What is the Six Yogas of Nāropa?
The Six Yogas of Nāropa (Nāro chos drug) are six tantric completion-stage practices at the heart of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. The six are gtum mo (inner heat), sgyu lus (illusory body), rmi lam (dream yoga), 'od gsal (clear light), bar do (intermediate state), and 'pho ba (consciousness transference). Each trains the practitioner to hold Mahāmudrā recognition through a state in which ordinary awareness tends to lose it: sleep, dreaming, dying, and after death. The curriculum was brought from India to Tibet by the translator Marpa, who received it from the eleventh-century master Nāropa.
The six practices
Gtum mo (Sanskrit caṇḍālī) is the inner-heat practice. Through visualisation and breath, the practitioner works with the subtle body's channels and drops to generate a bliss-emptiness awareness that the tradition treats as the gateway to the other five. Sgyu lus (māyā-deha) is the illusory-body practice: the ordinary sense of one's embodied form is recognised as having no more solidity than a dream-figure or a mirror reflection. Rmi lam (svapna) is dream yoga, in which the practitioner trains to know the dream as dream while remaining inside it. 'Od gsal (prabhāsvara) is the clear-light practice, bringing the same recognition into the gap between dream and waking and into the moment of falling asleep. Bar do (antarābhava) is the intermediate-state yoga, training for the analogous gap that opens after death. 'Pho ba (saṃkrānti) is consciousness transference: at the moment of death, the practitioner directs awareness out of the body rather than being carried by default karmic momentum.
The six are not a random collection. Each maps onto a state in which the mind tends to drop the Mahāmudrā recognition: sleep, dream, dying, post-death. They sit within the larger Tibetan curriculum: above the generation-stage (utpattikrama) deity-yoga and below formless Mahāmudrā resting. Gtum mo is the entry point; the other five build on the stability it produces. The Karma Kagyu three-year retreat is structured around this sequence.
The transmission line
The lineage traces back to Tilopa (988–1069), whom the Kagyu tradition regards as having received the teachings directly from the [dharmakāya](lexicon:dharmakaya) Buddha Vajradhara. Tilopa passed them to Nāropa (c. 1016–1100), and Nāropa to the Tibetan translator Marpa (1012–1097), who crossed the Himalayas several times to study with him in northern India. The inner-heat and dream-yoga practices are older than Nāropa: the eastern-Indian *mahāsiddha* tradition already taught versions of them in dohā song-poems and oral instruction. What Nāropa contributed was not the invention of the six but the synthetic shape that let Marpa carry them to Tibet as a single transmissible curriculum.
From Marpa the line passed to Milarepa (1052–1135), said to have practised gtum mo through twelve Himalayan winters in cotton robes. Milarepa taught Gampopa (1079–1153), a former Kadampa monk who joined Milarepa's tantric instruction to the gradual bhūmi path of monastic Mahāyāna. Gampopa's students founded the four major Kagyu sub-schools: Karma, Drikung, Drukpa, and Tsalpa. They have transmitted the curriculum to the present. The classical Tibetan exposition is Tsongkhapa's fifteenth-century Book of the Three Inspirations; the standard contemporary English presentation is Glenn Mullin's translation of that text alongside the Practice of the Six Yogas of Naropa.
Where the curriculum appears in the index
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's *Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism* is the foundational English-language Kagyu text in the index and the closest to a direct statement of the school's frame. Trungpa's Vajradhātu lineage and the Naropa University he founded in Boulder in 1974 are the institutional descendants of the line, named after Nāropa. The Six Yogas are not the subject of the book; the Mahāmudrā recognition the curriculum is built around is. Pema Chödrön's *When Things Fall Apart*, her course on awakening compassion, her teaching on uncertainty as the practice, and her conversation on becoming more alive carry the same Karma Kagyu lineage in a plainer English idiom. Tenzin Palmo's *Cave in the Snow* is the most direct first-person account of long Tibetan retreat practice in the index: twelve years in a Himalayan cave under the Drukpa Kagyu lineage, working through the curriculum of which the Six Yogas are the completion-stage backbone.
What the Six Yogas are not
The Six Yogas are not a printable protocol. The Tibetan teaching holds that practice requires an empowerment (dbang), an oral transmission (lung), and detailed pith instruction (man ngag) from a teacher who carries the lineage. Published technical literature — Glenn Mullin's translations, Garma C. C. Chang's Six Yogas of Naropa, teachings by Lama Yeshe and Tsoknyi Rinpoche — is treated by the tradition as oriented around live transmission, not as a substitute for it. The Six Yogas are also not coextensive with Mahāmudrā. Mahāmudrā is the formless recognition that is the lineage's ground; the Six Yogas are the formed tantric curriculum that stabilises it across conditions. A practitioner can work in Mahāmudrā without entering the Six Yogas at all. Nor are they the unique inheritance of the Kagyu line. The Shangpa Kagyu transmits a parallel Six Yogas of Niguma, and the Gelugpa carries the same curriculum through Tsongkhapa's reading. What the Nāro chos drug names is not a single set of texts but a curriculum-shape into which a transmissible content was poured.
