Will the real chakras please stand up?

 

Credit: mozzercork 

Christopher Wallis strikes again, this time with a blog post on the chakras. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that most modern yoga teachers haven´t got a clue about the real nature of the chakras. This is true even in India, according to Wallis. Contemporary “knowledge” of the chakras comes from three sources: Western esotericism (such as Theosophist C W Leadbeater´s 1927 work “The Chakras”), John Woodruffe´s 1918 translation of an Indian work from 1577 (Wallis considers both to be flawed), and books written by Indian gurus based on 1) and 2).

The real deal about the chakras is that it comes from Tantric forms of yoga, which flourished circa 600 AD – 1300 AD, and that each system had its own version of the chakras. Says the author: “Five-chakra systems, six-chakra systems, seven, nine, ten, twelve, twenty-one and more chakras are taught, depending on what text and what lineage you’re looking at. The seven- (or, technically, 6 + 1) chakra system that Western yogis know about is just one of many, and it became dominant around the 15th century”. None of them is the “right” one. Or the other way around: they are all right, depending on the context of spiritual practice in which they are used.

The chakra systems are prescriptive rather than descriptive. In a certain sense, there is no “red chakra at the base of the spine”. Rather, it´s something you visualize as an aid in meditation (in a certain other sense, the chakras are regarded as real energy centers, but since the energy body is supposed to be fluid, the chakras can float around quite a bit). Indeed, the point of the chakras is to “install” mantras and deities (or deity-energies) at certain points in the energy body, something apparently never done in modern yoga. Which deities? That too varies according to the system you practice!

Another misunderstood point is that the seed-mantras aren´t associated with the chakras, but with the elements. Wallis half-jokingly says that the fickle personal relationships of many Western gurus might be due to the fact that they mistakenly “install” the wind element in their hearts, since they assume that the wind-mantra is always associated with the heart chakra…

Perhaps recommended reading. 

The real story on the chakras