Maps of the inner body

These maps were drawn from the inside, in their own vocabularies, over two thousand years. They are not anatomy, and nothing here claims they were secretly describing it. The claim is narrower: where the traditions and modern reports agree on a place in the body, there is often a real structure there — a correspondence specific enough to be checked blind. Correspondence found after the fact is the weakest kind of evidence. Five of these maps are drawn on one body in the atlas (Maps), beside its perforators, knots and deep channels: the channels and points of Chinese medicine and its sinew channels on the skin, and the Daoist orbit, the yogic cakras and the Tibetan channels and wheels inside the figure, where the traditions place them.

Chinese medicine works with two kinds of structure. The first are points. The tender ashi points, named by Sun Simiao for the patient’s cry when they are pressed, follow one rule: take the painful spot as the point. The 361 classical acupoints lie along twelve primary channels and two midline vessels — the Governor (Du) up the back and the Conception (Ren) down the front.

The second is the fascia. The Neijing describes the cou li, the interstices between skin and flesh, through which the defensive qi circulates and pathogenic “wind” enters. It also describes the jing jin, twelve sinew channels of muscle and connective tissue, each of which knots — 結, jié, to bind or tie — at bony prominences such as the ankle, knee, hip, shoulder and cheekbone, and whose treatment is heat at the painful spot. Needling and acupressure act at points; cupping and gua sha act on the plane, lifting and shearing it until “sha” rises.

For decades, Chinese researchers have also documented propagated sensation along the channel: stimulating a point produces warmth or tingling that travels along the meridian at one to ten centimetres a second and is halted by pressure or cold — much the profile of a dilation travelling along a tree of vessels.

In neidan, internal alchemy, the practitioner circulates breath-energy around the microcosmic orbit: up the Governor vessel along the spine and over the head, then down the Conception vessel in front, through gates where the flow is said to be blocked until the work opens them. Three dantian — below the navel, at the heart and between the brows — are the fields in which the work is done. The manuals counsel patience: the orbit opens over years, and is not to be forced.

The yogic body is a network of nāḍīs — seventy-two thousand in the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, three hundred and fifty thousand in the Śiva Saṃhitā — of which three matter most: suṣumṇā in the centre, with iḍā and piṅgalā winding on either side. Along the central channel sit the cakras, and at three of them, knots: the granthis of Brahmā low in the body, of Viṣṇu at the heart, and of Rudra between the brows. Breath and attention pierce them in turn, and each piercing marks a stage.

In the kuṇḍalinī literature the energy is a serpent coiled at the base of the spine, rising through the knots to the crown. The rising is described as heat, currents and involuntary movement — the kriyās — and sometimes as a crisis that takes years to settle. One number is worth holding lightly: seventy-two thousand channels, and about a hundred thousand small perforators.

Tibetan practice works with tsa, channels; lung, winds; and tigle, drops. A central channel runs from the crown to below the navel, with right and left channels beside it that coil around it at the channel-wheels, forming channel-knots (rtsa mdud), tightest at the heart. The Six Yogas and the tsa lung exercises untie them by working the winds with the breath — and the traditions warn against untying them too fast.

Dzogchen adds a channel of its own, the kati, a crystal tube joining the heart to the eyes, and makes the tradition’s most extreme claim about the body: the rainbow body (’ja’ lus), in which a realised practitioner’s body is said to shrink at death and dissolve into light, leaving only hair and nails. On the perforator view the endpoint is humbler, and measurable: a body with all its perforators open and none of its knots.

In the Vipassana taught by S. N. Goenka, gross, solid bodily sensations are saṅkhāras — congealed reactions — that dissolve under equanimous attention. This is almost word for word what happens on a foam roller, with attention as the probe. The suttas describe the rapture of deep concentration suffusing the whole body, as water kneaded into a ball of bath powder soaks it through, within and without — the well-being that can come with a release.

After the awakening, the Udāna says, a great storm came, and the nāga king Mucalinda coiled around the seated Buddha and spread his hood over his head for seven days. In the iconography the hood has seven heads and forms a canopy over the crown, where the uṣṇīṣa rises from the top of the Buddha’s head. It is imagery, not evidence — but serpents appear wherever the traditions describe what moves in the body: kuṇḍalinī coiled at the base of the spine, the nāga’s hood over the crown, and the snake-like rising some practitioners describe today.

Japanese has an everyday word for a knot: kori (凝り), a congealing — and katakori, stiff shoulders, is among the most common complaints in the country. Shiatsu presses tsubo, points; Zen training gathers the breath into the hara, below the navel.