How many chakras are there?

It depends on the text. Seven is standard today, but tantric sources prescribe four, five, six, nine, twelve and twenty-one, and Tibetan tantra works with five. The number follows the practice a lineage teaches rather than an anatomy anyone found, which is why this library lists twelve centres and marks which are core and which are secondary.

Are the chakras real?

They are not anatomical structures, and no dissection has found them. They are a contemplative map: a set of places to put attention, with a vocabulary for what tends to happen there. Judged as anatomy they fail; judged as a technology of attention they have lasted a thousand years.

Where does the rainbow colour scheme come from?

From the twentieth century. Medieval Sanskrit sources give the centres colours, but not the spectrum order: muladhara is often yellow, anahata smoky, vishuddha white. Red-to-violet was popularised by Theosophical writers and became universal after the 1970s.

Why is the third chakra called the solar plexus chakra?

Because Theosophical writers matched each centre to a nerve plexus in the early twentieth century. Every Sanskrit source places manipura at the navel, several centimetres lower. The English name has stuck and the location in the texts has not moved.

What colour is each chakra?

In the modern scheme, red, orange, yellow, green, sky blue, indigo and violet from the base to the crown. The medieval texts colour the petals and the element figures separately and differently, and both are given on each centre's page.

What is the difference between a chakra and a nadi?

A chakra is a junction, a nadi is a channel. Nadis carry prana around the body and the chakras sit where the major ones cross. Both come from the same texts, and the practices that work on one usually work on the other.

Do I need to believe in this for the practices to do anything?

The breathing, the sustained attention and the chanting have effects you can notice without accepting any metaphysics. Most practitioners start there. Whether the map describes something beyond that is a question the practice does not settle for you.

Is kundalini dangerous?

Intensive practice can be destabilising, and the traditions themselves say so, which is why they insist on a teacher. Long retreats, forceful breath retention and sleep deprivation are where problems cluster. Daily meditation and gentle breath work are not that.

Do chakras relate to the endocrine glands?

The pairing is an analogy from the early twentieth century, not a finding. Each centre sits near a gland, and the correspondence is a useful mnemonic, but treating the thyroid as a throat chakra confuses a metaphor with a diagnosis.

Where should a beginner start?

With the seven main centres, one at a time, and with the breath. Read the root chakra page, sit with the region it names for a few minutes a day, then move up. The channels, winds and sheaths make more sense once the centres are familiar.

Chakras & Energy

The subtle body, mapped

Tantric texts describe a second anatomy laid over the physical one: wheels along the spine, channels that feed them, winds that move through them, sheaths that hold them. This library gives every part of that map its own page, with the tradition it came from and the practice that works on it.

48: entries mapped
5: layers of anatomy
12: traditions

The map of the subtle body

Five layers of vocabulary, from the seven centres most people meet first to the channels, winds, sheaths and aura layers that surround them.

🪷

The energy centres

Seven main chakras from the base of the spine to the crown, plus five secondary centres the older texts also name.

🛤️

The nadis

The channels that carry prana. Three run the length of the spine, eleven more reach the eyes, ears, tongue and limbs.

🌬️

The vayus

Prana in motion, sorted by direction: five main winds and five minor ones behind blinking, yawning and hunger.

🍚

The koshas

Five sheaths from food to bliss, the frame the Taittiriya Upanishad uses to nest body inside mind inside spirit.

🕸️

The layers of the aura

The Theosophical and modern-healing model of the field around the body, one layer paired with each main chakra.

Browse by tradition

Nobody invented the chakras once. The lists differ by century and by school, and the differences are the interesting part.

🔱

Tantric Shaiva and Shakta

Kashmir & Bengal c. 800 to 1200 CE

The lineage that produced the six-centre system in the first place. The Kubjikamata and the Netra Tantra count centres in fives, sixes and nines before anything settles.

🧘

Hatha yoga

North India 11th to 15th century

Manuals like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Shiva Samhita move the centres from visualisation into physical practice: breath retention, locks, seals.

