Sat-Chakra-Nirupana

The Sat-Chakra-Nirupana is the text behind the chart. Almost everything the modern world believes about the chakras can be traced through it, and almost nothing the modern world believes about the chakras is actually in it.

What it is

It is not a book. It is chapter six of a much larger work, the Shritattvacintamani, a ritual digest in twenty-six chapters that Purnananda compiled on initiation, the construction of the pavilion, the consecrated jar, the fire offering, the Shri Chakra, and the long apparatus of tantric worship. The sixth chapter deals with yoga, and its own closing colophon gives it a different name from the one the world uses. It calls itself the Yogavivarana, the exposition of yoga. Sat-Chakra-Nirupana, “the description of the six centres,” is the title it acquired once it began to circulate on its own.

It runs to fifty-five verses in the separate editions, fifty-six inside the parent work, which numbers the opening verse that the standalone texts leave unnumbered. It is composed in the long ornate metres of Sanskrit court poetry rather than the clipped manner of a sutra, which is worth knowing before opening it: this is a devotional poem carrying a technical map.

Who wrote it, and when

Purnananda was a Bengali, a brahmin of the Radhi community from the Mymensingh district, in what is now Bangladesh, and a member of a Shankarite order. The colophons style him Paramahamsa and Yati. Beyond the Shritattvacintamani he left the Shyamarahasya, the Shaktakrama, the Tattvanandatarangini and the Yogasara. Teun Goudriaan and Sanjukta Gupta place his activity in the sixteenth century, and set it in its moment: the Vaishnava revival that Chaitanya had set moving across the north-east was pressing the Shakta theoreticians into fresh work, and Purnananda’s digests belong to that response.

The date everyone repeats is 1577, and it deserves a word, because it is thinner than its confidence suggests. It comes from a single place: the preface Woodroffe wrote in 1918, reporting an account collected from Purnananda’s descendants with the help of the Varendra Research Society at Rajshahi. That account gives the Shritattvacintamani the Shaka year 1499, which converts to 1577, and it identifies Purnananda with a certain Jagadananda Sharma who copied a manuscript of the Vishnu Purana in 1526. No colophon carrying the 1577 date has been produced. The Library of Congress, more carefully than most, records him as “active 1526 to 1577,” and the popular sources that turned that floruit into a lifespan simply dropped the word “active.” No scholar has re-examined the evidence since.

What the text actually describes

Six centres along the axis of the body, and above them the thousand-petalled sahasrara. Each centre is given a petal count, the Sanskrit letters that sit on those petals, a seed syllable, an element, a geometric figure, and a presiding deity with his shakti. Muladhara has four petals and a yellow square of earth. Svadhishthana has six and the white crescent of water. Manipura has ten and the red triangle of fire. Anahata has twelve and a six-cornered figure of air. Vishuddha has sixteen and the white circle of ether. Ajna has two.

Add the petals: four, six, ten, twelve, sixteen, two. Fifty, which is exactly the number of letters in the Sanskrit alphabet, and the sixth centre carries the last two of them. Woodroffe noticed it and said so plainly.

“It will have been observed that there are fifty petals and fifty letters in the six Chakras.”

The sahasrara is then built by repeating those same fifty letters twenty times over. This is the quiet answer to the question the modern chart gets wrong. The seventh is the series totalled rather than a seventh member of it, and the text says as much in its title, which counts six. Note too where the elements stop. Earth, water, fire, air and ether are exhausted by the fifth centre. Ajna has no element. It has mind.

The closing verses are generous in a way that is easy to miss. Of the summit the text says:

“The Shaivas call it the abode of Shiva; the Vaishnavas call it Parama Purusha; others again call it the place of Hari-Hara. Those who are filled with a passion for the Lotus feet of the Devi call it the excellent abode of the Devi; and other great sages call it the pure place of Prakriti-Purusha.”

The commentaries

The standard commentary is the Shlokarthapariskarini, “the refiner of the meaning of the verses,” universally attributed to Kalicharana. The attribution is an inference rather than a statement. No manuscript says he wrote it. Avalon reasoned it out from the style and from a cross-reference in the commentary on verse 43 to Kalicharana’s commentary on another text, and every edition since has followed him. His date is unknown.

Two others were printed alongside it in 1913: notes by a Shankara, son of Kamalakara, who was evidently working from a slightly different text, and notes drawn from Vishvanatha, which come from his commentary on a different tantra altogether and were imported because they cover the same ground. Beyond these there is a small Bengali commentarial literature, including a commentary by Ramavallabha printed in 1869.

How it reached the world

Not in 1919, which is the story usually told. The text was coming off Calcutta presses from the 1850s, and the Sanskrit edition that made the translation possible was prepared by Taranatha Vidyaratna and published in 1913 as the second volume of the Tantrik Texts, with all three commentaries, several of them in print for the first time.

Then in 1919 Sir John Woodroffe, a judge of the Calcutta High Court writing as Arthur Avalon, published The Serpent Power: this text and the short Paduka-Panchaka, with Kalicharana’s commentaries, a long introduction, and colour plates painted from the Sanskrit descriptions. Woodroffe said in print that the Avalon books were written “with the direct cooperation of others,” and in particular with one friend who would not allow his name to be printed. That friend is generally identified as Atal Behari Ghose, a Calcutta lawyer who supplied the Sanskrit.

What followed is the story told in what the West gets wrong about chakras and traced in detail in the chapter on the rainbow.

What is not in it

No rainbow. The colours this text assigns are crimson, vermilion, the grey of heavy rain-clouds, the scarlet of the bandhuka flower, a smoky purple, and the white of the moon. Three of them are reds. There is no orange, no green, no indigo, no violet, and no ordering of any kind.

No glands and no nerve plexuses. No psychological attributes. And no seven.

For the centres themselves, gate by gate, see The Coiled Power. For the wider architecture of channels and winds in which they sit, see the subtle body.