Chakra, in full
The Sanskrit word means wheel or disc. Systems vary a great deal by text and by lineage: medieval Buddhist works from around the eighth century describe four or five centres, and Hindu sources give several different counts. The familiar arrangement of six centres plus the sahasrara at the crown appears in the eleventh-century Kaula work the Kubjikamata-tantra. These are objects of visualisation inside a practice, not structures anyone claims to find in a dissection.
The seven-centre model reached English readers largely through one book. In 1919 Sir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, published The Serpent Power, a translation of and commentary on Purnananda's sixteenth-century Sat-chakra-nirupana. That text became the reference point for nearly everything written about chakras in Europe and America afterwards, which is why one particular Bengali lineage's scheme is now treated as the standard one.
The rainbow colouring is a Western addition of the twentieth century. Charles Webster Leadbeater assigned the seven spectrum colours in his 1927 book The Chakras, and a variant in the 1930s used six colours plus white. Classical Sanskrit sources do give colours to the lotuses, but not the tidy red-to-violet run now printed on every yoga poster. Anyone using the rainbow scheme is using a modern convention, which is worth knowing rather than worth objecting to.
- Number culture
- Chakras, Cakra
A worked example
Compare the two schemes at the throat. The rainbow convention makes vishuddha blue, fifth in a red-to-violet sequence running from root to crown. The Sat-chakra-nirupana, the text Woodroffe translated in 1919, identifies it instead by its sixteen petals, each carrying a Sanskrit vowel. Petal counts and seed syllables are what the older material specifies, and they are what the practice itself works with.
Sources
The system of six chakras plus the sahasrara at the crown first appears in the Kubjikamata-tantra, an eleventh-century Kaula work, and the seven rainbow colours were added by Leadbeater in 1927.
Wikipedia — ChakraThe Serpent Power, by Arthur Avalon, the pen name of Sir John Woodroffe, was first published in 1919 by Luzac & Co.
Open Library — The Serpent Power
See also
Where it comes up on this site
Chakra: frequently asked
Partly. Six centres plus the crown appear in an eleventh-century Kaula text, so the arrangement itself is old. What is not old is the West settling on that one version, which followed John Woodroffe's 1919 translation and turned a single sixteenth-century commentary into the standard reference.
From Charles Webster Leadbeater's 1927 book The Chakras. Classical Sanskrit sources do give colours, but not a red-to-violet run from base to crown.