Yogic, tantric and related literatures describe a body of channels and centres alongside the physical one. Reading these descriptions as anatomy misunderstands what the texts were doing.
The maps are prescriptive rather than descriptive
These accounts appear inside practice manuals, attached to instructions about breathing, posture, visualisation and recitation.
They function as directions for where to place attention and what to imagine, in the way a set of instructions for a technique might rather than a report of observation.
Read that way the descriptions become coherent, since a map used for directing attention does not need to correspond to dissection to do its job.
The details vary between sources
The number of centres, their locations, their associated colours and sounds and the paths of the channels differ substantially between texts and lineages.
Modern popular accounts usually present a single standardised scheme, which is a later synthesis rather than a shared tradition transmitted intact.
The variation matters because it shows these were working systems developed within particular practices, not a single anatomy that different authors described more or less accurately.
Vocabulary was borrowed from the physical body
Terms for channels, winds, drops and centres draw on ordinary words for veins, breath and fluids, which is the usual pattern when a tradition needs vocabulary for something new.
Later readers, including early translators, sometimes took the borrowing literally and searched for physical correlates.
Traditional commentators themselves frequently address the question and give differing answers, so the ambiguity is internal to the traditions rather than imposed from outside.
Experience is what the descriptions organise
Practitioners engaged in intensive breath and concentration practices report sensations of heat, pressure, movement and localisation, and these reports are consistent enough to be studied.
The maps give such experiences a vocabulary, a location and an interpretation, which is what allows a teacher and student to discuss them at all.
Whether the framework explains the sensations or shapes what practitioners notice is a genuine open question, and both processes are likely involved.
Intensive practices are not risk-free
Traditional sources warn repeatedly that advanced breath and energy practices require supervision and preparation, and describe adverse effects in some detail.
Contemporary reports of difficult experiences during intensive retreats are documented, and researchers have begun cataloguing them systematically.
Anyone approaching such practices should do so with an experienced teacher, and should treat persistent distress as a reason to consult a clinician rather than to intensify the practice.