seated and held postures and techniques of breath. They do not describe a standing flow. The individual shapes that make up the salutation, the cobra, the forward fold, are old and can be found scattered across the tradition. The chaining of them into a single breathing sequence is what is new.

Where, then, did the sequence come from? The trail leads, in large part, to the early twentieth century and to two figures.

The first is a king. Bhawanrao Pant Pratinidhi, the Raja of the small princely state of Aundh in what is now Maharashtra, became the great popularizer of Surya Namaskar as a system of health. In 1928 he published a book on it, and in 1938 an English edition appeared under the title The Ten-Point Way to Health. He made the practice mandatory in the schools of his state, prescribed it as daily exercise for boys and girls, and drew it from the physical culture of the wrestling ground, the vigorous danda exercises of the Indian gymnasium. His version, tellingly, had ten positions, not the twelve that would later become standard. And he was careful to say that he had not invented it. He called it a commonplace Marathi tradition, something he had grown up with and was reviving and organizing, not creating from nothing. Whether it was truly old in his region or newly assembled there is a question the record does not settle, and this account leaves it open.

The second figure is the teacher who did more than anyone to shape modern yoga, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who taught in the palace of the Maharaja of Mysore in the 1920s and 30s. The scholar Norman Sjoman, studying the yoga tradition of that palace, found something revealing. The room where Krishnamacharya taught his yoga had been the palace gymnasium, still hung with the ropes of physical training. Nearby, the sun-salutation drill was being taught, and at the time it was regarded as exercise, as gymnastics, and not counted as yoga at all. The wrestlers’ danda movements that the physical culture of the day had systematized bear a close family resemblance to the shapes of the salutation. What Krishnamacharya did, and what his student Pattabhi Jois carried to the world in the flowing style called Ashtanga Vinyasa, was to fuse that dynamic sun-salutation drill with the older practice of holding postures, and to teach the whole thing as yoga. Jois would later say there is no Ashtanga yoga without Surya Namaskar. The sequence had become the engine of a new kind of practice.

The broader scholarship, above all Mark Singleton’s study Yoga Body, sets this in its full context, and it is worth being precise about what that scholarship says, because it is often reported crudely. Singleton does not claim that yoga is fake or that Indians borrowed their spirituality from the West. His argument concerns the postural form of modern yoga, the yoga of flowing shapes and held poses done for the body, and he shows that this form took its present shape in the early twentieth century through a genuine meeting of streams: the older Indian traditions of posture and the wrestling ground, and the physical culture then sweeping the world, the Scandinavian and European gymnastics, the calisthenics, the bodybuilding, the drills of health and vigor. Modern postural yoga, in this account, is a real and living tradition, but a young and hybrid one. And Surya Namaskar sits close to its heart. Singleton notes that before the mid-1930s it was far from obvious that the sun salutation and yoga were even part of the same body of knowledge.

There is a further dimension to this history, and it is political, because the physical culture that Surya Namaskar grew out of was never only about fitness. It was bound up with the struggle to rebuild the Indian body under colonial rule. The British had made an ideology out of the idea of the weak and effeminate Hindu, above all the “effeminate Bengali,” a stereotype the historian Mrinalini Sinha has traced in detail, and one that conveniently marked the very educated classes producing India’s political leaders as unfit to govern themselves. The answer, for a whole generation of reformers, was to reclaim the body. They revived the akhara, the wrestling ground that was gymnasium and temple and school at once, and made bodily strength a matter of national regeneration, a discipline studied by the anthropologist Joseph Alter. Vivekananda had told his countrymen, in a line his disciples never forgot, that they would understand the Gita better with stronger biceps. The Raja of Aundh drilling his schoolchildren through the Sun Salutation was part of that answer, health and vigour and discipline offered not to the individual alone but to a people trying to stand up straight. The modern sequence was assembled, in part, as an act of self-respect under empire.

None of this should be received as a debunking, and it is important to say so clearly. The devotion is ancient and unquestioned. The gymnastic sequence is modern and hybrid. They carry the same name because the modern sequence reached for the old prayer’s title, and because bowing to the sun was a thing the tradition had always done. The honest sentence, the one that holds the whole truth, is short. The salutation of the sun is old. The flowing sequence of poses is new. Anyone who tells you only one half is selling you something.

The twelve positions

For all the history, the practice itself is a plain and beautiful thing, and it can be walked through with respect rather than as a fitness drill. What follows is the standard sequence in the common Indian teaching, though the reader should know from the start that it varies from school to school. The Sivananda form differs from the Iyengar form, which differs from the two sequences, called A and B, of the Ashtanga Vinyasa school, which differ again from the Raja of Aundh’s ten. There is no single official Surya Namaskar. What is shared is the arc: a rising, a folding, a going-out, a lowering, and the whole of it returning on itself like the sun’s own day.

