What the six are
The Six Yogas of Nāropa are the systematised completion-stage (sampannakrama) curriculum of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism — six methods for stabilising the Mahāmudrā recognition across the conditions in which the ordinary mind tends to lose it. The Tibetan compound is Nāro chos drug, the six dharmas of Nāropa. The six, in the standard enumeration, are gtum mo (Sanskrit caṇḍālī) — the inner-heat practice, in which the subtle-body channels and drops are worked through visualisation and breath to generate the particular bliss-emptiness conjoined awareness the tradition treats as the gateway to the rest; sgyu lus (māyā-deha) — the illusory body, the cultivation in which the ordinary sense of one's own embodied form is recognised as having the same texture as a dream-figure or a mirror reflection; rmi lam (svapna) — the dream yoga, in which the recognition is brought into the dream state by training to know the dream as dream while remaining inside it; 'od gsal (prabhāsvara) — the clear light practice, in which the same recognition is brought into the gap between dream and waking and into the moment of falling asleep; bar do (antarābhava) — the intermediate state yoga, in which the practitioner trains for the analogous gap that occurs after death; and 'pho ba (saṃkrānti) — consciousness transference, the practice by which a dying practitioner directs awareness out of the body at the moment of death rather than being carried by the karmic momentum the tradition assumes operates by default.
The list is not arbitrary. Each yoga maps onto a condition in which the ordinary mind tends to drop the Mahāmudrā recognition that is the lineage's ground — sleep, dream, dying, post-death disorientation — and gives the practitioner a specific method for carrying recognition through that condition. The set sits inside the larger Tibetan curriculum-architecture: above the generation-stage (utpattikrama) deity-yoga in which the practitioner cultivates the form of a chosen yidam, and below the formless Mahāmudrā resting in which the cultivation comes to rest. Gtum mo, the inner-heat practice, is the gateway and the first of the six the curriculum formally treats; the others layer on top of the stabilisation it produces. The three-year retreat the Karma Kagyu still runs is structured around them.
The transmission line
The lineage traces back through Marpa (1012–1097), the Tibetan layman-translator who crossed the Himalayas three or four times to study with Nāropa in northern India, to Nāropa himself (c. 1016–1100), and from Nāropa back to his teacher Tilopa (988–1069), whom the lineage treats as having received the teachings directly from the [dharmakāya](lexicon:dharmakaya) Buddha Vajradhara — a marker that the school regards the transmission as descending from outside the historical line of human teachers. The substantive content the line carries is older than Nāropa: the anuttarayoga tantras of the eastern-Indian *mahāsiddha* milieu — Saraha, Lūipā, Kāṇha, Virūpa, Nāropa's own predecessors — already taught versions of the inner-heat and dream-yoga practices in dohā song-poems and oral instruction. What Nāropa contributed was not the invention of the six but the synthetic shape that allowed Marpa to carry them to Tibet as a single transmissible curriculum.
From Marpa the line passes to Milarepa (1052–1135), the Tibetan poet-yogi who is said to have practised gtum mo through twelve Himalayan winters in cotton robes; from Milarepa to Gampopa (1079–1153), a former Kadampa monk who joined Milarepa's tantric instruction to the gradual bhūmi path of monastic Mahāyāna and produced the dual-track presentation the Tibetan tradition has carried since; and from Gampopa to the four major sub-schools — the Karma Kagyu, the Drikung Kagyu, the Drukpa Kagyu, the Tsalpa Kagyu — that have transmitted the curriculum into the present. The classical Tibetan exposition is Tsongkhapa's fifteenth-century Book of the Three Inspirations, written from the Gelugpa side as a reading of what the older Kagyu lineages were transmitting; the standard contemporary English presentation is Glenn Mullin's translation of that text together with the Practice of the Six Yogas of Naropa. The Naro chos drug in modern Western circulation runs through that Gelugpa-mediated reading at least as much as through the Kagyu primary literature itself.
Where the curriculum appears in the index
The English-language index does not yet hold an item recorded directly under the title Six Yogas of Nāropa. The curriculum appears in the corpus only at one and two removes, through the modern Karma Kagyu material the line eventually produced. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's *Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism* is the foundational English-language Kagyu text and the closest the index has to a direct statement of the school's frame — Trungpa's American Vajradhātu lineage and the Naropa University he founded in Boulder in 1974 are the institutional descent of the line, named after Nāropa himself. 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 into a clinical English idiom; the lojong and bodhicitta curriculum she teaches sits below the formal Six Yogas instruction in the classical programme. Tenzin Palmo's *Cave in the Snow* is the most direct first-person account of long-form Tibetan retreat practice in the index — twelve years in a Himalayan cave under the Drukpa Kagyu lineage, working with the substantive curriculum of which the Six Yogas are the completion-stage backbone.
What it isn't
The Six Yogas are not a printable protocol the way vipassanā or the secular MBSR curriculum can be presented in a manual. The classical Tibetan insistence is that the practice requires an empowerment (dbang), an oral transmission (lung) and detailed pith instruction (man ngag) from a teacher who carries the lineage; the published Western technical literature on gtum mo and the rest — Glenn Mullin's translations, Garma C. C. Chang's Six Yogas of Naropa, the various Lama Yeshe and Tsoknyi Rinpoche teachings — is treated by the tradition as oriented around the live transmission rather than as a substitute for it. The set is 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, and a practitioner can in principle work in Mahāmudrā without entering the Six Yogas at all. And they are not the unique inheritance of the Kagyu line. The Shangpa Kagyu transmits a parallel Six Yogas of Niguma — Niguma being Nāropa's sister or consort, depending on the source — 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 particular transmissible content was poured.
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