Tadasana
standing pose in modern yoga
Tadasana (Sanskrit: ताड़ासन, romanized: Tāḍāsana), Mountain pose or Samasthiti (Sanskrit: समस्थिति; IAST: samasthitiḥ) is a standing asana in modern yoga as exercise; it is not described in medieval hatha yoga texts. It is the basis for several other standing asanas.
Etymology and origins
Tāḍāsana is from the Sanskrit words ताड tāḍa, "mountain" and आसन āsana meaning "posture" or "seat". Samasthitiḥ is from सम sama meaning "equal", "level", or "balanced"; and स्थिति sthiti, "standing".
The pose was unknown in hatha yoga until the 20th century Light on Yoga, but it appears in the 1896 Vyayama Dipika, a manual of gymnastics, as part of the "very old" sequence of danda (Sanskrit for "staff" or "stick") exercises. Norman Sjoman suggests that it was among the poses adopted into modern yoga as exercise in Mysore by Krishnamacharya to form the "primary foundation" for his vinyasas with flowing movements between poses. The pose was then taken up by his pupils Pattabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar, into their worldwide Ashtanga (vinyasa) yoga and Iyengar Yoga styles respectively.
Description
Tadasana is the basic standing asana on which many other poses are founded. The feet are together and the hands are at the sides of the body. The posture is entered by standing with the feet together, grounding evenly through the feet and lifting up through the crown of the head.
“Tadasana” enters the record as standing pose in modern yoga. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tadasana, standing and pose can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q196299. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1896.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tadasana” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.