One round moves through twelve positions. It begins standing at the front of the mat in Pranamasana, the prayer pose, palms pressed together at the heart, the body still, the attention gathered. On an inhalation the arms sweep overhead and the spine arches gently back in Hasta Uttanasana, the raised-arm pose, the body opening upward toward the light. On an exhalation it folds forward, hands reaching toward the feet, in Padahastasana, the standing forward bend, the head bowing below the heart. Inhaling, one leg steps back into a low lunge, Ashwa Sanchalanasana, the equestrian pose, the gaze lifting. Exhaling, the other leg joins it and the body forms a straight line or lifts into an inverted V. Then comes the low salute, Ashtanga Namaskara, the eight-limbed salutation, in which eight parts of the body, the feet, the knees, the chest, the chin, and the hands, touch the earth at once. This is the deepest bow of the whole sequence, the body itself prostrated before the sun, the whole self laid flat on the ground with nothing held back. There is a quiet theology in that shape. It is the posture of sashtanga pranama, the full-length prostration a devotee makes before the deity or the guru, the bodily grammar of surrender, the ego stretched out on the earth. And notice what the sequence does with it. It rises to its full height, arms flung up toward the light, and then it folds all the way down until the body that reached for the sun lies prostrate beneath it. Aspiration and surrender in a single circle of breath. The salutation teaches the body both to reach and to bow. Inhaling, the chest slides forward and lifts into Bhujangasana, the cobra, the heart opening toward the horizon. Exhaling, the hips rise into Adho Mukha Svanasana, the downward-facing dog. And then the sequence unwinds: the leg steps forward to the lunge, the body folds, the arms sweep up, and the hands return to the heart, one full round complete, the breath and the body having traced a circle.

The breath is the thread that makes it a practice and not merely a set of shapes. The rule is simple and worth keeping: where the body opens and expands, the breath is drawn in; where the body folds and contracts, the breath is let out. Inhale as you rise and arch, exhale as you bow and fold. Done this way, slowly, at dawn, the sequence is less an exercise than a conversation between the breath, the body, and the light. It is meant to be repeated in rounds, classically facing east as the sun comes up, and the tradition speaks of practicing it in sets, some devotees offering a hundred and eight rounds on holy days. A hundred and eight is the tradition’s most sacred count, the number of beads on a rosary and of the names in many a litany, and it carries a striking piece of astronomy as well: the distance from the earth to the sun is close to a hundred and eight times the sun’s own width. And this is not a modern coincidence dressed up as ancient wisdom. The classical Indian astronomers, in the Surya Siddhanta, already reckoned the sun’s distance in something near that ratio, more than a thousand years ago. The sacred number and the measured sky meet, near enough, at a hundred and eight.

That threading of breath to movement has a name, and it is the hinge of the whole modern practice. It is called vinyasa, from vi-nyasa, to place in a special and ordered way, and it was the particular innovation of Krishnamacharya to treat the transitions, the moving into and out of a shape on a breath, as being as important as the shapes themselves. That is the stroke that turned the still, held postures of the old hatha yoga into a flow. And the Sun Salutation is the purest case of it, the very engine of the flowing style, which is why Pattabhi Jois could say there is no Ashtanga yoga without it. When a person links the breath to the movement in the way that feels most essentially like modern yoga, they are doing the one thing that most marks this practice as modern. The thread itself was the invention.

The names the gym never hears

Here is the layer that the fitness version leaves out, and it is the layer that turns the sequence back into a prayer.

In its full and traditional form, each round of the Surya Namaskar is offered to a different name of the sun. There are twelve names, matching the twelve rounds, and the practitioner speaks one at the start of each, so that a full practice is a garland of salutations, the sun greeted under all its aspects in turn. The twelve are these. Om Mitraya namah, to the friend of all. Om Ravaye namah, to the radiant one. Om Suryaya namah, to the dispeller of darkness. Om Bhanave namah, to the one who illumines. Om Khagaya namah, to the one who moves across the sky. Om Pushne namah, to the nourisher. Om Hiranyagarbhaya namah, to the golden womb of the world. Om Marichaye namah, to the lord of the rays of dawn. Om Adityaya namah, to the son of Aditi, the boundless. Om Savitre namah, to the one who rouses all things to life. Om Arkaya namah, to the one worthy of praise. And Om Bhaskaraya namah, to the giver of light. To move through the twelve is to name the sun as friend, as radiance, as nourisher, as the golden source, as the rouser of life, and to bow to each in the body.

There is a further, more esoteric layer still, in which each name is joined to a seed syllable, a bija, the sun’s sound distilled: Hram, Hrim, Hrum, Hraim, Hraum, Hrah, six seeds carried through the twelve. In this fuller form the salutation is a complete act of mantra and movement together, the sound, the breath, and the shape all offered to the sun at once. Most of the world’s practitioners will never speak a word of it. But it is there, underneath the exercise, waiting, and it is what the sequence was reaching back toward all along.

The sun in the body

The tradition that gave the practice its inner meaning read the sun not only in the sky but in the body. In the map of the subtle body, two great channels of energy run alongside the spine: Ida, the lunar channel on the left, cool and receptive and calming, and Pingala, the solar channel on the right, hot and active and energizing. Pingala is the sun within, the channel of vitality and daytime force, and the practice of the Sun Salutation is understood, in this reading, to kindle it, to stir the inner agni, the fire of the body, and to wake a person into the active, outward-turned energy of the day. To salute the sun in the sky is at the same time to rouse the sun in oneself.

