Liber VIII · Eastern Mysticism · Chapter I: Chakras & Subtle Body
Vishuddha: The Throat Chakra in Tantra, Yoga and History
Vishuddha, the throat chakra: its sixteen-petalled lotus, the bija Ham, ether, Sadashiva and Shakini in the tantric texts, and the modern blue throat chakra.
Vishuddha (Sanskrit viśuddha, "purified" or "thoroughly pure") is the fifth of the six chakras in the classic tantric scheme: a sixteen-petalled lotus at the throat whose element is ether or space (ākāśa) and whose seed syllable is haṃ. In the sixteenth-century Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa, translated by John Woodroffe in 1919, it is a smoky-purple lotus bearing the sixteen Sanskrit vowels and inhabited by the god Sadāśiva and the goddess Śākinī. The sky-blue "communication chakra" of modern wellness books is a much later Western reading.
Name and Meaning of Vishuddha§
The word viśuddha combines the intensifying prefix vi- with śuddha, "pure" or "cleansed". It is an ordinary Sanskrit adjective, used of refined gold or a clear mind, before it became the name of a lotus in the subtle body. Tantric authors and their commentators explain the name in more than one way. One reading ties it to the element of the centre: ether is the most rarefied and least obstructed of the elements, a pure openness in which the others are contained. Another ties it to the yogin's progress. By the time the coiled power of kundalini reaches the throat, the four grosser elements of earth, water, fire and air have, in the meditative scheme, been dissolved stage by stage, and what remains is correspondingly purified.
Other texts simply call the centre the throat wheel or throat lotus (kaṇṭha-cakra, kaṇṭha-padma), naming it by its place rather than its quality. In the standard six-centre series described in the history of the chakras, Vishuddha is the fifth counting upward and the last of the five centres that each hold one of the gross elements. Above it, Ajna is the seat of the mind, and the thousand-petalled Sahasrara lies beyond the elements altogether.
Place in the Body: The Throat§
The Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa says simply that the lotus is "in the throat". Like the other centres it is pictured not on the surface of the neck but inside the central channel, the suṣumnā (see nadis, prana and the subtle body), strung with the lotuses above and below it. The tantric body was a body for meditation, and the throat was the station of sound, speech and space.
The throat also matters in hatha yoga, in a different idiom. The Haṭhapradīpikā (fifteenth century) describes jālandhara-bandha, the "chin lock", explaining it through an older physiology: a cooling nectar (amṛta) drips from the moon in the head and is normally consumed by the fire of the belly, and the lock at the throat is said to stop that loss.
From the early twentieth century, writers matched the chakras with nerve plexuses and glands, placing Vishuddha near the laryngeal plexus or the thyroid. These were attempts to reconcile yoga with modern physiology, not statements of the sources. There is no scientific evidence for chakras as physical structures; the texts themselves treat them as features of a subtle body known through practice.
The Lotus: Petals, Syllables and Bija§
The Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa describes the lotus as pure and "of a smoky purple hue", with sixteen petals on which the sixteen vowels of the Sanskrit alphabet shine in crimson: a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, ṛ, ṝ, ḷ, ḹ, e, ai, o, au, aṃ, aḥ. The choice is meaningful. The six lotuses together carry fifty letters on their petals (four, six, ten, twelve, sixteen and two), so that the whole Sanskrit alphabet, regarded in tantra as the body of the goddess of speech, is distributed through the subtle body. The vowels, which grammarians and tantric theorists treated as the life of the consonants, fall at the throat, the organ of voice.
In the pericarp, the centre of the flower, lies the region of ether: a circle, "white like the full moon". Within it is the seed syllable (bīja) of ether, haṃ, personified as the white deity Ambara ("sky"), who is seated on a snow-white elephant. Ambara is given four arms: two hold the noose and the goad, and two make the gestures of granting boons and dispelling fear. The elephant echoes the elephant Airavata of the root centre, Muladhara (drawn with seven trunks in many modern illustrations), a visual reminder that earth and ether stand at either end of the elemental series. The verses also place in this pericarp the full disc of the moon "without the mark of the hare", the dark patch Indian tradition sees on the lunar face.
The bīja is pronounced with a short vowel, closer to English "hum" than "ham". The text assumes a practitioner who visualises each element with its syllable; chanting it aloud as a sound exercise is a modern adaptation.
Element, Deity and Shakti§
Woodroffe's tables, drawn from the commentary and related works, set out the correspondences of the centre. Its element is ether (ākāśa), whose subtle quality (tanmātra) is sound; its organ of knowledge is the ear and its organ of action the mouth, as the instrument of speech. These links explain why later writers, Indian and Western alike, associate Vishuddha with hearing, speech and voice.
The presiding deity is Sadāśiva, "the ever-auspicious", described as snow-white, five-faced, three-eyed and ten-armed, wearing a tiger's skin. His body is joined with that of Girijā (Pārvatī), the "mountain-born" goddess, so that he appears in the half-male, half-female form known as Ardhanārīśvara. In Shaiva theology Sadāśiva is the highest of Śiva's five active forms, a sign that the centre stands near the summit of the ascent (see Shaivism).
