Borrowed & ReframedChakras · yoga · karma · mindfulness · the New Age
The concept is real and old. The version being sold is not the version that was taken. Almost every “ancient Eastern practice” a seeker meets online has been through the same seven-step machine — and once you can see it, you can run it yourself on anything.
How to read this page
Part I is what was actually taken, from where, and what got left behind — chakras, yoga, karma, and the lineage that carried them west. Part II is the steelman, which this page needs more than any other, and then the harm.
This page is written from outside the traditions it discusses. Per the reference document's own instruction, it should be reviewed by a Hindu scholar and a Buddhist teacher before publication — more than any other page in this library. We have sourced it carefully and that is not the same thing as having standing.
The Machine
Seven steps, in order, every time. This is the whole page in one structure — every section below is an instance of it, and once you have it you can apply it yourself to anything you are handed.
Step six is the one that does the damage. Once the reframed version is “what it is,” anybody describing the original is told they are being difficult.
Chakras — the clearest case in the library
What is genuinely old
- Attested Cakra systems appear in Indian tantric and yogic texts and are genuinely centuries old. The concept is real and the tradition is real.
- Attested There is no single canonical chakra system. Different texts give different numbers — four, five, six, seven, nine, twelve, twenty-one and more. Seven is one system among many, not the system.
- Attested Their purpose was soteriological — part of a practice aimed at liberation, undertaken with a teacher inside a religious framework. Not a wellness diagnostic.
⚠ And the part nobody is told
The rainbow colours are not traditional. The ROYGBIV spectrum — red root, orange sacral, yellow solar plexus, green heart, blue throat, indigo brow, violet crown — does not come from India. Traditional texts do assign colours, but they vary between texts and they do not form a spectrum.
Contemporary The rainbow mapping traces to Christopher Hills, Nuclear Evolution: Discovery of the Rainbow Body (1977), written in California and shaped by the Esalen milieu. Hills mapped the seven centres onto the seven colours of the visible spectrum. It had no precedent in Indian or Tibetan sources.
Kurt Leland, whose Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (2016) traces the whole thing, dates the birth of the modern Western chakra system to June 1977 — the moment the rainbow scheme and the list of qualities first appeared together in print.
Chakras are ancient. The chakra system you have seen is not. It is an early-twentieth-century Theosophical reading of a sixteenth-century text, with the colours added in 1977 and the whole thing repurposed for wellness. Both halves of that sentence are true and you deserve both.
Yoga — ancient, and also not
This one needs care, because two opposite-sounding claims are both true and neither cancels the other.
Attested Yoga as a philosophical and soteriological system is old. The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (roughly second to fourth century CE) are real and the eight limbs are real: ethical restraints, observances, posture, breath, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, absorption.
Look at what posture actually gets. Āsana receives essentially one sūtra, and what it says amounts to a steady, comfortable seat. It is about sitting still in order to meditate. The Ha ha Yoga Pradīpikā (fifteenth century) has more postures — still far fewer than a modern class, and for different purposes.
Contemporary Modern postural yoga — flowing, athletic, posture-centred — is largely a twentieth-century development. Mark Singleton's Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (2010) documents the influence of European gymnastics, Scandinavian physical culture and Western bodybuilding on the synthesis of modern āsana in colonial and early-independence India.
Attested Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), teaching at the Mysore Palace, is the figure from whom nearly all modern yoga descends — through B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi, and his son T.K.V. Desikachar.
Yoga is ancient. Your yoga class is about ninety years old.
Contested The live argument, reported rather than settled. The Hindu American Foundation's “Take Back Yoga” campaign argued that yoga's Hindu roots have been systematically erased in the West. Others, including Indian scholars, push back — pointing to yoga's own internal diversity and to the existence of non-Hindu yoga traditions. This is a real, ongoing, good-faith disagreement and it is not this page's to resolve.
⚠ Karma — and the tradition's own refusal
Attested In Hindu, Buddhist and Jain thought, karma is a complex doctrine about action and consequence, bound up with rebirth and with liberation. It differs substantially between the three, and there are centuries of internal debate inside each. In Buddhism it turns fundamentally on intention — not on a cosmic scoreboard.
The tradition explicitly considered the Western version and rejected it.
Attested In the Sīvaka Sutta (Sa—yutta Nikāya 36.21), the wanderer Mo iyasīvaka approaches the Buddha at Rājagaha and asks about teachers who hold that whatever a person experiences — pleasant, painful or neutral — is entirely caused by what was done in the past.
The Buddha says they are wrong, and gives eight causes of what a person feels: bile, phlegm, wind, an imbalance of the three, change of climate, careless treatment of the body, external assault — and the result of karma as the eighth. Those who claim everything is past action, he says, overshoot both what a person can know for themselves and what the world already agrees is true.
