The Chakra System

Six Wheels, Seven Colours

Earliest record
8th centuryThe Netratantra, a Kashmiri Śaiva text of about the eighth century, which sets out six cakras; Buddhist tantras of the same period count four or five, and the Kubjikāmatatantra's chapters 14–16 five. The six-plus-crown scheme the West inherited is attested from the thirteenth-century Śāradā-tilaka onward, and reached English through Pūrṇānanda's Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa, 1577
Said to date from
around 1500 BCEasserted by popular Western chakra literature, which presents the seven rainbow-coloured centres as an unbroken teaching of ancient or Vedic India; Kurt Leland, writing in Quest in 2017, documents the habit of printing such claims without sources and invokes the historian of religion Olav Hammer for it

The claim is about 2,300 years older than the evidence.

The rainbow seven first met in print in Ken Dychtwald's Bodymind, June 1977; the 1577 text colours the heart lotus like the red bandhūka flower.

Kurt Leland, 'The Rainbow Body: How the Western Chakra System Came to Be', Quest 105.2 (Spring 2017), pp. 25–29; Pūrṇānanda, Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa (1577), v. 22, tr. Arthur Avalon, The Serpent Power (2nd ed. 1924)

Lotuses of the tantric subtle body along the spine; the West's scheme has six plus a crown lotus.

More context

Cakra means wheel. Tantric texts set a graded series along the spinal channel and disagree on the number: the Netratantra six, the Kubjikāmatatantra five, Buddhist tantras four or five, others nine or more. The Western scheme is one lineage among these, older than the text that carried it. Christopher Wallis finds the same six-plus-crown, simpler, in the thirteenth-century Śāradā-tilaka and fuller in the Śiva-saṃhitā. What reached English was late: Pūrṇānanda's Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa of 1577, translated by John Woodroffe as Arthur Avalon in The Serpent Power, 1919. Leadbeater's The Chakras, 1927, reported colours seen clairvoyantly, not read in the Sanskrit; Leland finds later Indian yogis borrowing them. Kurt Leland traces spectrum-ordered colours to colour therapists of the 1930s, and their fusion with the familiar qualities to Ken Dychtwald's Bodymind, June 1977. The 1577 text gives the heart lotus the scarlet of the bandhūka flower, not green.

Light

The 1577 text assigns each centre a lotus, letters, an element and a deity: a precise map for meditation.

Shadow

Christopher Wallis objects that one lineage's six-plus-crown is taught as the system, when texts count five, nine, twelve and more.

Sources8 sources

Primary source

Scholarship

  • Dory Heilijgers-Seelen, The System of Five Cakras in Kubjikāmatatantra 14–16, 1994, Groningen Oriental Studies 9, Egbert Forsten, GroningenA five-cakra system in an early Śākta tantra, showing that the count of centres belongs to a text and a lineage rather than to the body
  • Kurt Leland, Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, 2016, Ibis PressThe century-long assembly of the Western system: a seven-chakra base in the 1880s, vernacular names and endocrine glands in the 1920s, single colours in spectrum order from colour therapists in the 1930s
  • Christopher D. Wallis, The Real Story on the Chakras, 2016, hareesh.org, 5 February 2016That a simpler version of the same seven-chakra system stands in the thirteenth-century Śāradā-tilaka and a more elaborate one in the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Śiva-saṃhitā, so that Pūrṇānanda's text of 1577 transmits the scheme rather than originating it; that five-, six-, seven-, nine-, ten-, twelve- and twenty-one-chakra systems are taught depending on text and lineage; and that the five-chakra system is dominant in Tantric Buddhism
  • Kurt Leland, The Rainbow Body: How the Western Chakra System Came to Be, 2017, Quest 105.2 (Spring 2017), pp. 25–29The attribution of the fusion of rainbow colours with the modern list of chakra qualities to Ken Dychtwald's Bodymind of June 1977 and his Yoga Journal article of July–August 1977; that Leadbeater's perceptions differ from both the Indian texts and later New Age books; and that chakra balancing appears in no scripture

Where this claim originates

  • C. W. Leadbeater, The Chakras, 1927A seven-chakra scheme with colour plates, described from clairvoyant observation rather than from an Indian text
  • Ken Dychtwald, Bodymind: A Synthesis of Eastern and Western Approaches to Self-Awareness, Health, and Personal Growth, 1977, published June 1977The book in which, on Leland's account, the colour healers' rainbow and the human potential movement's list of chakra qualities appear together for the first time in print