Manipura: The City of Jewels

Above the waters, at the navel, the climbing serpent reaches fire.

The text calls the third gate Manipura. Mani is a jewel, a gem. Pura is a city, a stronghold, a place of abundance. The city of jewels, so named, the commentators say, because the centre is lustrous like a gem, blazing where the lower two only glowed. At the navel, the body’s old centre of heat and digestion, the element changes again, from water to fire, and the temperature of the whole system rises.

What the text describes

The Sat-chakra-nirupana gives manipura ten petals, and here the colour scheme delivers one of its sharpest contradictions of the modern poster. The petals are described as the colour of heavy, rain-laden clouds, a dark blue-grey, and the ten letters on them as the colour of the blue lotus. There is nothing yellow about the petals of the so-called yellow chakra. Within the lotus is the region of fire, agni, and that the text colours red, shaped as a triangle, shining like the rising sun, marked with the emblems of fire. The fire is red; the petals are storm-grey. The element of fire carries the sense of sight, for fire is what makes seeing possible, and the eye was held to share in the nature of flame.

The seed-sound is RAM, the bija of fire. The animal is the ram, the mount of Agni, the fire-god, and the text places the deity of the seed upon it. Earth had the elephant, water the crocodile, fire the ram: three elements, three creatures, each chosen to embody the quality of its element.

The presiding deity is Rudra, and the text shows him aged and fierce, of a pure vermilion hue but white with the ashes smeared over him, three-eyed, his hands in the gestures that grant boons and dispel fear. This is Shiva in his oldest and most austere aspect, the ascetic of the cremation ground, fitting for the centre of fire, which both cooks and consumes. With him is the shakti Lakini, four-armed, dark of complexion, clothed in yellow. Brahma and Dakini at the root, Vishnu and Rakini at the abode, Rudra and Lakini at the navel: the great triad of gods, creator, preserver, destroyer, climbing with the centres.

Fire, and the power it brings

Each gate carries its fruit, and the third centre’s is the most dramatic of the lower three. The text says that meditation here brings the power to create and to destroy the world. The claim is not modest, and it is exactly what one would expect at the seat of fire, the element that transforms everything it touches, that turns the raw into the cooked, the living into ash, one state of matter into another. Fire is the agent of change in the old cosmology, and the centre of fire is therefore the centre of transformative power.

It is also the seat of the body’s digestive heat, the inner flame that the hatha texts work to kindle and direct. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika and related works treat the kindling of this navel-fire as central to the whole practice, the heat that, raised and turned inward, helps drive the coiled power upward. The third gate, then, is not only a place the serpent passes through. It is one of the furnaces that powers her ascent.

Here too the divergence from the modern reading is instructive. The popular system makes the navel centre the seat of willpower, self-esteem, personal power in the psychological sense, the place of confidence and assertion. The classical text speaks instead of cosmic power, the capacity to create and destroy, and of the literal fire of the body. The modern reading is not a wild distortion. It is a psychologising of an idea that was originally elemental and cosmological, the translation of fire-as-element into power-as-personality. The treatise notes the shift and lets the reader hold both, knowing which is the source.

The modern overlay

In the popular system, manipura is the yellow chakra, the third band of the rainbow, the solar-plexus centre of will and self-esteem, often wired to the pancreas or the adrenals. The yellow comes from the spectral ladder. The text, as we have seen, colours the petals like storm-clouds and the fire-region red. The willpower theme comes from the modern psychological overlay; the text speaks of creation and destruction and of digestive fire.

Hold the image the text gives: a storm-grey ten-petalled lotus at the navel, a red triangle of fire within it, a ram, and the ash-smeared Rudra presiding over the furnace where things are made and unmade.

Three elements lie below now: earth, water, fire. The next gate leaves the dense elements behind for something thinner and harder to name. At the heart, the element is air, and the sound heard there is a sound that nothing strikes.