Naropa

The Tibetan life of Naropa opens with him at the height of an academic career, a celebrated scholar at a great monastic university, when a hideous old woman appears to him and asks whether he understands the words of the texts or their sense. He answers the words, and she is delighted. He then says he also understands the sense, and she weeps, because that is a lie. She tells him to go and find her brother Tilopa.

What follows is a sequence of ordeals, twelve major and twelve minor in the standard telling. Tilopa refuses to teach, behaves outrageously, and at intervals issues an instruction which Naropa obeys without hesitation: to jump from a temple roof, to walk into a fire, to be beaten, to leap into a leech-filled swamp, to give away everything. Each time he is broken, and each time Tilopa restores him and gives a fragment of teaching. At the end Tilopa strikes him in the face with a sandal and he understands.

The narrative is a hagiography of a specific kind, and its subject is the uselessness of scholarship without realisation. It was written and transmitted in Tibet, in monasteries whose own students were spending years on exactly the textual study it warns about, which is a tension the tradition maintained deliberately. Of the historical Indian teacher behind it, very little independent can be said.

The set of practices that carries Naropa's name is a group of advanced tantric methods: the generation of inner heat, the recognition of the illusory nature of the body, the training of awareness during dreams, the practice of the clear light of sleep, the transference of consciousness at the moment of death, and the practice of the intermediate state after it. They are among the best known contents of Tibetan Buddhism and among the least publicly available, because in every lineage that holds them they are transmitted only with empowerment, preliminary training and a teacher, and that requirement is part of the teaching rather than an administrative rule around it. This atlas describes them and does not set them out.

The route is well documented. Naropa taught Marpa, the Tibetan translator who came south with gold to pay for instruction; Marpa carried the material home and taught Milarepa; and the whole Kagyu family of lineages descends from that transmission, with the Six Yogas as the completion stage practices at its core.

One honest qualification. The Six Yogas as a fixed and numbered set is a Tibetan formulation rather than something Naropa is known to have taught in that form, and the individual practices are attested across the Indian tantric literature independently of him. The name marks a channel of transmission, which is what a lineage is for.