This is why the practice belongs so naturally to the morning, to the moment when the outer sun and the inner one are both meant to rise. It is a way of tuning the body to the turning of the day, of beginning the waking hours by drawing in light. Whether one takes the subtle body literally or as a language for what a person feels when they move and breathe toward the dawn, the meaning is the same: the salutation is a way of coming awake, in every sense.

It is worth adding, in the same honest spirit that runs through this account, that there is also a moon salutation, a Chandra Namaskar for the cool lunar channel of Ida, and that this lunar counterpart is more recent still, assembled only in the later twentieth century to balance the solar one. Even the tradition’s newest devotions keep reaching back for its oldest images, the sun and the moon, the two lights by which the whole of life is measured.

The sun that heals

There is a reason the tradition turned to the sun in sickness, and it runs far deeper than any modern claim about the benefits of exercise. Surya has always been a healer. He is invoked for arogya, for soundness of body, and above all against the diseases of the skin and the eyes, the organs of light. The very hymn Agastya taught to Rama on the battlefield, the Aditya Hridayam, hails the sun as the calmer of grief and the lengthener of life, and in the sun’s litany of a hundred and eight names he is saluted outright as the destroyer of disease. And the tradition tells a story to carry the point. Samba, a son of Krishna, was struck with leprosy, and after twelve years of penance to the sun on the banks of the Chandrabhaga river he was made whole, and in gratitude he raised temples to Surya. That legend stands behind the great sun-temples, from the old Chandrabhaga shrines to Konark, and behind the whole company of sun-worshippers, the Saura, who kept the sun at the centre of their devotion and whom the tradition counts among its classical sects.

So when a person today moves through the Sun Salutation for their health, they are doing, without knowing it, a very old thing. The sun as healer is not a modern idea grafted onto a workout. It is one of the sun’s oldest names. What is genuinely modern is only the measuring of it, the studies of heart rate and flexibility and mood, and those this account reports as what they are, early and partial and promising, and never as a cure or a medical claim. The tradition’s confidence in the healing sun and the laboratory’s cautious findings are two different registers, and it would be a mistake to let either pretend to be the other.

When it is done, and what it has become

The Sun Salutation belongs to the sunrise. It is done at first light, facing east, on an empty stomach, ideally with the offering of water to the rising sun that is its devotional root. It has its holy days, above all Ratha Saptami, the seventh day of the bright fortnight of Magha, kept as the sun’s own turning, the day the tradition treats almost as the sun’s birthday, when devotees rise in darkness to bathe and offer water and salute the coming light. It belongs, too, to the great solar festival of Makar Sankranti, when the sun turns north and the days begin to lengthen.

And it has become something its first devotees could never have imagined. The Sun Salutation is now performed across the whole world, in every country, by hundreds of millions of people, most of whom have never heard the twelve names or offered a drop of water to the dawn. On the International Day of Yoga each June, vast crowds move through it together in public squares, and its shapes are taught in gyms from São Paulo to Seoul as the warm-up to a workout. A devotional act of the Indian morning has become a global fitness staple, stripped, for most who practice it, of the prayer that was its whole point.

There is no need to mourn that, and no need to police it. A person who moves through the sequence for their health and their calm is doing something real and good, and the tradition has always been generous with its gifts. But it is worth knowing what one is holding. Underneath the exercise is a prayer, and underneath the prayer is the oldest devotion there is, the turning of a living creature toward the light that made it.

The salutation and the sun

So the studios fill at dawn, and the bodies move through the ancient shape, and the name on the practice is right and wrong at once. It is not the yoga of the stilled mind, whatever the sign on the door says. The flowing sequence is younger than the grandparents of the people doing it. But the gesture at the heart of it, the bow toward the rising sun, is as old as anyone who ever stood in the cold before dawn and felt the first warmth come over the edge of the world and was moved to say thank you.

And there is one last thing the sun has always been, which the salutation quietly honours. It is the eye of the world. The Rigveda calls it the eye of Mitra and Varuna, the gaze by which the great gods see; the very hymn Rama was taught names the sun loka-sakshin, the witness of all the worlds; and the tradition made the sun the witness of every deed done beneath it, the sakshi from whom nothing is hidden, the impartial watcher who keeps the moral order simply by seeing. The Vedanta then takes the image inward. The sun that witnesses the world from without becomes a figure for the awareness that witnesses every thought from within, the sakshin, the seer that watches all we do and is stained by none of it. To turn and face the sun, on this reading, is to bow to the witness, the one outside and the one within, and to remember that we are always, already, seen.

The exercise can be done without the prayer, and it often is. But the prayer is still in there, folded into the shape, waiting for anyone who wants to unfold it again.

The sun does not need to be saluted. It rises regardless. The salutation was never for the sun. It was always for the one who turns to face it.