Visual forms of the subtle body

I recall hearing Kumar Gandharva singing a bhajan of Kabir long years ago, and being struck by some words that I knew absolutely nothing about at that time. "Ida, Pingala, Sukhman naadi `85", the verse ran, and the way Kumarji sang it, going back to these words again and again—only he could sing it that way, laying lingering emphasis on each syllable, piercing the air as if to embroider it with needle-sharp notes—one was compelled to take notice.

Obviously, Kumarji understood it all, but I was to learn only slowly that these naadis with unfamiliar names (‘Sukhman’ was for Kabir another way of saying ‘Sushumna’) were subtle channels carrying the vital life-breath that runs through the sukshma sharira—subtle body—that mystics in our land have been speaking of for ages.

In his composition, Kabir was obviously not setting out to map the subtle body: he took it for granted that his listeners knew it. But this man of God was drawing attention to it in his own, inimitable manner, using a weaver’s imagery:

"Where do the Ida, Pingala and Sukhman naadis go when the thread of life breaks? / One who holds the thread is beyond time, but where does he live? / `85What is the warp and what is the weft? / What are the threads from which the chadar [sheet] is woven? / Ida and Pingala are the warp and weft. Sukhman are the threads from which the chadar is woven. / Eight are the Lotuses and ten are the spinning wheels. / Five are the elements and three the qualities of the chadar."

It is all lyricism and intensity: a great saint-poet’s utterance. When one begins to decode the words, one will find oneself inevitably in the world of yoga and tantra, however, with its allusions to the subtle body that is so different from the physical body that we possess. It is not easy to understand any of this, for the knowledge is esoteric, and the references all carefully layered.

The practitioners of tantra dwell upon a system of centres of psychic realisation within the subtle body, called chakras, each with a name of its own; the uncoiling and rising of kundalini, ‘serpent power’, from the point where it rests, upwards through the spinal column to reach the point where a thousand-petalled lotus blooms is described; 72,000 naadis carrying prana or life-breath within this subtle body are outlined, among which Ida, Pingala and Sushumna feature most prominently, the first positioned to the left of the spinal column, the second to its right, and the third, the most important—‘sustainer of this universe’—in the centre.

The Moon moves in Ida, and the Sun in the Pingala, one reads; Ida flows through the left nostril, and the Pingala through the right; Ida is cooling, Pingala heats. And so on it proceeds. It is all about spiritual experience, about life and consciousness and the ecstasy of bliss, something that language is utterly incapable of describing. "Words and thoughts fly towards that goal but come back without reaching it`85.", as they say.

I am sure there are many who have an understanding of this, but I do not count myself among them. However, that does not keep me from being drawn to the concept of the metaphysical body being superimposed upon the physical body. The idea has ancient, very ancient, roots, and figures as much in philosophical treatises as in medical ones. What is further absorbing is the fact that visual form has been sought to be given to some of these ideas, or imagery, by artists.

However imperfectly they might have understood the abstractions involved, many of them endeavoured to create maps of the subtle body. There are, thus, all those images, reproduced often in books on Tantric Art, that show yogis seated in meditation, with lotus-like chakras placed in the body along a vertical axis. But among the more fascinating, and certainly among the most detailed, of these mappings is a scroll that is now in the Sarabhai Foundation at Ahmedabad.

On the scroll is the roughly drawn figure of a standing man, meant to be seen as a Shaivite or Nath yogi: eyes focused upon the tip of the nose, long pierced ears sporting outsized ear-rings, legs lightly parted and arms loosely draped along the sides of the body. Inside the body is seen an intricate network of images and motifs: lotuses with varying numbers of petals, stalks that join them, a coiled serpent, a conch-shell, a little hamsa bird holding in its beak the stem of a lotus upon which rest symbols of the sun and the moon.

At the very top of all this is an empty circle, the mahashunya or Great Void that yogis speak of. What makes the image even more complex is the fact that the entire form is surrounded and filled with long texts, arranged in blocks, that elaborate upon all that there is, in this view of the world: sacred formulas, the precise locus of chakras, practice of meditation, the power of letters of the alphabet, units of time, and the like. The name of a preceptor, Muni Chandra Nath, keeps recurring in the text.

It is all very mysterious, but also very engrossing. And so reminiscent of a wonderful passage in one of the oldest of Upanishads, the Chhandogya. ‘Within the city of Brahman, which is the body, there is the heart, and within the heart there is a little house. The house has the shape of a lotus, and within it dwells that which is to be sought after, inquired about and realised. What, then, is that which dwells within this house, this lotus of the heart? Even so large as the universe outside is the universe within the heart. Within it are heaven and earth, the sun, the moon, the lightning, and all the stars. Whatever is in the macrocosm is in this microcosm."

( This article was published on May 21, 2006)