The Subtle Body: Nadis, Chakras, and Kundalini

A book in 1919

In 1919 a British judge in Calcutta published a translation that quietly changed how half the planet would picture the human body.

His name was Sir John Woodroffe. He wrote under a pen name, Arthur Avalon, partly to share credit with the Bengali pandits he worked alongside. The book was The Serpent Power. Inside it he translated a sixteenth-century Sanskrit poem, the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana, which means the description of the six centres. From that book, more than from any temple or any lineage, the West learned to say the word “chakra.”

A century later the word is everywhere. It sells crystals and yoga mats. It comes with a rainbow, red at the base of the spine and violet at the crown, and a chart matching each colour to a gland and a mood. Almost none of that rainbow is in Woodroffe’s book. Almost none of it is in the Sanskrit he translated.

This is the difficulty with the subtle body. There is a real and old tradition here, careful, technical, attached to datable texts. And there is a younger thing, grown up mostly in the last hundred and fifty years, laid over the old like a transparency. The honest task is to keep them apart. So we will go slowly, from the oldest layer outward, and say plainly at each step what is ancient, what is medieval, and what is modern.

Three bodies, five sheaths

Start with the oldest claim, which is not yet about chakras at all. It is the claim that you are layered.

Classical Vedanta describes three bodies. The sthula sharira, the gross body, is the physical frame that eats and breathes and dies. The sukshma sharira, the subtle body, is the body of mind, sense, and vital energy, the part the tradition says travels between lives. The karana sharira, the causal body, is subtler still, the seed-layer of latent tendencies and accumulated karma from which the other two grow. The physical is the coarsest. The causal is the deepest. Most of what yoga calls the inner body lives in the middle term, the sukshma sharira.

The Taittiriya Upanishad, one of the older Upanishads, gives a more detailed map in its second chapter, the Brahmananda Valli. It describes the self as five sheaths, the pancha kosha, nested one inside another like the layers of an onion. Outermost is the annamaya kosha, the sheath made of food, the physical body. Within it the pranamaya kosha, the sheath made of breath and vital energy. Within that the manomaya kosha, the sheath of mind and emotion. Within that the vijnanamaya kosha, the sheath of discernment, the faculty that tells self from not-self. Innermost is the anandamaya kosha, the sheath made of bliss. And the Upanishad insists that even this is a sheath. The Self beyond it, identical with Brahman, is what the seeker is after.

This is worth holding onto before any talk of wheels and serpents. The point of the layered body in the Upanishad is not power. It is a method of stripping away. You learn what you are by recognising, one sheath at a time, what you are not.

Prana and the five winds

The second layer of the subtle body is energetic. It is prana.

The word is usually rendered “vital energy” or “life-breath,” and both are right and both are thin. Prana is what makes the difference between a living body and a corpse. It is carried on the breath but it is not only the breath. The yoga texts say it moves in the body as five currents, the five vayus, literally “winds,” each with its own direction and work.

Prana in the narrow sense governs intake, the inward and upward motion, the breath drawn in. Apana governs elimination, the downward and outward motion, what the body pushes away. Samana sits in the middle and governs digestion and assimilation, drawing things to the centre. Udana moves upward, governing speech, effort, and the ascent the yogi is interested in. Vyana pervades the whole and governs circulation and the distribution of energy through the limbs. They are described separately and they work as one. Much of breath practice, pranayama, is the deliberate handling of these currents, and one classical technique for rousing kundalini, which we will come to, works precisely by forcing apana upward to meet prana.

The rivers: nadis

If prana is the water, the nadis are the riverbeds.

A nadi is a channel, a conduit through which prana flows in the subtle body. The texts are lavish with the count. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika and other hatha works speak of seventy-two thousand nadis threading the body, each said to branch again. The number is not meant as dissection. It is a way of saying the channels are beyond counting, a net laid through the whole subtle frame.

Three of them matter above the rest. They run, in this map, along the line of the spine. On the left is ida, associated with the moon, with coolness, with the quality the texts call lunar. On the right is pingala, associated with the sun, with heat, the solar current. Between them, the central channel, is sushumna, and sushumna is the one that counts, because it is the road the awakened power travels.

Woodroffe’s translation of the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana opens exactly here, with the three channels, naming ida and pingala by the old solar and lunar names:

“In the space outside the Meru, placed on the left and the right, are the two Siras, Sasi and Mihira. The Nadi Susumna, whose substance is the threefold Gunas, is in the middle.”

