Sat-Cakra-Nirupana

The Bengali tantric yogi Purnananda Yati composed the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana around 1577 as a section within a much larger work, the Sri-Tattva-Cintamani, giving it a systematic description of six centers, cakras, arranged along the body's central channel from the base of the spine to a point between the eyebrows, with a seventh center at the crown treated somewhat separately as the seat of final union rather than as one of the six in sequence. For each center the text specifies a number of lotus petals, ranging from four at the lowest center to a thousand at the crown, an associated element, earth, water, fire, air and ether from the lowest four centers upward, a presiding deity and goddess, a Sanskrit seed syllable, bija mantra, inscribed on the petals, and a particular quality of consciousness or spiritual attainment associated with awakening that center.

Running through and connecting all of them is Kundalini, a coiled serpent power the text describes as lying dormant at the base of the spine until yogic practice awakens it and draws it upward through each center in turn toward union with consciousness at the crown, the central image that gives the tradition's alternate English name, the serpent power. Purnananda wrote for practitioners already trained in tantric method, and the text assumes considerable prior familiarity with Sanskrit technical vocabulary and ritual visualization rather than explaining its system from first principles for an uninitiated reader.

Sir John Woodroffe, a British judge serving in colonial Calcutta, developed a serious scholarly interest in Bengali Tantra and, writing under the Sanskrit pen name Arthur Avalon, published an English translation of the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana together with a related short text in 1919 as The Serpent Power, accompanied by his own lengthy introduction and commentary situating the material for a Western audience largely ignorant of tantric technical vocabulary. The book's influence on how chakras came to be understood outside India is difficult to overstate: the specific set of seven centers, their colors, petal counts, seed sounds and associated qualities that most yoga studios, wellness books and New Age practitioners now treat as the standard, universal chakra system is, in its particular details, substantially Purnananda's sixteenth century Bengali scheme as filtered through Woodroffe's translation, rather than a single pan-Indian or pan-Hindu consensus that existed in that exact form before his book.

Other tantric lineages numbered and described the body's subtle centers somewhat differently, and Purnananda's text was one specific regional articulation among several rather than a universally received canon. The atlas notes this directly because a great deal of popular chakra literature presents the seven-chakra system as timeless and universal across all of Hindu and Buddhist tantra, when in the specific form now most widely known it traces quite precisely to this one text and this one early twentieth century translation.