📜

The six-chakra text

Bengal 1577

Purnananda's Shat-chakra-nirupana fixed petals, letters, seed sounds and deities into the list the modern world inherited, through Arthur Avalon's 1919 translation.

🐍

Kundalini yoga

India & diaspora Medieval to modern

Practice organised around raising energy coiled at the base of the spine through each centre in turn, and around the knots that resist it.

🦶

The Natha siddhas

North India 12th century onward

Gorakhnath's lineage, and the Siddha Siddhanta Paddhati, which maps sixteen adharas: physical support points from the toes to the palate, used for grounding rather than for ascent.

☸️

Buddhist Vajrayana

Tibet & Himalaya 8th century onward

Five wheels rather than seven, with their own petal counts, a central channel called avadhuti, and the heart as the seat of mind. The inner fire of tummo at the navel drives the Six Yogas of Naropa.

🌿

Ayurveda and marma

India Classical to present

The medical tradition that shares the prana vocabulary and adds 107 marma points, junctions treated by touch rather than meditation.

☯️

Daoist internal alchemy

China 2nd century onward

Three dantian and the microcosmic orbit. Developed independently of the chakras and often compared to them too quickly.

🪡

Meridian theory

China Han dynasty onward

Twelve primary channels and eight extraordinary vessels carrying qi. The closest East Asian analogue to the nadis, with a clinical literature behind it.

🔮

The Theosophical synthesis

London & Adyar 1880 to 1930

Where Sanskrit sources met Western occultism. Leadbeater's The Chakras (1927) gave the centres colours, glands and a spinning appearance.

🌈

The Western rainbow model

Europe & North America 1970s onward

Seven centres, seven spectrum colours, seven psychological themes. Popular, useful, and younger than most people assume.

🤲

Reiki and hands-on healing

Japan 1922 onward

Usui's system arrived without chakras and acquired them in the West. Today most Reiki training teaches the seven centres as standard.

Browse by practice

What people actually do with the map: breath, sound, posture, attention, touch.

🧠

Chakra meditation

attention

Holding attention at one centre, with or without its image, colour and seed sound. The oldest practice on this list and still the base of the rest.

🌬️

Pranayama

breath

Breath work aimed at the channels rather than the lungs. Alternate-nostril breathing is the everyday form of ida and pingala practice.

🔊

Seed mantra chanting

sound

LAM, VAM, RAM, YAM, HAM. One syllable per centre, chanted aloud or silently, felt as vibration in the region it names.

🤞

Mudras and bandhas

locks

Hand seals and internal locks that redirect pressure and attention. Mula bandha at the base, uddiyana at the navel, jalandhara at the throat.

🤸

Asana sequencing

posture

Postures grouped by the region they open: hip work for the lower centres, backbends for the heart, inversions for the head.

😴

Yoga nidra

rotation

Guided rotation of awareness through the body, often following the centres in order. Lying down, without effort, close to sleep.

💎

Colour and crystal work

modern

Stones and colours matched to centres, laid on the body or held. A twentieth-century layer over an older map, and a popular entry point.

🎵

Sound and singing bowls

sound

Bowls, gongs and tuning forks pitched to the centres. The tuning schemes are modern inventions; the effect of sustained tone on attention is not.

🤲

Hands-on energy healing

touch

Reiki, polarity therapy and their relatives: hands held on or above the body, working centre by centre. Complementary to medical care, never a replacement for it.

👁️

Scanning and aura reading

perception

Sensing the field around a person by hand or by sight, usually layer by layer. The most subjective practice here, and the one most worth cross-checking.

A second anatomy

The word chakra means wheel. In the Sanskrit texts that first use it in this sense, around the eighth century, it names a point in the body where the practitioner concentrates: not an organ, not a nerve plexus, but a place where attention is placed and something happens. Over the next four hundred years those points were counted, named, given petals and letters and syllables, and arranged along the spine into the ladder most people picture today.

The ladder was never the only version. The Kubjikamata Tantra works with five centres, the Netra Tantra with a different set, Buddhist tantras with four. Some systems put the highest centre at the palate, others above the head entirely. The familiar seven, with their colours and their psychological keywords, come from a specific chain of transmission: Purnananda's Shat-chakra-nirupana of 1577, translated by Arthur Avalon in 1919 as The Serpent Power, read by Theosophists, and turned into a rainbow by the human potential movement in the 1970s.