So the flattened Western karma — what goes around comes around, you attracted this, this happened because of something you did — is not a simplification of the doctrine. It is a position the tradition examined and refused.
The honest caveat, since this page does not overclaim even in its own favour: commentators note that because birth itself is understood as a consequence of karma, one could argue everything is downstream of it — but that reading ignores the worldly conditions the sutta is explicitly pointing at. The other thing scholars draw from it is that karma here is not deterministic: a bile disorder can be treated with medicine, and suffering can be reduced in the present.
Contemporary What it became. In New Age usage karma is compressed into cosmic justice, often instant and always individual — so that illness, poverty, assault and disability become evidence of moral failure in this life or a previous one. That is where the doctrine becomes a weapon, and §08 is about what it does to people.
The lineage, fully documented
Most of what a seeker meets online as “Eastern wisdom” arrived through a small number of Western intermediaries, and it changed shape at each hop.
Law of Attraction
Studied Nothing supports it. There is no evidence that thought causes external events.
Contested And it is structurally unfalsifiable: if it works, the law is proven; if it doesn't, you didn't believe hard enough. There is no outcome that counts as the law failing — which is the same architecture as “your energy blocked the message” and “that's your shadow.”
The real mechanism, stated fairly: optimism, confidence and attention genuinely do affect behaviour, and behaviour affects outcomes. A person who expects good things applies for more jobs and asks more people. That is real — and it is psychology, not physics.
The rest, briefly
“Shamanism” Contemporary
The word is Tungusic and Siberian (šaman). Its use as a universal category is an anthropological artefact rather than a discovery. Michael Harner's “core shamanism” (1980s) is an explicitly modern synthesis assembled from many cultures and marketed as universal. Real practitioners belong to specific peoples.
Mindfulness Studied
Extracted from its Buddhist ethical framework and sold as a productivity and stress tool. The critique has a name — “McMindfulness,” after Ronald Purser. And this is the one borrowed practice where we have real harm numbers: in a US population survey, half of 434 respondents with meditation experience endorsed at least one adverse-effect item and 10.6% reported some functional impairment, with childhood adversity associated with elevated risk.
Kundalini Transmitted Contested
A real concept in Indian tradition, with real warnings attached inside that tradition — which the export version largely dropped. ⚠ And the Western lineage carries its own problem: Yogi Bhajan, who brought “Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan” to the West, was the subject of an independent investigation commissioned in 2020 by the organisations he founded, conducted by the firm An Olive Branch, which examined allegations of sexual abuse and found them credible. Several senior teachers left the organisation afterwards.
Ayurveda — filed wrongly by almost everyone Attested
Ayurveda is its own historical medical system, with its own classical texts (Caraka Sa—hitā, Sušruta Sa—hitā), its own theory of the došas, its own diagnostics and its own long institutional history. It is not “the medical wing of yoga” and it is not interchangeable with chakras or karma — those come from different streams. Lumping it into a general bin of “Eastern wellness” is precisely the simplification step of the Machine.
⚠ Practical safety: studies of commercially available Ayurvedic products have repeatedly found lead, mercury and arsenic at harmful levels, with rasa shastra metallic preparations (bhasma) more often affected. Do not take metallic preparations, and treat imported supplements as unverified unless independently tested.
Namaste, mala beads, dreamcatchers, white sage Transmitted
Each has a source community, and in several cases a specific one that has said publicly what it thinks. The symbolism reference carries white sage in detail, including the conservation problem.
The steelman — and this page needs it more than any other
Without this section the page is just scolding, and scolding teaches nobody.
- Cultures have always borrowed. Buddhism transformed beyond recognition moving from India to China to Japan, and Zen is not therefore fake. There is no pure original anywhere, and demanding one is a category error.
- Living traditions change too. The India of 1500 is not the India of today. Framing source cultures as static museums is its own kind of condescension.
- Many source-community teachers actively chose to share. Vivekananda came to Chicago in 1893 to teach the West. Yogananda moved to America. Suzuki brought Zen. They were not robbed; they were evangelising, and treating every transmission as theft erases their agency.
- Gatekeeping has its own harms. Rigid purity policing shuts people out of things that would genuinely help them, and it is frequently wielded by people with no more claim to authority than anybody else.
- The reframed versions help real people. Somebody whose anxiety is genuinely eased by a yoga class is not doing something wrong.
So what is the actual objection? Not borrowing. Four specific things:
- Unacknowledged borrowing — the source erased from the description.
- Claiming the borrowed version is the authentic original.
- Commercial extraction from communities that see none of the money.
- Distortions that actively harm people — which is §08.
That is a defensible, specific position. “Don't do yoga” is not.
