Demystifying Surya Namaskar, the Sun Salutation(s) - Part I: The History

Sun Salutation, also called Surya Namaskar(a) or Salute to the Sun[2] (Sanskrit: सूर्यनमस्कार, romanized: Sūryanamaskāra)

Surya is the Hindu demigod of the sun.[9] The Sanskrit word namaskar stems from namas, which means “to bow to” or “to adore.”  The familiar phrase we use to close our yoga classes, namaste—te means “you”—also comes from this root.  Each Sun Salutation begins and ends with the joined-hands mudra (prayer hands gesture) touched to the heart. This placement is no accident; only the heart can know the truth.  The early yogis along with many other spiritual leaders taught that each of us reflects the natural world, embodying its energy and mimicking “nature with its …stars and planets…the sun and moon” (Shiva Samhita, II.1-3). The outer sun giving prana or energy to the earth, they asserted, is in reality a creator of our own “inner sun,” which in space and time corresponds to our spiritual, heart or energy. Here is the seat of consciousness and higher wisdom (jnana) and, in some traditions, the home of the embodied self or soul (jivatman).

It might seem strange to us that the yogis place the seat of wisdom in the heart, which we typically associate with our emotions, and not the brain. But in yoga, the brain is actually symbolized by the moon, which reflects the sun’s light but generates none of its own. This kind of knowledge is worthwhile for dealing with mundane affairs, and is even necessary to a certain extent for the lower stages of spiritual practice. But in the end, the brain is inherently limited in what it can know and is prone to what Patanjali calls misconception (viparyaya) or false knowledge of the self.

It is not known who designed the physical practice but its origins are dated to the Hatha yoga texts in the 19th century.  The yoga scholar Mark Singleton states that "Krishnamacharya was to make the flowing movements of sūryanamaskār the basis of his Mysore yoga style".[28] His students, K. Pattabhi Jois,[29] who created modern day Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga,[30] and B. K. S. Iyengar, who created Iyengar Yoga, both learned Sun Salutation and flowing vinyasa movements between asanas from Krishnamacharya and used them in their styles of yoga.[27]  However, There’s some disagreement among authorities over the origins of Sun Salutation. Traditionalists contend that the sequence is at least 2,500 years old (perhaps even several hundred years older), that it originated during Vedic times as a ritual prostration to the dawn, replete with mantras, offerings of flowers and rice, and libations of water. Skeptics of this dating maintain that Sun Salutation was invented by the raja of Aundh (a former state in India, now part of Maharashtra state) in the early 20th century, then disseminated to the West in the 1920s or 1930s.