How the Seven-Chakra System Reached the West

The route is short and well documented. In 1918 the British judge Sir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, published The Serpent Power, which translated Purnananda's Sat-Cakra-Nirupana and a second short text with a long introduction. That single book is the origin of the seven-chakra system as it is known outside India: almost every subsequent western account descends from it, often at several removes.

Woodroffe was working with a living Bengali tantric tradition and was scrupulous about his sources, but his book presented one text of one lineage, and the impression it created, that there is a single canonical chakra system, is a side effect of its success. Indian tantric literature is far more various than the book suggests, and the atlas records the seven-chakra scheme as what it is, a particular lineage's scheme that became the standard by an accident of transmission.