The seven chakras, and five more

What a centre is

Each of these is a place along the axis of the body where practice concentrates. The medieval texts describe them as lotuses: a number of petals, each petal carrying a Sanskrit letter, a seed syllable in the middle, an element, an animal, a presiding deity. None of that is decoration. The petal counts are how a practitioner knows which centre they are at, and the letters give a chant its structure.

Seven is the number everyone learns. Six is the number the texts usually give, with sahasrara counted separately because it lies outside the series rather than at the top of it. That distinction survives in the phrasing of most Sanskrit sources: shat-chakra, the six wheels, plus the thousand-petalled lotus above.

Old correspondences and new ones

The element sequence is stable across sources: earth, water, fire, air, space, then two centres past the elements. So are the petal counts, which add up to fifty in the lower six, one for each letter of the Sanskrit alphabet. So are the seed sounds LAM, VAM, RAM, YAM and HAM.

The colours need care, because the texts describe two different things and modern lists describe a third. The yantra of each centre, the geometric figure holding the element, has a fixed colour: a yellow square for earth, a white crescent for water, a red triangle for fire, a smoky hexagram for air, a white circle for space. The petals are coloured separately and differently: crimson at the root, vermilion at the sacral, the blue-black of a rain cloud at the navel, vermilion again at the heart, smoky purple at the throat, white at the brow.

The rainbow is neither of those. Red, orange, yellow, green, sky blue, indigo and violet were assembled in the twentieth century by matching seven centres to seven spectrum bands, and it caught on because it is easy to remember and easy to draw. Gland pairings came the same way, from Leadbeater's 1927 book and its readers.

All three layers are given on each page, labelled for what they are.

Not one system but many

Christopher Wallis and other scholars of the tantric sources make a point worth repeating here: in the texts these centres are prescriptive rather than descriptive. They are not organs waiting to be found and unblocked but templates for practice, places where a syllable is installed, a deity visualised, attention held. That is why different lineages prescribe different numbers, four, five, six, nine, twelve, twenty-one, without any of them being wrong. The number follows the practice.

Buddhist tantra keeps the idea and changes almost every detail. Tibetan Vajrayana works with five wheels rather than seven, with their own petal counts (thirty-two at the crown, sixteen at the throat, eight at the heart, sixty-four at the navel, thirty-two at the base), a central channel called avadhuti rather than sushumna, and the heart rather than the head as the seat of mind. The inner fire practice of tummo, at the navel wheel, is the engine of the Six Yogas of Naropa.

The Natha tradition adds a different axis again. Gorakhnath's Siddha Siddhanta Paddhati lists sixteen adharas, physical support points from the big toes and ankles up through the perineum, navel and palate, used for grounding and localised concentration. Adharas are anchors; chakras are wheels. Keeping the two apart is one of the clearer distinctions the older literature makes.

The five that did not make the list

Bindu, hrit, lalana, manas and soma are not obscure. They appear in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Shiva Samhita and their commentaries, and specific practices depend on them: khechari mudra exists to reach lalana, bhakti practice sits at hrit. They fell out of popular teaching because seven is a tidy number and because the Theosophical synthesis that carried the chakras west worked from a seven-centre model.

They are here because a map that shows only the famous roads is not much of a map.