Lung, Winds and Tantric Practice

Beyond ordinary medical usage, rlung carries a second, closely related sense in Tibetan Buddhist tantra, where subtle winds moving through a network of channels, rtsa (comparable to nadis), are the vehicle advanced practitioners work with directly in completion-stage practices, most famously the Six Yogas of Naropa, using controlled breath and visualization to draw these winds into the central channel as a basis for advanced meditative states. This tantric usage and the medical usage are historically and doctrinally connected rather than two unrelated ideas sharing one word, since Tibetan medicine and Tibetan Buddhist tantra developed within the same monastic and scholarly culture and share much of their subtle-body vocabulary.

In English-language scholarship and popular Tibetan Buddhist writing, lung is very commonly translated simply as "wind" or "inner wind," a literal and largely accurate rendering, though it can obscure the extent to which the term functions as a technical physiological and yogic category rather than the everyday meteorological one. As with prana and qi, lung is a concept internal to a living medical and religious tradition; it has not been the subject of a controlled scientific test of the kind applied to the Western esoteric claimants below, and is described here in the terms Sowa Rigpa and Tibetan Buddhist tantra themselves use.