The ChakrasThe word Chakra is Sanskrit and signifies a wheel. It is also used in various subsidiary, derivative and symbolical senses, just as is its English equivalent; as we might speak of the wheel of fate, so does the Buddhist speak of the wheel of life and death; and he describes that first great sermon in which the Buddha propounded His doctrine as the Dhammachakkappavattana Sutta (chakka being the Pali equivalent for the Sanskrit chakra) which Professor Rhys Davids poetically renders as to set rolling the royal chariot-wheel of a universal empire of truth and righteousness. (C.W. Leadbeater, The Chakras)
The chakras or force-centers are points of connection at which energy flows from one vehicle or body of a man to another. (C.W. Leadbeater, The Chakras)
All these wheels are perpetually rotating, and into the hub or open mouth of each a force from the higher world is always flowing a manifestation of the life-stream issuing from the Second Aspect of the Solar Logos which we call the primary force. That force is sevenfold in its nature, and all its forms operate in each of these centers, although one of them in each case usually predominated over the others. Without this inrush of energy the physical body could not exist. Therefore the centers are in operation in every one, although in the undeveloped person they are usually in comparatively sluggish motion, just forming the necessary vortex for the force, and no more. In a more evolved man they may be glowing and pulsating with living light, so that an enormously greater amount of energy passes through them, with the result that there are additional faculties and possibilities open to that man. (C.W. Leadbeater, The Chakras)
This divine energy which pours into each center from without sets up at right angels to itself (that is to say, in the surface of the etheric double) secondary forces in undulatory circular motion, just as a bar-magnet thrust into an induction coil produces a current of electricity which flows round the coil at right angels to the axis or direction of the magnet. The primary force itself, having entered the vortex, radiates from it again at right angels, but in straight lines, as though the center of the vortex were the hub of a wheel, and the radiations of the primary force its spokes. By means of these spokes the force seems to bind the astral and etheric bodies together as though with grappling-hooks. The number of these spokes differs in the different force-centers, and determines the number of waves or petals which each of them exhibits. Because of this these centers have often been poetically described in Oriental books as resembling flowers. (C.W. Leadbeater, The Chakras)
In the Hindu ascent of the sushumna, the chakras of the lower centers are identified, respectively, as of the elements of Earth, Water and Fire, the associated divinities being the Brahma the creator, Vishnu as Preserver and
r, and Shiva as the Destroyer of Obstructions to Illumination. (Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, p. 102)