Root

Muladhara is described in the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana, a Sanskrit text of 1577 by Purnananda which is the single source behind most modern accounts of the chakras, as a lotus of four petals at the base of the trunk, bearing the letters vam, sham, shham and sam. Within it is a yellow square, the symbol of the earth element, with the seed syllable LAM; the presiding deity is a child form of Brahma with the shakti Dakini. Inside the square is a triangle in which the kundalini is said to lie coiled three and a half times around a svayambhu linga, sleeping and closing the mouth of the central channel, the sushumna. The whole apparatus, petals with assigned letters, element, seed syllable, deity and animal vehicle, is a visualisation scheme for a specific meditative practice, not a description of anatomy or of energy in any modern sense.

The three principal nadis named throughout Hatha yoga literature, Ida, Pingala and Sushumna, are given their fullest early account in texts such as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Goraksha Samhita, which describe seventy-two thousand nadis in all, with these three, plus eleven others, as paramount; Sushumna, the central channel, is said to run the same course as the chakra system itself, from Muladhara to Sahasrara, with Ida and Pingala winding around it. The elephant given as Muladhara's animal vehicle, vahana, is named in the tradition as Airavata, the mount of the god Indra, chosen for its association with strength and with the earth the root chakra governs.

Sources The Serpent PowerSir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) with Roots of YogaJames Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.)

The route is short and well documented. In 1918 the British judge Sir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, published The Serpent Power, which translated Purnananda's Sat-Cakra-Nirupana and a second short text with a long introduction. That single book is the origin of the seven-chakra system as it is known outside India: almost every subsequent western account descends from it, often at several removes.

Woodroffe was working with a living Bengali tantric tradition and was scrupulous about his sources, but his book presented one text of one lineage, and the impression it created, that there is a single canonical chakra system, is a side effect of its success. Indian tantric literature is far more various than the book suggests, and the atlas records the seven-chakra scheme as what it is, a particular lineage's scheme that became the standard by an accident of transmission.