Kuṇḍalinī

The Coil Before the Spine

First attested
8th centuryThe eighth-century Tantrasadbhāva, a Trika Śaiva scripture, which describes the kuṇḍalinī śakti in a yogic context at 15.128–30 and may be the first text to say she takes the form of a serpent. James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga (2017), give that dating, and add that an earlier mention may stand at Sārdhatriśatikālottara 12.1–2, which sets a primordial coil, ādyā kuṇḍalinī, in the heart — a text not securely dated, so the eighth century is the safe floor. The Tantrasadbhāva itself remains unpublished, read from Nepalese manuscripts through an electronic transcription prepared under Mark Dyczkowski; the date is one argued in the scholarship, not a dated manuscript.
Claimed
around 1500 BCEasserted by Popular kuṇḍalinī literature, which dates her to the Vedas or beyond; the dated instance is Gopi Krishna, who wrote in 1967 that the cult of Kundalini was better known to the ancient adepts of India, China and Egypt than to modern thinkers, and that awakenings had occurred from times immemorial, probably from the very birth of civilisation and even before that. Philip Deslippe (2012) documents the parallel institutional claim, that the Kundalini Yoga taught in the West from 1968–69 was an ancient and secret tradition.

The claim runs about 2.3 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

The serpent asleep at the base of the spine is the later location; the earliest kuṇḍalinī, in eighth-century Śaiva tantra, is a coil in the heart, and the syndrome named for her was coined in 1976.

The coiled goddess-power whose rising means liberation — exact in the texts, vague in every summary since.

Kuṇḍalinī means 'she who is coiled'. She is nowhere in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra: her first descriptions are Śaiva, and perhaps the earliest, Sārdhatriśatikālottara 12.1–2, sets a primordial coil in the heart. The eighth-century Tantrasadbhāva, at 15.128–30, describes her in a yogic context and may be the first to give her serpent form. The serpent asleep at the base of the spine is a later location: earlier texts put her at the heart, the navel or the bulb below it. She arrives there with the six cakras Mallinson and Singleton trace to the c. tenth-century Kubjikāmatatantra, and with haṭha yoga, whose earliest text, the eleventh-century Amṛtasiddhi, turns on retained semen rather than on her. Woodroffe carried the scheme into English in 1919; Gopi Krishna's memoir of 1967 made her a medical question. None of it is Vedic: the Rigveda has no kuṇḍalinī.

Light

The texts are exact where modern summaries are vague. In the Gorakṣaśataka she pierces three knots, dries the moon's fluid at the sixteen-petalled cakra, and disappears into Śiva at the top of the central channel; in the Khecarīvidyā she returns with the nectar of immortality.

Shadow

Gopi Krishna's memoir of 1967 describes an awakening at Christmas 1937 in Jammu and years of disorder after it. By 1976 the psychiatrist Lee Sannella had made a syndrome of such episodes: 'physio-kundalini', from Bentov's model and Californian cases he said diverged from Gopi Krishna.

Sources and verification8 sources · 8 links

Primary source

  • Tantrasadbhāva, 15.128–30; composed c. eighth century. Unpublished: no printed edition exists, and the e-text scholars use was prepared from Nepalese manuscripts under Mark Dyczkowski. Cited here at second hand from Roots of Yoga (2017), not from the SanskritThe earliest description of the kuṇḍalinī śakti in a yogic context, and perhaps the first in which she takes the form of a serpent

Scholarship

  • Philip Deslippe, From Maharaj to Mahan Tantric: The construction of Yogi Bhajan's Kundalini Yoga, 2012, Sikh Formations 8.3 (December 2012), pp. 369–387That the Kundalini Yoga taught in the West by Yogi Bhajan (1929–2004) from 1968–69 was, against an official history claiming an ancient and secret tradition, a bricolage drawn mainly from the haṭha teacher Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari (1924–1994) and the Sikh sant Maharaj Virsa Singh (1934–2007)
  • Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, 2014, 3 vols, Oxford University PressWhat the hymns do not contain — no cakras, no kuṇḍalinī, no yoga as a practice system — which is the ground for saying the popular Vedic dating has nothing behind it
  • James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga, 2017, Penguin Classics; Chapter 5, 'The Yogic Body' — the introductions to the sections on the cakras, kuṇḍalinī and bindu, with translations 5.4.1–5.4.5 and 5.6.1, and note 21 to the chapter (record)That kuṇḍalinī is not mentioned in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and that her first descriptions are in tantric Śaiva texts; that the earliest may be the 'primordial coil' (ādyā kuṇḍalinī) in the heart at Sārdhatriśatikālottara 12.1–2; that the eighth-century Tantrasadbhāva 15.128–30 is one of the first to describe her in a yogic context and may be the first to give her serpent form; that later sources locate her at the base of the spine while earlier texts place her at the heart, the navel or the bulb (kanda) below it; that the Netratantra of 800–850 is the earliest known work to teach six points all called cakras, and that the c. tenth-century Kubjikāmatatantra is the first to teach the particular six — Mūlādhāra to Ājñā — that became the standard blueprint for the yogic body; that the earliest haṭha texts turn on bindu rather than on her; that in the Gorakṣaśataka she pierces the three knots, dries up the fluid of the moon at the sixteen-petalled cakra and disappears into Śiva at the top of the central channel, while in the Khecarīvidyā she returns with the nectar of immortality; and that Avalon's edition of 1919 began the modern ubiquity of the scheme

