Anahata: The Unstruck Sound

At the heart, the climb crosses a threshold. Below lay the three dense elements, earth and water and fire, the solid, the fluid, the burning. At the fourth gate the element is air, the first of the subtle elements, invisible, untouchable except by its effects. And the centre takes its name from a sound, where every gate below was named for an element or a place.

Anahata. The unstruck.

A sound that nothing strikes

Every ordinary sound is made by two things meeting. A string and a finger. A drumhead and a hand. Air and a reed. Strike one thing against another and the world rings. The Sanskrit word for such sound is ahata, struck. But the tradition holds that the sages, sitting in deep stillness at the heart, heard a different sound, one that no collision produced: the anahata-nada, the unstruck sound, the continuous subtle resonance of the absolute itself, shabda-brahman, the word that is the ground of being. The fourth centre is named for it. To reach the heart, in this account, is to come within hearing of a sound that was never made and never stops.

What the text describes

The Sat-chakra-nirupana gives anahata twelve petals, and colours them the deep red of the bandhuka flower, with twelve vermilion letters. Within is the region of air, vayu, and the text draws air as a hexagram, two interlaced triangles forming a six-pointed star, smoke-grey in colour, for air carries the grey of smoke. The sense that belongs to air is touch, the most diffuse of the contact-senses, fitting for the most diffuse of the dense elements.

The seed-sound is YAM, described as grey as a mass of smoke, seated on a black antelope, the krishna-sara, the swift dark deer that is the mount of the wind. The antelope is air made into an animal: nothing on earth is quicker or harder to hold.

The presiding deity is Isha, the Lord, shown lustrous as the sun, his hands granting boons and dispelling fear. With him is the shakti Kakini, described as yellow like new lightning, three-eyed, four-armed, bearing a noose and a skull. And within the hexagram is a smaller triangle holding another linga, the bana-linga, shining like gold, the second of the three lingas the serpent passes on her way up, after the self-born linga at the root.

The dwelling of the self

What makes the heart-centre singular is what the text places inside it. Here, the Sat-chakra-nirupana says, dwells the individual self, the jivatman, and it describes it in one of the most quoted images in the whole literature: the self at the heart is like the steady, tapering flame of a lamp in a windless place. Not a guttering flame, not a flame in a draught. A flame perfectly still, because nothing disturbs it. The heart is the chamber of the indwelling self, the point of contact between the individual and the absolute whose unstruck sound fills the centre.

And above this, the text sets a wishing-tree. Woodroffe’s public-domain translation:

“Above that, in the heart, is the charming Lotus… It is known by the name of Anahata, and is like the celestial wishing-tree, bestowing even more than (the supplicant’s) desire.”

The kalpataru, the celestial tree that grants whatever is asked, and more, grows at the heart. The image is generous in a way that the modern “heart chakra of love” only faintly echoes. The text is not describing an emotion. It is describing the place where the self dwells as a steady flame, where the unstruck sound of the absolute is heard, and where a tree grows that gives beyond asking. This is the heart as the meeting-place of the human and the divine, not the heart as a feeling.

The modern overlay

In the popular system, anahata is the green chakra, the fourth band of the rainbow, sitting in the middle of the seven, the heart centre of love and compassion, often wired to the thymus. The placement in the middle, the bridge between the lower three and the upper three, is a genuine structural intuition, and the centre does sit at the heart. But the green comes from the spectral ladder, not the text, which colours the lotus bandhuka-red and the air-region smoke-grey. The theme of love as a single emotion is the modern psychologising; the text speaks of the unstruck sound, the indwelling self, and the wishing-tree.

Hold the image the text gives: a deep-red twelve-petalled lotus at the heart, a smoke-grey six-pointed star within it, a swift black antelope, a golden linga, and at the centre a flame that does not flicker, in a place where a sound that nothing struck is always sounding.

Three gates remain. Above the heart, at the throat, the element thins again, to ether, the subtlest of the five, and the centre there is named simply for purity.