The Material

5. The ten winds

The rlung differentiates into ten currents: five root winds (rtsa ba’i rlung) and five branch winds (yan lag gi rlung).

The five root winds

The five branch winds

Operate the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. Subtler, less important in practice, and named differently depending on the tantra.

The central couple

The practice condenses into one relation: the upper wind descends, the lower ascends, they meet at the navel.

This is the mechanics of the vase breath (bum pa can, bumba-chen, “like a vase”): inhalation, slight lowering of the diaphragm, slight lifting of the pelvic floor, and the air is “closed” in the abdomen as in a vessel.

And in purely somatic terms: this is regulation of intra-abdominal pressure by coordinated action of diaphragm and pelvic floor. The old language calls it “union of the winds”. Biomechanics says the same thing with other words.

The test

No technique required. Observe, while sitting:

• On the inhalation, what moves first? If the shoulders rise and the abdomen stays still, the upper wind is working without the lower.
• On the exhalation, is there any participation from the pelvis, or is it entirely silent?

The observation alone changes the pattern within a few breaths. This is not mysticism — it is motor control.

6. Thig le: the white and the red drop

thig le (tigle) — “drop, dot, sphere”. The third component: the condensed essence.

The two drops

The model says that every human receives two essences at conception:

• White drop (thig le dkar po) — from the father. Seat: crown of the head. Quality: cool, bliss, energy.
• Red drop (thig le dmar po) — from the mother. Seat: navel. Quality: warm, vitality, heat.

The central mechanics

In tummo (chapter 22), the sequence is:

1. Heat is kindled at the navel — the red drop is activated
2. The heat rises up the central channel
3. It melts the white drop at the crown
4. The white drop descends, passing through the wheels

And each stage of the descent is associated with an increasing state of bliss — the so-called four joys.

The same structure in death

What is striking: the same movement is described in the dying process — but reversed and involuntary: the white drop descends from the crown, the red ascends from the navel, they meet in the heart (chapter 24).

That is: the higher practice is voluntary rehearsal of what will happen obligatorily. This is the logic that unifies Part F.

The honest note

This material has an explicit sexual dimension in the texts, and is often either suppressed or inversely over-emphasised in Western presentation.

Two things deserve precision:

First, in the overwhelming majority of cases the practice is visualisation, not somatic — done alone, with an imagined consort.

Second, the rhetoric of “tantric sexuality” in the West is largely a modern construction, and has been used as a pretext in documented cases of abuse (chapter 27).

7. Drod: heat as the sign of life

drod (drö) — heat. And it is, in this system, the basic sign of life.

In medicine

The me drod (me-drö), “the fire of heat”, is the digestive capacity — and all Tibetan dietetics is organised around it. Weak heat means food is not transformed, however good it is.

In the climate of the Tibetan plateau — high altitude, dry, cold — this is not theory. Cold is the main pathogen.

In practice

Heat is the sign of success. In the texts, the signs of progress in tummo are somatic and verifiable: cold tolerance, warmth in the extremities, the capacity to stay with minimal clothing.

And there is a whole title for it: ras pa (repa), “the one dressed in cotton” — the one who does not need wool. The most famous yogi of the tradition, Milarepa, carries the epithet in his very name.

And the connection

Note the coherence:

• The red drop is warm and sits at the navel
• The wind me mnyam (digestion) sits at the navel
• Tummo ignites at the navel

The navel is, in this system, the furnace — both medically and tantrically. There is no separation between the heat that digests and the heat that transforms. It is the same heat, in different degrees.

8. Bön — and what is really indigenous

Here precision is required, because there is much confusion in circulation.

The myth

The popular version: Bön (pön) was the ancient shamanic religion of Tibet before Buddhism, with drums, ecstasies and sacrifices, and Buddhism replaced it.

The scholarly picture

Organised Bön is roughly contemporary with the second propagation of Buddhism — that is, it was formed as a recognisable tradition around the 10th–11th century.

It has monasteries, canon of scriptures, monastic discipline, philosophical scholasticism, and its own Dzogchen tradition — and is structurally very close to the Nyingma school of Buddhism.

It regards as its founder Tonpa Shenrab, from the land of Zhangzhung (western Tibet) and ultimately from Tazig (somewhere west — possibly a reflection of Persian contact).

The image of the “pre-Buddhist shamanic Bön” is largely a construction: in part from Buddhist polemic that wanted a primitive opponent, in part from 19th–20th century Western romanticism.

What then is genuinely indigenous

There is a real pre-Buddhist substratum, and it is not what people think. It is less spectacular and much more everyday:

1. Worship of local beings. yul lha (gods of the place), sa bdag (lords of the earth), klu (lu, water beings), btsan (tsen). The landscape is inhabited and has rights. Before you build, dig, or change anything, you ask.

2. The lha bsangs (la-sang) — the smoke offering from juniper branches. The most everyday ritual in Tibet, to the present day.

3. And most important for this text: the bla.

The bla — an indigenous vital force

The bla (la) is a concept that does not come from Buddhism and does not fit well with it.

It is a vital force that:

• inhabits the body but can leave it
• departs from terror, from shock, from loss
• can be captured by spirits
• its loss causes wasting, torpor, melancholy, illness
• moves inside the body according to the day of the month — there are tables with its position

And there is a whole ritual of recovery: bla ‘gugs (la-guk, “calling the la”) and bla bslu (la-lu, “ransoming the la”) — where a ransom is offered to what holds it, a garment of the person is used, and there is a bla rdo, a “stone of the la” that functions as an anchoring point.

This is the most clearly indigenous part of the system — and it coexists with Buddhism without ever being fully incorporated into it. Buddhism has no place for a soul that is lost and ransomed.

The structural resonance across cultures is sharp. See the Andean guide, chapter 15, on mancharisqa and despacho — the ransom paid to the land to recall what was taken by shock. The convergence is noted in the Convergence Asymmetry.