Sasi is the moon, Mihira the sun. Woodroffe notes in his commentary that these are ida and pingala. Meru is the spine, named for the world-mountain at the centre of the cosmos, a quiet hint that the tantric body is a small model of the universe.

The nadis are said to spring from a common root called the kanda, a bulb low in the pelvis. Woodroffe places it, following the text, two fingers above the anus and two below the root of the genitals, and says the seventy-two thousand channels emerge from there, of which only ida, pingala, and sushumna are the most important. This is where the inner geography begins.

The wheels: chakras

Now the part everyone has heard of. And the part where the most care is needed.

A chakra means a “wheel,” and in the subtle body it is a centre, a hub where nadis meet, visualized as a lotus with a set number of petals. The texts also call them padmas, lotuses, and adharas, supports, supports for meditation. Each lotus, in the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana, carries a number of petals, the petals bear Sanskrit letters, the centre holds an element, a bija or seed-syllable, a presiding deity, and a shakti. They are dense diagrams meant to be built up in the mind’s eye, point by point.

Here is the system Woodroffe made famous, the six centres of the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana plus the seventh above them. At the base, at the perineum, is muladhara, the “root support,” a four-petalled crimson lotus, element earth, seed-syllable Lam. Above it, at the root of the genitals, svadhishthana, six petals, element water, seed Vam. At the navel, manipura, the “city of jewels,” ten petals, element fire, seed Ram. At the heart, anahata, twelve petals, element air, seed Yam. At the throat, vishuddha, sixteen petals, element ether, seed Ham. Between the brows, ajna, the “command” centre, two petals, the seat of the subtle mind, seed Om. And over all of them, at the crown, sahasrara, the thousand-petalled lotus.

Woodroffe’s verses give each its signature. The heart centre, anahata, he renders this way:

“Above that, in the heart, is the charming Lotus, of the shining colour of the Bandhuka flower, with the twelve letters beginning with Ka … It is known by its name of Anahata, and is like the celestial wishing-tree, bestowing even more than (the supplicant’s) desire.”

And the throat centre, vishuddha:

“In the throat is the Lotus called Visuddha, which is pure and of a smoky purple hue. All the (sixteen) shining vowels on its (sixteen) petals, of a crimson hue, are distinctly visible to him whose mind (Buddhi) is illumined.”

Note what is there and what is not. There is colour in these verses, smoky purple, vermilion, the hue of rain-clouds. There is no rainbow. The colours do not run red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet up the spine. That sequence is a later arrival, and we will get to where it came from.

The crown centre stands apart. Woodroffe described it most fully not in The Serpent Power but in his earlier introduction to the Mahanirvana Tantra, in 1913, where he writes of the sahasrara:

“Sahasrara-padma, or thousand petalled lotus of all colours, hangs with its head downwards from the brahma-randhra above all the chakra. This is the region of the first cause (Brahma-loka) … in whose effulgence Parama-Shiva and Adya-Shakti reside.”

The sahasrara is the goal. It is where the ascending power arrives.

One system among several

Here the article has to stop and tell the truth that most chakra books skip.

The seven-chakra system is not “the” chakra system. It is one systematization, the one that happened to win.

It comes specifically from a Bengali and Kashmiri tantric line, crystallized in the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana, written in 1577 by a man named Purnananda. The text Woodroffe translated is itself less than four hundred and fifty years old. The underlying idea of inner centres is older, but the older texts do not agree on how many there are or where they sit.

The scholars who have actually read the Sanskrit sources are blunt about this. James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, whose Roots of Yoga is the current academic standard for translated yoga sources, show that chakra systems vary widely across the tantras. The tenth-century Kubjikamata Tantra describes a system of five. The Netra Tantra describes six. The Kaulajnananirnaya lists eight. Several medieval Buddhist tantras work with four. Some texts list more than a dozen, others fewer than five. Daniel Simpson, drawing on this scholarship in The Truth of Yoga, puts it plainly: the predominant seven-centre model is “a mix of tradition and recent invention,” and the earliest references describe the centres differently from the familiar chart.

So when someone says “the seven chakras” as though reciting a law of nature, the accurate response is gentler and stranger. There were many maps. This is one of them. It is a good one, internally coherent and beautifully worked out, and it became the standard because a colonial judge translated it well at the right moment. That is a real pedigree. It is not the same as the only pedigree.

The coiled power: kundalini

At the bottom of all this sits the figure that gives the whole map its drama. Kundalini.

