Rlung, Rtsa and the Tibetan Body: A Complete Guide·Part F of 7
The Practice
sngon 'gro (ngöndro) — "that which precedes". The preliminaries.
20. Ngöndro: the hundred thousands
sngon ‘gro (ngöndro) — “that which precedes”. The preliminaries.
And it is one of the most somatic practices any tradition has produced.
What it includes
Four practices, of 100,000 repetitions each (in practice 111,111, to cover errors):
- Refuge with full prostrations — full-body, with the body falling entirely to the ground
- Purification mantra
- Mandala offerings — with piles of rice on a metal plate, with specific hand movement
- Guru yoga
The somatic scale
A hundred thousand full prostrations is, on average, six months to three years of daily work.
It is real endurance training: hundreds of repetitions a day, with weight on hands and knees, in repeated motion.
And the tradition knows the problems: injuries of knees, shoulders and wrists are recognised, and practitioners use wooden boards, gloves and aprons.
Why it exists
Three reasons, and they are all practical:
1. It is a filter. The number is not symbolic. Someone who is not willing to do three years of repetitive somatic work before approaching the advanced material will not have the persistence that material requires.
2. It changes the body before the mind. Repetition on this scale installs a hexis — and the tradition considers this a precondition, not a warm-up.
3. It exhausts a specific form of enthusiasm. The person who is interested in spectacular experiences rarely endures the hundred-thousandth prostration. And this, from the standpoint of chapter 27, is a feature, not a bug.
21. Trul khor
‘khrul ‘khor (trul-khor) — literally “magical wheel” or “mechanism”. The word is also used for machines.
Full name: rtsa rlung ‘khrul ‘khor — “the mechanism of the channels and the winds”.
What it is
Dynamic movements performed while the breath is held.
This is the structural characteristic and what distinguishes it from other somatic systems. The sequence is:
- Inhalation and holding in “vase” (bum pa can)
- Movement — turns, bends, rotations, some intense
- Often a drop (beb) — a controlled sitting with force into position
- Exhalation
It is not static postures. The movement happens inside the retention.
The documentation
The most striking visual evidence is in the Lukhang, the small temple behind the Potala in Lhasa: 17th-century wall paintings depicting series of yogis in these positions, with clear sequences.
There is also the line called Yantra Yoga, attributed to the translator Vairotsana (8th c.) and known in the West mainly through Namkhai Norbu.
The warning
Retentions with movement really change intra-thoracic pressure, venous return and cerebral perfusion. The tradition places them after years of preparation and transmits them with supervision.
The contraindications are the expected ones and are not negotiable: hypertension, cardiac conditions, glaucoma, epilepsy, pregnancy.
22. Tummo — and what the measurements show
gtum mo (tummo) — “the fierce one”, “the furious woman”. The most famous practice of the tradition, and the only one in this whole field that has been measured in the laboratory.
The practice, in general outline
(Description, not instruction.)
- Posture, with tightening of the lower muscles
- Vase breath — strong inhalation, retention, pressure downward from above and upward from below, so that the air is “closed” in the lower abdomen
- Visualisation of a flame at the navel, small and very hot
- With each breath, the flame grows and rises up the central channel
- It reaches the crown, melts the white drop
- The white drop descends, passing through each wheel, with increasing bliss
The test
The classical verification: the practitioner sits on a freezing night and dries wet sheets with the heat of their body. The number of sheets measures the success.
And the title ras pa (repa), “dressed in cotton”, is exactly this — proof by garment.
The data
Benson et al., Nature, 1982. Measurements on practitioners in Upper Dharamsala. Recorded increases of finger and toe temperature of up to ~8°C, without change in core temperature.
Benson et al., 1990. Observations of monks at low temperatures, drying wet sheets.
Kozhevnikov et al., PLoS ONE, 2013. The most important. Studied nuns in eastern Tibet and Western practitioners. Findings:
- Rise in core temperature — not only extremities — to levels of mild fever, sustained
- The mechanism was analysed in two components: the forced breathing produces the heat (thermogenesis through muscular activity and increased metabolism); the visualisation sustains it
- Western practitioners, without the monastic training, achieved the thermogenesis but not the sustaining
How to read it
The phenomenon is real. Not fraud and not mythology.
The mechanism is ordinary. Isometric muscular contraction, forced breathing, increased metabolic rate, peripheral vasodilation. Nothing exotic is required.
And this does not diminish it. The noteworthy thing is not that heat is produced — it is that it is produced voluntarily, targeted, and sustained through mental work. The voluntary control of a function considered autonomic is the finding.
And it shows something broader: a tradition can have wrong theory and correct technique. The flame at the navel does not exist; the visualisation of it does something measurable.
23. Sleep and dream
Chapter 3 noted that there are three states in which the mind thins by itself. Sleep is the one that comes every night, for free — and the tradition considered it unjustifiable to waste it.
Two practices
rmi lam (milam) — dream yoga. The goal: to recognise inside the dream that you are dreaming, and then to work within it — change the content, verify it is fabricated, use it as a field.
‘od gsal (ö-sel) — yoga of clear light, or yoga of sleep. More difficult: maintaining awareness in deep, dreamless sleep.
Why
The explicit reason is chapter 24: the dying process has the same structure as the entry into sleep — withdrawal of the senses, dissolution, and finally a state without content.
So sleep is a daily, harmless rehearsal. Every night, at no cost.
The modern convergence
Lucid dreaming is a confirmed phenomenon. The group of Stephen LaBerge showed experimentally that sleepers in REM can execute pre-arranged eye movements as a signal — that is, communicate from inside.
And the techniques used today — reality checks, dream journals, intention before sleep — are functionally the same as those of the texts.
It is the second case in this document where the tradition described something correctly long before it was measured.
24. The dissolution
Here is perhaps the most detailed phenomenology of death that any tradition has recorded.
The four outer dissolutions
| Dissolution | Outer sign | Inner sign |
|---|---|---|
| Earth → Water | Heaviness, body “sinks”, loss of strength, blurred vision | Vision like a mirage |
| Water → Fire | Dry mouth, cessation of secretions, blurred hearing | Vision like smoke |
| Fire → Wind | Loss of heat, from extremities toward centre; no longer recognises | Vision like fireflies |
| Wind → Consciousness | Breathing stops; clinical death | Vision like a lamp flame |
And here the tradition says something unusual: here it is not finished.
The three inner phases
| Phase | Tibetan | What happens | How it is described |
|---|---|---|---|
| White appearance | snang ba | White drop descends from crown | Whiteness, like moonlight in clear sky |
| Red increase | mched pa | Red drop rises from navel | Reddishness, like sunlight |
| Black near-attainment | nyer thob | The two meet in the heart | Black; loss of consciousness |
And then, ‘chi ba’i ‘od gsal — the clear light of death. The very subtle state, naked.
Why it matters
First, the educational argument. All the higher practice — the tummo with the drops, the yoga of sleep — is rehearsal for this sequence. The practitioner has voluntarily passed through similar states, so that when they come obligatorily they do not find them unknown.
Second, the honest assessment. A portion of the outer signs corresponds to observable clinical reality: the peripheral withdrawal of circulation, the drop in temperature from the extremities, the dryness, the loss of senses in a specific order, the agonal breathing patterns. These are recorded in palliative care.
The inner phases are not — they are not observable and cannot be verified.
Third, and the most practically useful: independent of what happens after, having a detailed, named, expected mapping of the dying process changes how you meet it. It is the difference between falling into unknown darkness and walking into a room whose map you have seen.
25. Bardo
bar do (bardo) — simply “between two”. Intermediate state.
The six bardos
The word does not mean only “after death”. The Nyingma tradition enumerates six:
- Of life — from birth to death. And this is an intermediate state too
- Of dream
- Of meditation
- Of death — the process of chapter 24
- Of reality — the visions after death
- Of becoming — toward the next birth
That life itself is a bardo is the essential point, and is usually lost in popular presentations.
The text — and the necessary corrections
The famous book is called in Tibetan Bar do thos grol chen mo — “The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State”.
Five things that must be said:
1. It is not called “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”. The title is Evans-Wentz’s 1927 invention, made by analogy to the “Egyptian Book of the Dead” to sell to a Western audience.
2. Evans-Wentz did not read Tibetan. The translation was done by Kazi Dawa Samdup; Evans-Wentz edited and added heavy Theosophical framing that is not in the original.
3. It is a terma. That is, a “hidden treasure”, revealed by Karma Lingpa in the 14th century. It is not an ancient text in the usual sense — and the whole terma tradition is itself internally disputed.
4. It is one text, not the Tibetan book on death. There are dozens, from different schools, with different details.
5. It is a liturgical text, not a doctrinal one. It is read aloud, to the dying or dead person, as real-time guidance. It is not a theory of the afterlife; it is a script for a specific occasion.
The practical part
Regardless of what one believes, the text does something few cultures do: it gives the living a role and words to say beside a person who is dying.
And the accompanying instructions are explicitly practical: do not make noise, do not weep loudly, do not move the body abruptly, speak calmly, use their name.
This is, in essence, a protocol of palliative care — and modern palliative protocols say very similar things, by another route.
26. Ten practical principles
There is no such list in the tradition. The following is synthesis. Each principle is marked: [tantric], [medical], [lojong], [modern].
1. Work the horse, not the rider [tantric]
Do not try to control thought with thought. Change the breath, posture, tone, focus — and the mind follows. It is the foundational principle of chapter 1 and the only one you need to remember if you forget the rest.
2. What you do with the breath, you do to the mind [tantric]
And vice versa. There is no “just a breathing exercise”. Every change in the wind is a change in the mental state — which is why breath work is never neutral and is never done inattentively.
