Wind and Breath in Tibetan Thought: the Confluence of Tantra and Ayurveda, Geoffrey Samuel

Geoffrey Samuel explores the role of wind and breath in Tibetan Buddhism, linking Tantra, Ayurveda, and consciousness.

Key Takeaways

Wind and breath are foundational concepts linking physiology, consciousness, and spirituality in Tibetan thought.
Prana and rlung represent vital energies that flow through subtle body channels, influencing mind and body.
The subtle body model is a hybrid of material and immaterial elements, central to tantric Buddhist practice.
Translation and cultural adaptation shaped how Indian concepts were integrated into Tibetan Buddhism.
There is growing dialogue and potential integration between traditional Tibetan knowledge and modern science.

What the video covers

Geoffrey Samuel discusses the historical and cultural development of concepts of wind and breath in Tibetan Buddhism and medicine.
He explains the Sanskrit terms prana and vata and their Tibetan equivalent rlung, focusing on their connection to life, breath, and consciousness.
The transfer of Buddhist knowledge from India to Tibet involved complex translation and adaptation of these concepts.
Prana is linked to breathing exercises in yoga and early Buddhist meditation practices, emphasizing control of breath to influence consciousness.
Tantric literature introduces a subtle body model with channels and chakras, where prana flows and carries consciousness.
The subtle body model blends physiological and spiritual elements, with chakras associated with deities and symbols.
Comparisons are made between Indian and Chinese models of energy channels and centers within the body.
In Vajrayana Buddhism, mastery of prana and subtle body processes is central to attaining Buddhahood.
The talk also touches on Ayurvedic doshas and their relation to bodily processes and healing practices distinct from tantric approaches.
Samuel highlights the potential for mutual enrichment between traditional Tibetan Buddhist knowledge and contemporary scientific understanding.

Chapters

What is the significance of prana and rlung in Tibetan Buddhism?

Prana and rlung represent vital energies or winds that flow through the body's subtle channels, closely linked to consciousness and life processes. They form the basis for tantric practices aimed at controlling mind and body to attain enlightenment.

How did Indian concepts of breath and energy transfer to Tibet?

Indian concepts such as prana and vata were transmitted to Tibet through Buddhist cultural exchange, involving translation into Tibetan language and adaptation to local contexts, which added layers of complexity and new interpretations.

What is the 'subtle body' model discussed in the video?

The subtle body model is a framework describing channels and chakras within the body through which prana flows. It blends physiological and spiritual elements and is central to tantric Buddhist practices for manipulating consciousness and achieving Buddhahood.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Hello, I'm Geoffrey Samuel. I'm an anthropologist who's worked on Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan medicine for many years. I'm particularly interested in how traditional Buddhist forms of knowledge and practice developed, and in the relationship between traditional Buddhist forms of knowledge and understanding, and contemporary science.

Speaker A

So today I'm going to be talking about wind and breath. