Sowa Rigpa, the Tibetan science of healing, organizes the body around three nyepa, dynamic principles usually translated as humors: lung (wind), tripa (bile) and beken (phlegm), a framework the tradition's foundational text, the Four Tantras (rGyud bzhi), sets out as the basis of both physiology and diagnosis. Lung is the subtlest of the three, linked to the air element, described with the qualities rough, light, cold, subtle and mobile, and responsible for breath, speech, movement, sensory and mental function, and the passage of substances through the body; because it is the most mobile humor it is also the most prone to imbalance and the hardest to treat predictably.
Tibetan medical texts divide lung into five functional winds by location, a scheme closely paralleling the Ayurvedic pancha vayu with which Sowa Rigpa shares centuries of textual and doctrinal exchange, reflecting Tibetan medicine's own layered history of borrowing from Indian Ayurveda, Chinese medicine and indigenous Tibetan and Bon sources. Lung disorders are treated through diet, behavioral regulation, external therapies such as moxibustion and, in more advanced or stubborn cases, through medicated compounds specifically formulated to calm excess wind, reflecting the tradition's own diagnostic logic that lung's mobility makes it uniquely able to aggravate or complicate the other two humors.