Six Yogas of Naropa

The Six Yogas of Naropa gather the completion stage practices transmitted from the Indian tantric master Naropa to his Tibetan translator and student Marpa, who carried the teachings into Tibet in the eleventh century, from where they passed through Marpa's own student Milarepa and became foundational to the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, while also spreading, with some variation, into other schools' completion stage curricula, making the set one of the most influential single bodies of advanced tantric practice in the whole of Tibetan Buddhism. The six practices catalogued together are inner heat, tummo, which the set traditionally places first as a foundation supporting the practices that follow, the illusory body, dream yoga, milam, clear light, transference of consciousness, phowa, and, in most traditional enumerations, bardo yoga, working directly with the intermediate state itself, together forming a coordinated curriculum rather than six unrelated techniques loosely grouped by convention, each yoga building on capacities the others are understood to develop.

The tradition generally presents the Six Yogas as a coherent, sequenced system rather than a menu from which a practitioner might select individual techniques freely, with tummo's cultivation of inner heat and the associated subtle body mastery traditionally regarded as establishing a foundation the other five yogas draw on, an interdependence that is part of why serious study of the set is undertaken within a structured, teacher guided retreat and study framework rather than piecemeal.

Every element of the set is transmission bound, requiring formal tantric empowerment and ongoing guidance from a qualified holder of the relevant lineage, consistent with the individual entries elsewhere in the atlas addressing tummo, phowa, milam and Chod each on their own terms, and this entry accordingly gathers the set's history, structure and lineage rather than any technical content belonging to any of its six component practices. The Six Yogas remain an actively taught and practised curriculum within Kagyu and other Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and retreat centres today, including in the Tibetan exile community and among Western students who have received appropriate empowerment, a living transmission that traces, through an unbroken teacher to student lineage the tradition itself documents carefully, back to Naropa's own eleventh century Indian teaching.