Kuṇḍalinī at the Crown vs Kuṇḍalinī at the Base
- Wallis (via the early Kālottara / Śaiva Siddhānta material): an early (c.
- Wallis (via the early Kālottara / Śaiva Siddhānta material): an early (c. 7th-century) Saiddhāntika passage visualizes Kuṇḍalinī in the heart, summoned there from her eternal home in the crown of the head, where she dwells with Śiva. The early placement is high, not low. Śaiva Siddhānta - Modern haṭha / popular kuṇḍalinī corpus: Kuṇḍalinī lies coiled, dormant, at the base of the spine (mūlādhāra), and the whole project is to raise her from the bottom to the crown. This base-dormancy model saturates the vault's haṭha and modern-yoga material.
If the early Tantric placement of Kuṇḍalinī is the crown (descending/summoned), and the base-of-spine dormancy model is later, then a large fraction of the vault's (and the world's) kuṇḍalinī material describes a downstream haṭha-yoga reconfiguration mistaken for the original. The two models aren't variants — they're opposite directions (she's already up and gets summoned down/fixed vs she's down and gets raised up), and they imply opposite practices.
The base-dormancy kuṇḍalinī familiar today is a post-classical haṭha-yoga relocation of an originally crown-dwelling Goddess-energy. Falsifiable: if the earliest datable Tantric subtle-body sources consistently place the dormant/home position at the crown or heart (not the base), the base-model is demonstrably later.
- A survey of datable early Tantric subtle-body passages (Kālottara and contemporaries) confirming the high placement as the norm, with the base-placement appearing only in later (haṭha-era) texts.
- Corroboration from the vault's Samuel/White material (subtle body as 8th–10th-c innovation; modern haṭha as reconstruction).
- Distinguishing genuine sectarian variation from a clean chronological shift.