Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa
Fifty Letters, Six Lotuses
- First attested
- 1577Pūrṇānanda's Śrītattvacintāmaṇi, completed in Śaka 1499 — 1577 CE — whose sixth chapter is the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa: fifty-five verses, transmitted with Kālīcaraṇa's commentary and printed in that form by Woodroffe in 1919. The date is the one carried through the secondary literature and by Woodroffe rather than one fixed by a critical edition consulted here; a Wellcome authority record gives Pūrṇānanda as active 1526–1577, which is why 1526 also circulates for the text. The six cakras themselves are older than this chapter: Mallinson and Singleton trace the mūlādhāra-to-ājñā series to the c. tenth-century Kubjikāmatatantra, and the Netratantra of about 800–850 already teaches six points all called cakras.
- Claimed
- around 1500 BCEasserted by The text's own framing and its modern reception. Pūrṇānanda writes as a compiler of the tantras, which Śākta tradition holds to be the revelation of Śiva and therefore without a date; English chakra literature inherits that and calls the six-centre system Vedic or immemorial — a habit Kurt Leland, writing in Quest in 2017, documents as printed without sources. The Ṛgveda contains nothing of it; Jamison and Brereton's translation is where that can be checked.
The claim runs about 3.1 thousand years ahead of the evidence.
One petal per letter: the six lotuses carry the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet between them — a chakra here is a place to install a sound, not an organ to balance, and the chapter is Bengali, of 1577.
Pūrṇānanda's poem of 1577 on the six lotuses — the text through which the West received the chakras.
Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa means description of the six wheels, and it is not a book. It is the sixth chapter of the Śrītattvacintāmaṇi, a compendium the Bengali Śākta Pūrṇānanda completed in Śaka 1499 — 1577 CE — fifty-five verses, transmitted with Kālīcaraṇa's commentary. John Woodroffe, a judge of the Calcutta High Court writing as Arthur Avalon, printed it in English inside The Serpent Power in 1919; Kathleen Taylor has shown how much he owed his collaborator Atal Bihari Ghose. It is the channel, not the source — Mallinson and Singleton find these six already in the c. tenth-century Kubjikāmatatantra — but it is what the West drew on. Its petals are not anatomy: four, six, ten, twelve, sixteen and two make fifty, one for each letter of the Sanskrit alphabet. The seventh, the sahasrāra, sits above the six the title counts.
Light
A visualisation script of extraordinary precision — each lotus given its petals, letters, element, yantra, seed-syllable and deity — written so that a practitioner could build the body in imagination and know exactly what to see.
Shadow
Read in English as a chart of energy anatomy, it becomes a description of what is inside everyone rather than instructions for what to construct. Christopher Wallis calls Woodroffe's rendering somewhat incoherent and confusing, and the diagrams built on it inherit that.