Chakras

The chakras are described in modern practice as subtle energy centres aligned along the spine, through which the vital force is held to flow. The familiar scheme has seven.

Muladhara at the base of the spine, associated with survival and grounding, earth, and the colour red; Svadhisthana at the sacrum, with sexuality and creativity, water, orange; Manipura at the solar plexus, with will and personal power, fire, yellow; Anahata at the heart, with love and compassion, air, green; Vishuddha at the throat, with speech and truth, ether, blue; Ajna between the brows, with insight, indigo; and Sahasrara at the crown, with union, violet or white.

Each is given a lotus with a set number of petals, a Sanskrit seed syllable, lam, vam, ram, yam, ham and om, and in the classical sources a presiding deity and an element. They are connected by nadis, channels, of which three are central: ida and pingala winding around a middle channel, sushumna, up which the coiled energy Kundalini is said to rise from the base to the crown when roused.

Practitioners work with them through posture, breath control, mantra, visualisation and meditation, and read a centre as blocked, open, deficient or excessive, with corresponding psychological and physical tendencies. In contemporary therapeutic use each is also paired with an endocrine gland and a set of complaints.

Two things should be said about status. Practitioners describe the chakras as belonging to a subtle body rather than a physical one, so their absence from anatomy is not, on their own account, an objection. And where specific medical claims are made, that working a centre treats a named disease, those are testable claims, and they have not been established.

The chakras are genuinely Indian and genuinely old. The version taught almost everywhere in the world today is neither wholly one nor the other, and the difference is well documented.

The tantric sources, Hindu and Buddhist, from roughly the seventh century onward, describe chakra systems in detail. They also describe different systems: four centres, five, six, seven, nine, twelve, twenty-one, depending on the text and the lineage. The number was never fixed, because the chakras in those sources are not anatomical discoveries but structures generated in practice, visualised, constructed and used within a specific initiatory system, and different systems needed different structures. Buddhist tantra commonly works with four or five. The scheme of six centres plus the crown, which underlies the modern seven, comes principally from a sixteenth-century text, the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana.

That text is the one that reached the West. Sir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, translated it in The Serpent Power in 1919, and that book is the direct ancestor of essentially all Western chakra literature.

The colours are the giveaway. The classical sources assign colours, but not the rainbow: they give the centres colours tied to their elements and deities, and those do not run red to violet in spectral order. The rainbow correspondence, red at the base ascending through the visible spectrum to violet at the crown, is a twentieth-century Western addition, popularised in the 1970s, and it is now so universal that it is generally assumed to be ancient. It is not.

The same applies to the pairing of chakras with endocrine glands and with a psychological developmental sequence: both are modern syntheses, drawing on theosophy and later on humanistic psychology, and neither is present in the Sanskrit sources.

What practitioners hold is that attention directed to these centres produces reliable and reportable changes in experience, of energy, warmth, emotional release, absorption, and that a practitioner can work with those changes systematically. That much is a claim about first-person experience, and the experiences are real in the sense that people consistently report them under the described conditions.

The claims that go beyond this are where the disputes lie, and the disputes run inside the tradition as well as between it and outsiders.

Kundalini awakening is the most serious. Classical and modern sources alike warn that raising the energy without preparation or guidance can produce severe disturbance, what the literature calls kundalini syndrome, with reports of anxiety, insomnia, involuntary movement, heat, and in some cases episodes indistinguishable from acute psychiatric crisis. Traditional teachers treat that as a reason for lineage, initiation and supervision. Clinicians who have written on it regard some of the reports as spiritual-emergency presentations of underlying conditions. Both readings are in the literature and neither has displaced the other.

Medical claims are the second area. Chakra balancing is widely offered as a therapeutic service, and where it is presented as treatment for diagnosable illness the claim is testable and unsupported.

The third is a live argument about appropriation and accuracy. Indian practitioners and academic scholars of tantra have objected that the Western chakra system, with its rainbow, its glands and its self-help vocabulary, is presented as ancient Indian knowledge while differing substantially from the sources. Western teachers reply that traditions have always adapted. The historical facts underlying the argument are not themselves in dispute.