3. Periphery to centre, not bottom to top [tantric]
The system does not aim at ascent. It aims at gathering. When you feel scattered, the movement is not “higher” — it is inward, toward the heart.
4. Transformation, not elimination [tantric]
The intensity of an emotion is not the problem; its direction is. A system that removes intensity removes vitality too. With an explicit limit: this is for inner work, not permission for behaviour (see #10).
5. Heat is life [medical]
Cold — in the body, in the relationship, in the space — is the basic pathogen of this system. Torpor, sadness and stiffness want warmth, oil, weight and food, not analysis.
6. If the practice produces anxiety, the problem is the practice [medical]
The most important principle in the document. Palpitation, insomnia, tightness in the chest and galloping thought after intense practice are not signs of progress or “resistance”. They are srog rlung. The answer is not more discipline.
7. When the wind rises, eat heavy [medical]
The treatment of the stimulated nervous system in this system is fatty food, warm liquids, sleep and company — not fasting, not cleansing, not isolation. And explicitly: the person should not remain alone.
8. The preceding first, and the number is not symbolic [tantric]
Ngöndro exists because repetition on a large scale does something that understanding does not. The small, repeatable act over years beats the intensive experience.
9. Take in the unpleasant [lojong]
Tonglen reverses the instinct of avoidance, and does so with the breathing cycle so that it stays somatic. You train the capacity to approach without closing.
10. And the limit: no saying holds to silence someone being harmed [modern]
“Do not blame others”, “everything is practice material”, “your resistance is the obstacle” — are tools of inner work. They are not answers to abuse. When a saying is used by someone with power to justify their behaviour, it has ceased to be spiritual guidance. Chapter 27 explains why this is not hypothetical.
The essential about the essentials
They are not ten. They are one, seen from ten angles:
The mind is not commanded. It is carried. Change the vehicle and the payload, and the passenger goes elsewhere.
27. The two warnings
This tradition has two distinct dangers. The first is clinical, and the tradition knows it. The second is institutional, and for decades it did not recognise it.
A. The clinical
This is chapter 16, and does not need repetition — only the connection with the modern data.
The literature on adverse effects of meditation has matured in the last decade. The most extensive qualitative study (Britton et al.) documented a spectrum of difficulties in practitioners: hyperarousal, insomnia, anxiety, depersonalisation, emerging traumatic material, loss of functionality.
The risk factors that emerge are exactly those named in chapter 16: intensity, duration, isolation, insufficient food and sleep, absence of supervision.
The useful thing here is not the warning. It is the protocol. Tibetan medicine does not simply say “be careful” — it says what to eat, how warm to be, who to have beside you, and how much to reduce.
B. The institutional
This must be said directly, because without it the text would be dishonest.
The facts
In the transfer of this tradition to the West there are multiple, independently documented cases of serious abuse by recognised teachers:
- In 2017, eight students published an open letter against Sogyal Rinpoche (founder of the Rigpa network and author of one of the most popular books in the field), with charges of physical, sexual and psychological abuse. An independent legal investigation that the organisation itself commissioned confirmed the charges.
- In 2018, independent reports led to the stepping down of the leader of Shambhala after charges of sexual abuse, and brought to light systemic issues in the organisation.
- Earlier, the successor to the founder of Shambhala knowingly transmitted HIV to students, with fatal consequences — and the leadership knew.
- There are other cases, with varying degrees of documentation.
In 2017, a group of Western students presented the issue directly to the Dalai Lama. His position was clear and public: he had already stated it in 1993, and his guidance was that students should publicise abuse, by name.
And now the structural issue
The important thing is not the list. It is why it was so difficult to speak.
Four elements of the tradition itself, each with sense in its place, combine into a mechanism of silence:
1. dam tshig (dam-tsik, samaya) — the sacred bond with the teacher. Its violation is described in the heaviest possible terms. And “violation” includes criticism.
2. Devotion to the teacher — in guru yoga, the student systematically trains to see the teacher’s actions as perfect. It is a real technique with a real purpose. It is also the perfect recipe for not recognising abuse.
3. “Crazy wisdom” — the idea that a realised teacher may behave incomprehensibly for didactic reasons. And chapter 18: “I do not suppress, I transform”.
4. Secrecy — tantric material is not discussed outside context. So there is no outside witness.
And here is the bitter point: the mechanism that was supposed to protect against deviation — the bond with the teacher as guarantee of correct guidance — is exactly the one that covered it up.
The conclusion, without varnish
This is not “a few bad apples”. It is a structural problem of power: a system with absolute hierarchy, internal judgement, secrecy, and theologically-ensured non-contestation has no mechanism of self-correction.
And this is not a judgement on the technique. Tummo works, srog rlung is a correct diagnosis, tonglen does something real. The problem is not the content — it is the structure of transmission.
The practical criterion that follows is simple and requires no metaphysics:
Any system that explains to you why your discomfort with someone’s behaviour is your own problem has already removed the organ with which you would recognise the harm.