What this library covers

Each of the five sections below holds one kind of thing, and each entry has its own page.

The centres are the wheels themselves. Seven main ones from the base of the spine to the crown, and five secondary ones that appear in the older sources without ever becoming standard: bindu at the back of the head, hrit below the heart, lalana at the soft palate, manas and soma in the region of the brow.

The nadis are the channels prana moves through. The Shiva Samhita counts 350,000 of them and then names fourteen that matter. Three of those fourteen do most of the work: sushumna up the spinal axis, ida and pingala winding around it.

The vayus are prana sorted by direction. Prana moves in, apana moves down and out, samana gathers at the navel, udana rises, vyana spreads everywhere. Five minor winds handle blinking, yawning, sneezing, hunger and what remains after death.

The koshas are five sheaths, from the body made of food to the sheath of bliss. The frame comes from the Taittiriya Upanishad and gives the other four sections somewhere to sit.

The layers of the aura are the newest material here, from Theosophy and from twentieth-century healing practice. They are included because they are what most modern chakra teaching actually assumes, and because saying where an idea came from is more useful than pretending it was always there.

How to read the correspondences

Every centre on this site carries a table: element, seed sound, petal count, colour, associated gland. Some of those columns are ancient and stable. The petal counts and the Sanskrit letters go back to the medieval texts and barely vary. Others are recent. The rainbow colour scheme is twentieth-century, the gland associations come from Leadbeater and his readers, and the endocrine mapping is an analogy rather than a claim about physiology.

We mark which is which on each page. A tradition is more interesting when you can see its seams.

A note on health

Energy work sits alongside medical care. Nothing in this library diagnoses, treats or replaces treatment, and no practice here should delay seeing a doctor about a symptom. The centres are a map for attention and self-understanding. Used that way they are durable and worth learning. Used as medicine they are not.

Frequently asked questions

: It depends on the text. Seven is standard today, but tantric sources prescribe four, five, six, nine, twelve and twenty-one, and Tibetan tantra works with five. The number follows the practice a lineage teaches rather than an anatomy anyone found, which is why this library lists twelve centres and marks which are core and which are secondary.
: They are not anatomical structures, and no dissection has found them. They are a contemplative map: a set of places to put attention, with a vocabulary for what tends to happen there. Judged as anatomy they fail; judged as a technology of attention they have lasted a thousand years.
: From the twentieth century. Medieval Sanskrit sources give the centres colours, but not the spectrum order: muladhara is often yellow, anahata smoky, vishuddha white. Red-to-violet was popularised by Theosophical writers and became universal after the 1970s.
: Because Theosophical writers matched each centre to a nerve plexus in the early twentieth century. Every Sanskrit source places manipura at the navel, several centimetres lower. The English name has stuck and the location in the texts has not moved.
: In the modern scheme, red, orange, yellow, green, sky blue, indigo and violet from the base to the crown. The medieval texts colour the petals and the element figures separately and differently, and both are given on each centre's page.
: A chakra is a junction, a nadi is a channel. Nadis carry prana around the body and the chakras sit where the major ones cross. Both come from the same texts, and the practices that work on one usually work on the other.
: The breathing, the sustained attention and the chanting have effects you can notice without accepting any metaphysics. Most practitioners start there. Whether the map describes something beyond that is a question the practice does not settle for you.
: Intensive practice can be destabilising, and the traditions themselves say so, which is why they insist on a teacher. Long retreats, forceful breath retention and sleep deprivation are where problems cluster. Daily meditation and gentle breath work are not that.
: The pairing is an analogy from the early twentieth century, not a finding. Each centre sits near a gland, and the correspondence is a useful mnemonic, but treating the thyroid as a throat chakra confuses a metaphor with a diagnosis.
: With the seven main centres, one at a time, and with the breath. Read the root chakra page, sit with the region it names for a few minutes a day, then move up. The channels, winds and sheaths make more sense once the centres are familiar.

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