The word comes from kundala, “coiled.” She is described as a power, a shakti, lying asleep at the base of the subtle body, in the muladhara, coiled around a small self-arisen linga, the svayambhu-linga. The Sat-Chakra-Nirupana gives the image that fixed itself in the tradition, the serpent wrapped three and a half times:

“Over it shines the sleeping Kundalini, fine as the fibre of the lotus-stalk. She is the world-bewilderer, gently covering the mouth of Brahma-dvara by Her own. Like the spiral of the conch-shell, Her shining snake-like form goes three and a half times round Siva, and Her lustre is as that of a strong flash of young strong lightning.”

Three and a half coils. Her body closing the brahma-dvara, the “door of Brahman” at the foot of sushumna. Woodroffe’s prose summary in the Mahanirvana Tantra says it cleanly: she “lies asleep coiled like a serpent around the linga, and closes with Her body the door of Brahman.”

The whole of this yoga is a wager about what happens if she wakes. Roused, she straightens, enters the mouth of sushumna, and rises through the central channel, piercing each chakra in turn. The hatha texts describe the rousing as a physical and energetic labour. The Gheranda Samhita teaches a technique called shaktichalana, in which the practitioner draws in the breath and forces apana upward to meet the fire of the navel, and that fire, fanned, wakes the sleeping serpent. The ascent ends at the crown. There, in this map, shakti meets Shiva, the coiled power meets pure consciousness, and the two are one. That union is the goal the seven centres were drawn to chart.

This is doctrine and reported experience, not laboratory fact, and the texts treat it as serious and difficult, hedged with warnings and the need for a teacher. We can report exactly what the tradition claims. We cannot, and the tradition itself does not, hand it over as a trick.

Where the rainbow came from

Now the modern layer, stated as neutrally as the old one.

If you learned the chakras from a poster, you learned them with seven rainbow colours, a mapping to the endocrine glands, and a fixed psychological meaning for each, the root for security, the sacral for sexuality, the solar plexus for power, and so on up. This package is real and widely taught. It is also, in its specifics, about a hundred years old and Western in origin.

The trail is well documented. In the late nineteenth century the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, was already blending Indian terms with European ideas. The historian Karl Baier has traced how the older mesmerist notion of a “fluidum,” an invisible force passing between bodies, was assimilated to the Indian word prana by Theosophical writers such as Blavatsky and Annie Besant. The subtle body was being rebuilt with Western parts.

The decisive figure for colour was Charles W. Leadbeater, a Theosophist, whose 1927 book The Chakras described the centres from what he claimed was clairvoyant sight. His colours were his own, drawn from his vision, and they did not yet match the spectrum we now use. The tidy rainbow, where the seven chakras line up with the seven colours of visible light from red to violet, was tightened later still, commonly credited to Christopher Hills and his 1977 book Nuclear Evolution. Carl Jung, lecturing on kundalini yoga in 1932, added a further layer by reading the chakras as stages of psychological development. By the time the chakra reached the modern wellness studio it carried all of this, the Theosophical force, the clairvoyant colours, the spectrum match, and the psychology, fused so smoothly that it now passes for ancient.

Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion, offered the phrase that keeps the whole subject honest. He called the chakra and nadi system a “mystical physiology,” a subtle physiology whose organs reveal themselves only in the work of meditation. You will not find a chakra in a dissected body. That was never the claim of the careful texts. The centres are built up in the mind through visualization, and the tradition says they have real effects when they are. The modern error is to treat a visualization template as though it were a diagram of the nervous system, and then to colour it in.

The same flattening reaches the seed-syllables. The familiar wellness formula, chant the bija Yam to “open your heart chakra,” is a modern simplification of something far more specific. In the classical sources the bija belongs inside a dense ritual of visualization, deity, and lineage instruction, not a stand-alone exercise you run on yourself to unblock a feeling.

None of this makes the practice empty. It makes the history precise. The old map is old. The rainbow is new. A reader who knows which is which has been done a service, and the tradition loses nothing by the honesty.

The map and the territory

The subtle body, then, is a layered claim, and each layer has its own age and its own kind of truth.

The five sheaths of the Taittiriya Upanishad are old and philosophical, a method for finding the Self by setting aside what it is not. The five winds and the channels are the working vocabulary of yoga’s energetics. The seven centres are a late-medieval tantric synthesis, one of several, made global by a single 1919 translation. The coiled power and her ascent are the tradition’s high wager about what the inner body is for. And the rainbow on the poster is a modern overlay, traceable to named people and dated books.

The tradition does not need the poster. It managed for centuries without it.

The map was always meant to be travelled, not framed.