Meditation on the Chakras

Meditation on the chakras is a contemplative practice from the yogic and tantric traditions of India, which map a subtle body of channels (nadis) and centres (chakras, wheels) superimposed on the physical one. The best-known scheme, systematised in medieval tantric and hatha-yoga texts, arranges seven principal centres along the spine from the base to the crown, each associated with an element, a seed sound, a lotus of a given number of petals, and a deity.

In practice the meditator concentrates on these centres in turn, often coordinating breath, visualisation and mantra, with the aim in many systems of awakening the coiled energy called kundalini at the base and raising it to the crown, where its union with the divine is experienced as liberation. The specific correspondences vary between texts and lineages, and the familiar seven-chakra, rainbow-coloured model widespread in the modern West owes much to twentieth-century interpreters who adapted the Indian sources.

The specific scheme of seven principal chakras now familiar worldwide comes largely from a particular textual tradition rather than being uniform across all tantric sources, which vary considerably in how many subtle centers they describe and how they are located and named. One especially influential text, a sixteenth century Sanskrit work usually known by the short title Sat Cakra Nirupana, part of a larger tantric compilation, supplied much of the detailed iconography, associated colors, seed sounds, and symbolic animals that later became the standard reference point. That text reached Western readers chiefly through the early twentieth century translation and commentary of the British judge and scholar John Woodroffe, writing under the pen name Arthur Avalon, whose work introduced tantric subtle body concepts to an English speaking audience largely unfamiliar with the wider Sanskrit tantric literature the scheme was drawn from.

Theosophical and later New Age writers took up this material over subsequent decades and reworked it further, most consequentially by attaching the chakras to the rainbow spectrum of visible light, an association absent from the Sanskrit sources and not settled on the same color for each center across the original texts. The result is a globally recognized seven chakra system that is genuinely rooted in real tantric literature while also being, in its most widely known present form, a twentieth century Western simplification of sources that were themselves more varied than the popular version suggests.