The Chakra System

Six Wheels, Seven Colours

First attested
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
Claimed
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 runs about 2.3 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

The rainbow seven is a Western assembly completed in 1977; the six-plus-crown scheme beneath it is one tantric lineage among others that counted five, nine or twelve — and older than the 1577 Bengali text through which the West received it.

A meditation map, not anatomy; the rainbow colours are a twentieth-century addition, not ancient India.

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, matching neither the Sanskrit nor what followed. 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

A practical map: the 1577 text assigns each centre a lotus, a syllable, an element and a deity, giving meditation something definite to hold. Practitioners in living Śākta and haṭha lineages still work it as instruction, not metaphor.

Shadow

The West sells a 1977 colour chart as immemorial India. Christopher Wallis objects that one lineage's six are taught as the system when tantric texts count five, nine, twelve and more; Kurt Leland notes that chakra "balancing" appears in no scripture.

Sources and verification9 sources · 8 links

Primary source

  • Pūrṇānanda, Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa, 1577, the sixth chapter of the Śrītattvacintāmaṇi; 55 verses, transmitted with the commentary of KālīcaraṇaThe six centres with the sahasrāra above them, each lotus given its petals, letters, element, yantra and deity; the mūlādhāra lotus of crimson hue at verse 4, and the heart lotus of the colour of the bandhūka flower at verse 22
  • Arthur Avalon (John Woodroffe), The Serpent Power: Being the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa and Pādukā-pañcaka, 1919, Luzac & Co., LondonThe English translation and commentary through which the six-centre scheme reached Western readers and, through Zimmer, Jung and Campbell, Western psychology

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
  • Christopher Hills, Nuclear Evolution: Discovery of the Rainbow Body, 1977, University of the Trees Press, Boulder Creek, California; an earlier edition appeared in 1968 without this subtitleA second book of 1977 mapping the body's centres onto the visible spectrum. Leland's history of the Western system does not mention it; carried here as a same-year candidate, not as a credited source

Linked entries

  • Set againstSiddhārtha GautamaTraditional

    Buddhist tantras from about the eighth century, ascribed by their tradition to the Buddha, count four or five cakras where Pūrṇānanda's lineage counts six — which is why no number can be called the original.

  • Set againstThe Gurū Granth SāhibAttested

    Sikh scripture speaks of the dasam duār, the tenth gate, and of a lotus of many petals opening, but places the nectar in the Name given by the Guru rather than in kuṇḍalinī or khecarī mudrā.

  • Set againstThe DaodejingAttested

    The Daodejing names no centres at all; the three cinnabar fields of later Daoist internal alchemy developed separately, though they are routinely equated with the chakras.

  • Set againstThe Bhagavad GītāAttested

    The Gītā names yogas of action, knowledge, devotion and meditation but no subtle-body centres; its cakra at 3.16 is the turning wheel of the world, and at 11.17 and 11.46 Kṛṣṇa's discus. The centres belong to later tantric texts and are read back into it.

  • Set againstThe Yoga Sūtras of PatañjaliAttested

    The graded series of wheels is not Patañjali's: his text uses cakra of the navel (3.29) and knows no kuṇḍalinī rising through six or seven centres — that scheme belongs to later tantric and haṭha texts, and its English form to 1919 and 1927.

  • IncludesKuṇḍalinīAttested

    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.

  • Received fromṢaṭ-Cakra-NirūpaṇaAttested

    This chapter is the carrier: the six-plus-crown scheme the West calls the chakra system reached English through Woodroffe's translation of it in 1919, which is why a Bengali text of 1577 stands behind posters that claim the Vedas.

  • Set againstYoga Body: Singleton's ArgumentA modern connection

    Two pictures of yoga that feel immemorial and have dated modern authors: the seven rainbow chakras are Leadbeater in 1927, the flowing posture sequence is Mysore in the 1930s.

Follow the thread