The game
Leela: the yoga of snakes and arrows
Leela is not a game that someone invented for amusement. It was designed and refined over 2,000 years ago by sages and saints of the Hindu Indian traditions as a teaching device — a way of carrying the vast maps of Vedanta, yoga and the Puranas onto a single cloth that a family could sit around.
One board, many names
The same 72-square board travelled across India for centuries under different names, and Jain and Buddhist teachers made their own versions with their own squares.
- Leela / लीला
- Sanskrit for divine play — the universe understood as the play of consciousness.
- Gyan Chaupar
- “The game of knowledge”, the name used across North India and in Jain and Buddhist versions.
- Moksha Patam
- “The ladder to liberation” — the board as a map from bondage to freedom.
- Paramapada Sopanam
- “Steps to the highest place”, the South Indian Vaishnava name.
In the nineteenth century the board was carried to Britain, stripped of its Sanskrit squares and its philosophy, and sold as Snakes and Ladders — and later, in America, as Chutes and Ladders. The children's game most of the world knows is the last, thinnest echo of a contemplative practice.
Snakes, arrows and karma
The board is a map of consciousness rather than a track. Arrows (often drawn as ladders) rise from squares of virtue: devotion, good company, right knowledge, charity, selfless service. Snakes fall from squares of contraction: vanity, greed, anger, delusion, bad company.
Nothing on the board is punishment. A snake is simply the natural consequence of a state, drawn honestly. And the die is not chance in the Western sense — in the traditional reading, the roll expresses the karma you arrive with. That is why the same player, asking a different question, plays a different game.
The planes of the board
The 72 squares are grouped into planes, rising from the earth to cosmic consciousness. Numbering and titles vary between traditions and between painted boards; the version below follows the widely used board popularised by Harish Johari in Leela: The Game of Self-Knowledge.
The Plane of Earth
Birth, delusion, greed, anger — the ground floor of ordinary life.
The Plane of Fantasy
Imagination, jealousy, purification — the mind's first stirrings.
The Plane of Nescience
Ignorance, entertainment, envy, sorrow — living unawake.
The Plane of Feeling
Devotional service, good company, joy and pleasure.
The Plane of Effort
Penance, right action, charity — the will engaged.
The Plane of Balance
Neutrality, clarity, the middle path.
The Plane of Human Spirit
Self-knowledge, humanity, sadness, prayer.
The Plane of Austerity
Earth, plane of ascetics, the fire of discipline.
The Plane of Reality
Truth, spiritual devotion, the plane of the sun.
Higher Planes
Bliss, cosmic good, cosmic consciousness drawing near.
Absolute
68 is Cosmic Consciousness, the end of the journey.