SEVEN CAKRAS

With the vivid images of her cakra series, Linda Saccoccio makes her own unique contribution to a history of images, ideas, and practices that extends back over a thousand years.  Here, of course, I am speaking of the set of circles or wheels that has occupied a central place in Indian representations of the subtle body. While it is impossible for us to know when people first began to experience the subtle body as a configuration of cakras, channels, knots, and so forth, one can date the earliest expressions of that experience to some time around the year 800. For the most part, those earliest expressions are found in a class of medieval texts known as the Tantras.  The earliest among these to mention the cakras is the Buddhist Hevajra Tantra, which lists a set of four. An important ninth or tenth-century Hindu Tantra, the Kaulajnananirnaya, is likely the earliest source of all to describe seven cakras, assign them specific subtle body locations (genitals, navel, heart, throat, mouth, forehead, and crown of the head), and link them to groups of divine “maidens” with characteristic colors. Apart from the heart, which this text calls a “lotus,” none of these cakras are said to have petals: rather, they have “spokes” (like wheels) or “leaves” (like trees), which are 5, 8, 10, 12, 16, 100, and 1000 in number.  The “standard” system of seven cakras as we know it, with the classical names of muladhara svadhisthana, and so on, first appears in two later Hindu Tantras, the Kubjikamata and the Rudrayamala, which date from about the twelfth century.