Chakras

This page describes the chakras as a system of ideas: what the texts say, and how the picture changed over time. It makes no claim that chakras exist physically or that any practice acts on them.

Where the names come up in a Yin yoga class, they are only a place to rest your attention.

The word

Chakra (cakra) means wheel or circle. In early Indian texts it can mean a chariot wheel, a discus or a circle of people. The sense of a centre in the body comes later.

Where the system comes from

The chakras belong to tantra, a broad family of Hindu and Buddhist traditions that grew over many centuries, and to the hatha yoga texts that drew on them. These texts describe a subtle body, a map of channels (nadis) and centres, which the practitioner is taught to visualise in meditation. An older Upanishadic map, the five koshas, layers of the self, describes the person as sheaths rather than centres.

There was never one agreed map. Different tantric texts describe different numbers of centres: some four, some five or six, some many more, placed in different spots and given different names.

Buddhist tantra has its own versions.

The seven-centre list that is standard today was shaped largely by the Sat-cakra-nirupana, a text usually dated to the sixteenth century.

In 1919 it was translated into English by Sir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, in a book called The Serpent Power. That translation became the main source for how the chakras were understood outside India.

The seven chakras as the texts describe them

In this system, six centres lie along the spine and a seventh sits above the head:

• Muladhara, at the base of the spine, explained on the page about the root chakra.
• Svadhisthana, in the pelvis, the centre now called the sacral chakra.
• Manipura, at the navel, known in English as the solar plexus chakra.
• Anahata, at the heart, described on the page about the heart chakra.
• Vishuddha, at the throat; see the throat chakra.
• Ajna, between the eyebrows, the centre often called the third eye.
• Sahasrara, at or above the crown of the head, described as a lotus of a thousand petals and often treated as separate from the other six; see the crown chakra.

The texts describe each centre as a lotus, the flower of Hindu and Buddhist symbolism, with a set number of petals, with its own Sanskrit syllables, element, shape and presiding deity. In kundalini practice, as the texts present it, a force pictured as a coiled serpent at the base of the spine rises through these centres toward the crown.

How modern yoga culture changed the picture

During the twentieth century, writers in Europe and the United States added layers the Sanskrit texts do not contain. The rainbow colour sequence, the pairing of each chakra with an endocrine gland, and the matching of chakras to emotions or personality traits are all modern additions. So are most of the claims about blocked or unbalanced chakras.

Scholars of tantra generally treat this later material as a new, Western development rather than a continuation of the older texts.

Knowing that history makes it easier to read modern chakra content for what it is: a recent reinterpretation, not a description found in the old sources.

How chakras can come up in a class

If you are curious about the history, a teacher may be happy to talk about it or suggest where to read further.

In the practice itself, the names can sometimes serve as simple places to rest your attention, such as the throat during a humming breath or the spine during a slow twist. That is a way of focusing, not a claim about what happens in the body.

A slow, quiet practice such as Yin leaves time for these conversations. The Sanskrit yoga glossary explains the other terms on this page.

What does chakra mean outside the subtle body?

Chakra meaning is broader than the seven centres. The Sanskrit word cakra simply means wheel, and it carries that sense across many parts of Indian culture.

In Buddhism, the dharmachakra, the wheel of the teaching, is one of the oldest symbols, and the Buddha’s first sermon is traditionally described as setting that wheel in motion. A spoked wheel of this kind, the Ashoka Chakra, sits at the centre of the flag of India. In Hindu stories, the Sudarshana Chakra is the spinning discus carried by Vishnu. Older texts also speak of the chakravartin, a wheel-turning ruler whose chariot wheels roll on without obstruction.

The use of chakra for centres in the body grows out of the same image: a wheel, or a circle of petals, at a point along the spine. Buddhist tantric texts describe their own sets of wheels, often four or five rather than seven. So when you meet the word in a yoga class, it helps to know it is an ordinary Sanskrit word with a long life outside the body map.