Tibetan practice

The most technically elaborate contemplative system in existence — and the one that produced a laboratory result nobody expected, published in Nature in 1982.

What it is

The Vajrayāna Buddhism of Tibet and the Himalaya, organised in four main schools — Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug — and distinguished by an unusually large and structured repertoire of practice.

Its main components:

Ngöndro — the preliminary practices, and preliminary is misleading. A standard set requires 100,000 full-body prostrations, 100,000 refuge recitations, 100,000 Vajrasattva mantras, 100,000 mandala offerings and 100,000 guru yoga recitations. This typically takes years and is undertaken before the practices it prepares for.

Deity yoga — the yidam practice. The practitioner generates a detailed visualisation of an enlightened being, complete with colour, implements, ornaments, retinue and surrounding mandala, recites the associated mantra, and then dissolves the visualisation, in a two-stage structure of generation and completion. This is a constructive practice of extraordinary technical demand.

Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā — the culminating approaches of the Nyingma and Kagyu schools respectively, in which a teacher gives a "pointing out" instruction directing the student to recognise the nature of mind directly, and practice consists of remaining with that recognition.

Completion-stage practices working with channels, winds and drops — the subtle-body system described in the subtle body — including tummo, inner heat.

Bardo teachings, on the intermediate states between death and rebirth, and phowa, the transference of consciousness at death.

Where it came from

Buddhism entered Tibet from the seventh century and again in the eleventh, bringing late Indian tantric Buddhism largely intact at a time when it was disappearing in India. The Tibetan transmission preserved material that survives nowhere else.

The four schools crystallised between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. The Chinese occupation from 1950 and the destruction of monasteries during the Cultural Revolution scattered the tradition into exile, which is why it reached the West at scale from the 1960s.

How it is practised

Under restriction, and the restrictions are structural rather than decorative. Tantric practice requires three things from a qualified teacher: wang (empowerment), lung (reading transmission) and tri (instruction). Practising without them is regarded within the tradition as ineffective at best. Practitioners take samaya, binding commitments, including undertakings not to disclose certain material.

For that reason this article describes the shape of the tradition and contains no instruction. The material is not secret out of mystique; the tradition holds that misapplied it is dangerous, and it is not this site's to teach in any case.

What we can and cannot say

We can report one genuinely remarkable laboratory result. In 1982 Herbert Benson and colleagues published in Nature a study of Tibetan monks practising tummo in Upper Dharamsala. Under observation, practitioners raised the temperature of their fingers and toes by up to around 8.3°C. Later work by Benson's group documented monks drying wet sheets draped over their bodies in cold conditions, and subsequent research by Maria Kozhevnikov and colleagues has examined the combination of forceful breathing and visualisation involved.

This is a real, published, partially replicated finding of voluntary control over peripheral temperature — a physiological capacity that mainstream physiology did not expect. It does not validate the metaphysics of channels and winds; the likeliest mechanism involves breathing technique, muscle activity and vasomotor control. But it is a genuine anomaly resolved in the tradition's favour on the narrow empirical point, and this site reports those where they occur.

We can say the technical sophistication is exceptional. The visualisation practices demand a sustained constructive capacity that most people cannot approach without years of training, and the Abhidharma-derived analysis of mental factors underlying them is unusually precise.

We can say Tibetan Buddhism has been a major partner in contemplative research, largely through the Dalai Lama's engagement with the Mind and Life Institute — which has funded much of the neuroscience discussed under the evidence, and which raises its own questions about the independence of a research field substantially funded by people committed to a favourable result.

We should say that this tradition has had serious abuse scandals, addressed under the guru problem and sexual misconduct by teachers. The structural conditions — an unquestionable teacher, samaya vows binding students to silence, and a doctrine in which the guru is regarded as enlightened — are close to the worst possible arrangement for accountability, and the documented outcomes reflect that.

We cannot say what deity yoga accomplishes. What can be said is that it is not what most Westerners mean by meditation, and that describing this tradition as "mindfulness" is a category error of some size.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading