The Same Debate, One Chakra Higher

Vam belongs to the same 1577 source as the other chakra bijas in this atlas, Purnananda Yati's Shat chakra nirupana, where it is assigned to svadhisthana, the center placed below the navel and given rulership over water, in a scheme of six main centers that this text is what standardized rather than what first invented. Manuscripts and earlier Tantric fragments describe subtle centers in different numbers and arrangements before Purnananda's synthesis, so treating the six chakra map as an ancient fixed given, rather than as a sixteenth century Bengali systematization of older and more varied material, is one of the more common popular misunderstandings this mantra carries with it.

Its transmission into English again runs through Arthur Avalon's 1919 translation The Serpent Power, and the same objections scholars raise against that translation generally apply here with a specific twist: svadhisthana is associated in Purnananda's text with material connected to sexuality and desire that Avalon's translation, working within an Edwardian British context, handled with considerable circumlocution and moralizing gloss rather than the directness of the Sanskrit commentary. Later, more literal academic translations of the same passage render its content in plainer and more explicit terms, and the gap between Avalon's version and these later ones is unusually wide for this chakra precisely because Avalon's discomfort with the material shaped his phrasing more heavily here than at less charged points in the text. Readers relying only on popular yoga literature descended from Avalon typically do not encounter the more direct academic renderings at all.