From Tilopa to Milarepa, Six Names for One Path

The Six Yogas trace their transmission through four names the Kagyu tradition treats as an unbroken chain: the Indian mahasiddha Tilopa, who is said to have received the methods directly; his student Naropa, a former abbot of the great monastic university of Nalanda who left institutional scholarship to seek Tilopa out; the Tibetan translator Marpa, who studied under Naropa in India and carried the teachings back to Tibet; and Marpa's own student Milarepa, whose life as a solitary yogi became the model later Kagyu practitioners measured their own retreat against. The six practices named in the set, inner heat, the illusory body, dream, clear light, the transference of consciousness, and the intermediate state, work with the subtle body's channels and energies rather than with ordinary meditative concentration alone, which is why the tradition classes them among the completion stage tantric methods rather than among the preliminary or generation stage practices that come before them. Their stated purpose is an accelerated path to the same awakening the sutra vehicle also aims at, using the body's own subtle structure as a more direct tool than sustained ethical and contemplative cultivation alone provides. Every other lineage that transmits versions of these six, not only Kagyu, traces its own recension back to the same Tilopa to Naropa lineage as its source.