Chakras

What it is

Cakra means wheel or disc. In Indian and Tibetan tantric traditions, chakras are centres in the subtle body where channels converge — points of concentration used in visualisation and yogic practice.

The system familiar in the West has seven, running up the spine, each with a colour, an element, a seed syllable, a gland and a psychological theme: root (red, survival), sacral (orange, sexuality), solar plexus (yellow, will), heart (green, love), throat (blue, communication), brow (indigo, intuition), crown (violet, transcendence).

Almost every element of that description has a documented modern origin.

Where it came from

Chakras appear in Hindu and Buddhist tantric literature from roughly the eighth century CE onward. They are not Vedic and not Upaniṣadic in this form; they belong to the tantric period.

The number varies enormously by lineage. Buddhist tantric systems commonly use four or five. The Kubjikāmata Tantra works with six. Other texts give nine, ten, twelve or more. There was never a single canonical count, and the variation is not marginal — it reflects genuinely different schemes for genuinely different practices.

The seven-chakra scheme comes from one late text. The Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa — "Description of the Six Centres" — was composed by Pūrṇānanda in 1577, and describes six chakras plus the sahasrāra above the head. It is one system among many, and a comparatively recent one.

It reached the West through one book. Sir John Woodroffe, a judge of the Calcutta High Court writing as Arthur Avalon, translated the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa in The Serpent Power (1919). Essentially every Western account descends from that translation. The West did not receive the Indian tradition; it received one sixteenth-century text via one Edwardian translator.

The rainbow colours are Western and recent. Classical descriptions do give colours, but they are the colours of the lotuses and their petals, and they do not form a spectrum — mūlādhāra is usually described as red or crimson, but the sequence above it does not run orange, yellow, green, blue. The rainbow mapping is traced to Christopher Hills, whose Nuclear Evolution (1977) aligned the seven centres with the seven colours of the visible spectrum. It spread through the New Age publishing of the 1980s and is now so universal that its absence from any pre-1977 source surprises people. Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body (2016) documents the transmission in detail.

The endocrine correspondences are Theosophical. C.W. Leadbeater's The Chakras (1927) matched the centres to glands — crown to pineal, brow to pituitary, throat to thyroid — which is why the fit looks so tidy. The glands were identified by Western medicine first and assigned afterwards.

How it is practised

In the classical traditions, chakras are objects of visualisation and internal work, not of diagnosis. The practitioner constructs the centre in imagination — its lotus, petal count, seed syllable, deity and colour — and works with it as part of a structured practice, generally within an initiatory lineage and under a teacher.

In modern Western use they function far more often as a psychological typology and a diagnostic scheme: a "blocked" chakra explaining a difficulty, addressed by colour, crystal, sound or bodywork. That application has no classical precedent.

What we can and cannot say

We can say chakras are genuinely part of tantric Hindu and Buddhist practice, in systems of real sophistication with a substantial textual tradition.

We can say the version in general Western circulation is a twentieth-century construction built on a sixteenth-century text, with colours from 1977 and glands from 1927. This is not a matter of interpretation; each step has a name and a date.

We can say no anatomical correlate exists, and that the gland correspondence is a retrofit rather than a discovery.

We can say the reported sensations are real, and the account under the subtle body applies: sustained attention to a bodily location, shaped by strong expectation about what should be felt there, reliably produces sensation there.

We should say plainly that this is a living tradition and the extraction has been thorough. Chakra material has been separated from its religious context, from its initiatory requirements, and from Hinduism and Buddhism as such, and sold as a technique. Practitioners within those traditions have objected, and the objection is not that outsiders may not learn — it is that what is being taught is frequently not the tradition at all, while carrying its authority and its vocabulary.

This site describes the system and teaches no practice, for the reasons set out in cultural appropriation.

We cannot say what the classical practitioners experienced. What can be said is that they were doing something considerably more demanding, and considerably less colourful, than what the poster describes.

Further reading

• Kurt Leland, Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (2016) — the transmission traced step by step.
• Arthur Avalon, The Serpent Power (1919) — the source of the Western system, worth reading to see what it actually says.
• Christopher Wallis, Tantra Illuminated (2012) — a practitioner-scholar on what the classical systems were for.