⚠ Where the borrowed material does its worst damage
If this library does nothing else, it should equip you to recognise this sentence and refuse it.
⚠ The structure that was imported without its checks
The teacher–student power relationship came west. The accountability structures that imperfectly checked it did not. What follows is stated carefully — allegations described as allegations, with the forum and the outcome named, because getting this wrong would be its own harm.
The practical form of this, for you: ask what your teacher is accountable to, and to whom. If the honest answer is nobody, that is not a lineage — it is an unregulated position of trust.
⚠ Risk
What a new seeker should actually ask
- Where did this come from, and when? Ask about the version you are being taught, not the concept.
- What got left behind when it was brought over? Usually the ethics, the goal, the community, and the teacher's accountability.
- Who profits, and are they from the tradition?
- ⚠ Is this telling me that my suffering is my fault? If yes, leave. That is the line on this page.
- Does my teacher have accountability to anyone at all?
- Am I being told the original is the same as this? It usually isn't — and a good teacher will say so freely, without being asked twice.
Provenance
The Sīvaka Sutta Attested
Sa—yutta Nikāya 36.21, in the Vedanā Sa—yutta. The wanderer Mo iyasīvaka at Rājagaha, in the Bamboo Grove. Eight causes of feeling: bile, phlegm, wind, an imbalance of the three, change of climate, careless care of the body, assault, and the result of kamma as the eighth. Available in translations by Bhikkhu Bodhi (The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, 2000), Thanissaro Bhikkhu, and others, freely readable online.
The Western chakra system Contemporary
Kurt Leland, Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), dating the modern system's arrival to June 1977. Christopher Hills, Nuclear Evolution: Discovery of the Rainbow Body (1977). Charles W. Leadbeater, The Chakras (1927). Sir John Woodroffe as “Arthur Avalon,” The Serpent Power (1919). Anodea Judith, Wheels of Life (1987).
Modern postural yoga Studied
Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010). Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) at the Mysore Palace; his students Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi and T.K.V. Desikachar. The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali; the Ha ha Yoga Pradīpikā.
The abuse cases Contested
Stated as allegations, with forums and outcomes named. Choudhury: Jafa-Bodden civil verdict, Los Angeles, January 2016; arrest warrant for non-payment; six separate civil suits, several settled; denials of wrongdoing and no criminal charges brought. Pattabhi Jois: allegations by former students, with R. Sharath Jois's public acknowledgement of witnessing improper adjustments. John Friend: resignation from Anusara, 2012. Yogi Bhajan: independent investigation by An Olive Branch, commissioned by the organisations he founded, reporting in 2020.
Standing Practitioner
This page is written from outside every tradition it discusses. It should be reviewed by a Hindu scholar and a Buddhist teacher before publication. Careful sourcing is not the same as standing, and on this page that distinction matters more than anywhere else in the library.
✦ For practitioners
- Date what you teach, out loud, in the class. “The rainbow colours are from 1977 and I still find them useful” costs you nothing and models the entire method.
- Never say a student's suffering is karmic. Not their illness, not their assault, not their poverty. This is the single most damaging sentence available to you.
- Name what you are accountable to — a body, a code, a supervisor, a complaints route. If the answer is nothing, build one before you teach anybody.
- Ask before you touch, every time, and mean it. The adjustment is the specific vector in §09, and consent obtained once at the start of a course is not consent.
- Send people to the source. Singleton, Leland, the suttas, actual teachers in actual lineages. The material is more interesting than the myth, and pointing at it costs you nothing but authority you should not have wanted.
✦ For those guiding others
- Watch for the person using karma against themselves. They will often say it lightly. Ask where they learned it, and then tell them about §04 — it lands better as history than as reassurance.
- Do not let “it's modern” become a demolition. The goal is a person who knows what they are standing on, not one who has been talked out of something that was helping them.
- Teach the Machine rather than the examples. A student who can run those seven steps themselves is protected from the next thing as well as this one.
- Take the physical risk seriously. Injury in postural yoga is common and under-discussed, and beginners genuinely cannot tell strain from damage yet.
- When someone tells you their teacher is beyond question, that is the topic. Not the tradition, not the technique — the accountability.
We are not vouching for these, only pointing at them.
- Kurt Leland, Rainbow Body (2016). If you read one thing from this page, read this — it is the backbone of §02.
- Mark Singleton, Yoga Body (2010). The scholarship on where modern āsana actually came from.
- The Sīvaka Sutta, SN 36.21. Free online in several translations, and about two pages. Read it before you accept anything anybody tells you about karma.
- Ronald Purser, McMindfulness (2019).
- Teachers inside the traditions themselves — Hindu, Buddhist, Jain — writing about their own practice. This page is a map of what was taken; they are the thing itself.