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Sacred Correspondences
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What Is Named in Public and What Is Not

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What Is Named in Public and What Is Not

What can honestly be said about the Six Yogas in public falls short of what the practices themselves involve, and that gap is not an oversight in the record, it is how the tradition itself has always drawn the line. Their names, their lineage and their general doctrinal purpose, an accelerated completion stage path using the subtle body, are documented openly in academic scholarship and have been for decades. What is not published, and is not reproduced here, is the practice itself: the specific techniques, sequencing and internal content a practitioner is given only after formal empowerment, wang, from a qualified lama, and only then within a structured retreat undertaken under that teacher's direct guidance rather than studied independently from a text. The tradition's own reasoning is that these methods work with subtle energies in ways it holds to be genuinely capable of harm without a teacher's supervision, so the transmission requirement is presented as a safeguard built into the practice rather than as secrecy for its own sake. A reader can therefore learn a great deal about what the Six Yogas are and where they come from without ever being told, by this atlas or by the scholarship it draws on, how to perform them, because that content was never made public in the sources this entry depends on.

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Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Sources
The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism
Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton University Press, 2014The dictionary's definitional entry for the Six Yogas as the boundary of what this record states publiclyView the Source
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