The śakti, or goddess of the lotus, is Śākinī. The text calls her "purer than the Ocean of Nectar", dressed in yellow, holding in her four hands a bow, an arrow, a noose and a goad. Each centre has such a goddess, from Ḍākinī at the root to Hākinī at the brow: forms of the one power that Shakta theology sees animating the body.
The verses close, in conventional tantric fashion, with the fruits (phala) of meditation. The region is called "the gateway of great Liberation", and the text promises that one who concentrates on it becomes eloquent and wise, sees past, present and future, and is freed from disease and sorrow: claims of devotional praise for its own practice. In the dissolution the work describes, air is absorbed into ether here, and ether into mind at the brow.
How the Texts Differ§
Pūrṇānanda's sixteen-petalled throat lotus is only one version among the many maps of the subtle body in Hindu and Buddhist tantra.
Buddhist tantra§
The Hevajra Tantra and related Buddhist works describe four principal centres. The throat centre there is the "wheel of enjoyment" (saṃbhoga-cakra), associated with the enjoyment body of a buddha, and in many presentations it too has sixteen petals; the navel, heart and crown wheels have sixty-four, eight and thirty-two. In Tibetan practice the three syllables oṃ āḥ hūṃ are commonly placed at the crown, throat and heart, so that the throat is the seat of āḥ and of enlightened speech. On these systems, see Vajrayana Buddhism.
Nath and hatha yoga lists§
The Siddha Siddhānta Paddhati, a Nāth work, lists nine centres rather than six, with a throat centre followed by a separate centre at the palate (tālu) before the brow. The palate is where the hatha texts locate the flow of nectar and the practice of khecarī mudrā, so the Nāth list divides between two points what Pūrṇānanda gathers into one. The Śiva Saṃhitā and other hatha works agree broadly on the sixteen petals but vary in the deities, colours and powers they assign.
The blue-throated god§
Modern books often link Vishuddha with Śiva Nīlakaṇṭha, "the blue-throated", who in Puranic myth drank the poison that arose when the gods and demons churned the ocean, and held it in his throat. The story is ancient and widely told, but the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa does not connect it with the throat lotus; the association is largely a modern teaching device, used to present the centre as a place where harmful things are transformed.
The Modern Western Layer§
What most readers now know as "the throat chakra" comes from a series of twentieth-century reinterpretations, traced in Chakras in the West. The Theosophist C. W. Leadbeater, in The Chakras (1927), described the throat centre as a vortex of sixteen "spokes" with a largely bluish, shimmering appearance, and linked its awakening to clairaudience, hearing on subtler planes. Alice Bailey and later writers tied the centre to the thyroid gland.
From the 1970s the rainbow scheme gave the fifth chakra the colour blue, and writers in the human potential movement recast it in psychological terms: communication, truthfulness, self-expression and creativity. Anodea Judith's Wheels of Life (1987) systematised this layer, linking the centre with sound and with the "right to speak", and treating lying as its characteristic distortion. C. G. Jung's 1932 seminar had already read Vishuddha as the threshold of abstract, psychic reality.
Popular practice today may include chanting haṃ, toning, visualising blue light at the throat, or pairing the chakra with blue stones. These modern forms can be meaningful to those who use them, but they are not in the tantric texts, whose throat lotus is smoky purple, crowded with gods and syllables, and one stage in a disciplined ascent rather than a centre to be "balanced".
Frequently asked questions§
What does Vishuddha mean?§
Viśuddha is Sanskrit for "purified" or "thoroughly pure". Commentators link the name to the purity of ether, the element of the centre, and to the purification of the yogin as kundalini rises past the grosser elements below the throat.
What is the bija mantra of the throat chakra?§
The seed syllable is haṃ, the bīja of the element ether, pronounced with a short vowel close to English "hum". In the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa it is visualised as a white deity seated on a snow-white elephant within a white circle.
Why is the throat chakra blue?§
The blue colour comes from the modern rainbow scheme popularised from the 1970s, which gives the seven centres the colours of the spectrum in order. The sixteenth-century text describes the lotus as smoky purple with crimson letters, and its region of ether as white.
Is the throat chakra the same as the thyroid gland?§
No. The link with the thyroid is a twentieth-century correlation made by Theosophical and later writers. The tantric texts describe a lotus in the subtle body, and there is no scientific evidence for chakras as physical structures.
Sources and further reading§
- The Serpent Power — Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe), 1919
- The Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study — David L. Snellgrove, 1959
- Hatha Yoga Pradipika — Svatmarama, 15th c.
- Roots of Yoga — James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, 2017
- The Chakras — C. W. Leadbeater, 1927
- The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga — C. G. Jung, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, 1996
- Wheels of Life — Anodea Judith, 1987
- Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan — Kurt Leland, 2016