Purnananda

The Shat-chakra-nirupana, the description of the six centres, is not a book. It is the sixth chapter of a larger Sanskrit compendium, the Sri-tattva-cintamani, which Purnananda composed in Bengal and which carries a date corresponding to 1577. The chapter sets out six centres along the spinal axis and a seventh above them, each with a number of petals, a seed syllable, a presiding deity, an element and a colour, and it describes the ascent of kundalini through them.

Tantric traditions had been describing such systems for centuries before him, and they did not agree with one another. The number of centres varies between lineages, the attributes vary, and schemes that look similar in summary turn out to overlap only in part. What Purnananda supplied was not the idea but a single tidy statement of one version of it, ordered, complete, and short enough to be handled whole.

That is what made it travel. Sir John Woodroffe, an English judge of the Calcutta High Court writing as Arthur Avalon, translated the chapter with a long introduction and published it in 1919 as The Serpent Power. That book was the principal channel through which the chakras entered Western esotericism, and the reason there appears to be one canonical chakra system rather than many is very largely the success of one translation of one chapter.

Set beside the influence, the biographical record is close to empty. Purnananda is placed in Bengal in the sixteenth century, and the Sri-tattva-cintamani carries a date corresponding to 1577. Beyond that, what is known comes from the work itself and from the later manuscript and commentarial tradition around it, rather than from any account of a life.

He is not the only writer of that period whose name survives attached to a text and to nothing else, and the shape of the gap is worth naming exactly. This is an absence of evidence rather than a disputed biography. There are no competing accounts to weigh against one another. There is simply very little to work with, and the atlas would rather say so than repeat a confident sentence with no source under it.

What can be said with more confidence is where the text sits. It belongs to the Bengali tantric literature of its century, it draws on an existing body of teaching about the subtle body rather than announcing a new one, and the commentary of Kalicharana, which Woodroffe translated alongside the verses, is how the chapter had been read for generations before any English reader saw it. The interpretation that reached the West arrived with that commentary attached to it, which is worth knowing whenever the modern chakra system is described as ancient and Indian without further qualification.