  The word Chakra in Sanskrit, and signifies a wheel. It is also used in various subsidiary, derivative and symbolical sense, 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 Lord Buddha propounded his doctrine as the Dhammachakkappavattana Sutta (chakka being the Pali equivalent for the Sanskrit chakra) which Professor Ryhs Davids poetically renders as “to set rolling the royal chariot-wheel of a universal empire of truth and righteousness”. That is exactly the spirit of the meaning which the expression conveys to the Buddhist devotee, though the literal translation of the bare word is “the turning of the wheel of the Law”. The special use of the word chakra with which we are at the moment concerned is its application to a series of wheel-like vortices which exist in the surface of the etheric double of man.
In ordinary superficial conversation a man some times mentions his soul-implying that the body through which he speaks is the real man, and that this thing called the soul is a possession or appanage of that body-a sort of captive balloon floating over him, and in some vague sort of way attached to him. This is a loose, inaccurate and misleading statement; the exact opposite is the truth. Man is a soul and owns a body-several bodies in fact; for besides the visible with his lower world, he has others which are not visible to ordinary sight, by means of which he deals with the emotional and mental worlds. With those, however, we are not for the moment concerned. In the course of the last century enormous advances have been made in our knowledge to the minute details of physical body; students of medicine are now familiar with its bewildering complexities, and have at least a general idea of the way in which its amazingly intricate machinery works. |
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