Where this claim originates

  • Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe), The Serpent Power: Being the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa and Pādukā-pañcaka, 1919, London: Luzac & Co.; a translation of Pūrṇānanda's Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa of 1577The route by which the cakra-and-kuṇḍalinī model of the subtle body entered English, and the single late text through which the modern West received it
  • C. W. Leadbeater, The Chakras: A Monograph, 1927, The caduceus passage accompanies Fig. 4d and footnotes Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, fifth Adyar edition, vol. V; read in the 1972 Quest Books printingLeadbeater's claim that the spine with iḍā and piṅgalā is the original of the caduceus of Mercury, whose two snakes he says symbolise the kuṇḍalinī or serpent-fire and whose wings signify flight through higher planes — cited for what he asserted in 1927, not as evidence that any such derivation occurred
  • Gopi Krishna, Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man, 1967, First published Ramadhar & Hopman, New Delhi and Zurich, 1967, with an introduction by Frederic Spiegelberg and a psychological commentary by James Hillman, both already in that first edition (its copyright page carries 'Commentary copyright, 1967 James Hillman'); revised edition London: Stuart & Watkins, 1970His account of an awakening while meditating one morning at Christmas 1937 in a house outside Jammu and of the years of disorder that followed; and his claim that the cult of Kundalini was known to the ancient adepts of India, China and Egypt and reaches back to the birth of civilisation
  • Lee Sannella, Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence?, 1976, San Francisco: published by the author, 3101 Washington Street; Library of Congress catalogue number 76-43180. Revised as The Kundalini Experience, Integral Publishing, 1987The coinage 'physio-kundalini' for the physiological part of what he observed, his statement that he derives it from a model recently proposed by Itzhak Bentov (who supplied the book's appendix on micromotion of the body), and his admission that his cases are at variance with Gopi Krishna, Muktananda and the classic yoga scriptures

Linked entries

  • Part ofThe Chakra SystemAttested

    She is the moving element of the same map: the particular six she is made to rise through, Mūlādhāra to Ājñā, are traced by Mallinson and Singleton to the c. tenth-century Kubjikāmatatantra, though the Netratantra of 800–850 already teaches six points all called cakras; both halves of the model reached English in Woodroffe's book of 1919.

  • Set againstThe Bhagavad GītāAttested

    The Gītā names no kuṇḍalinī; yet Jñānadeva's thirteenth-century Marathi commentary on it, the Jñāneśvarī, carries one of the earliest haṭha-yogic accounts of her awakening, at 6.228–40.

  • Often confused withCaduceusA modern connection

    Leadbeater wrote in 1927 that the spine with iḍā and piṅgalā is 'the original of the caduceus of Mercury', its two snakes the serpent-fire and its wings flight through higher planes; the derivation is his own, resting on his diagram and on Blavatsky, not on any Greek or Sanskrit text.

  • Set againstThe Yoga Sūtras of PatañjaliAttested

    Mallinson and Singleton note that kuṇḍalinī is not mentioned in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra at all — the work most often opened first for yoga has nothing of her.

  • Set againstThe Descent of InannaA modern connection

    Both reached Western readers as psychological itineraries rather than as texts: Jung lectured on kundalini yoga in 1932, and Perera turned the descent into a course of feminine initiation in 1981. In each case the map is twentieth-century and the source is not.

  • Received fromṢaṭ-Cakra-NirūpaṇaAttested

    The text takes her from the mūlādhāra up through the six lotuses to the sahasrāra, and it is this account, in English from 1919, that fixed the base of the spine as her home — earlier Śaiva texts put her at the heart, the navel or the bulb below it.

  • Set againstPatañjaliAttested

    Kuṇḍalinī is not Patañjali's: the word appears nowhere in Woods's 1914 volume, which prints the sūtras with the bhāṣya and Vācaspati Miśra's gloss — it reached his readers through Vivekananda, whose Raja Yoga of 1896 made rousing her the one and only way.

  • Set againstShekhinahA modern connection

    Scholem closed his 1952 Eranos lecture by asking whether the Shekhinah is a cosmic force in the sense Shakti is, and answered that the differences are 'no less profound than their affinities' — exile, he noted, 'is totally absent in the Indian conceptions'. The pairing travelled anyway. Kuṇḍalinī is a power coiled in the practitioner's own body; the Shekhinah is a rung of the Godhead, and no Jewish source asks anyone to raise her through themselves.

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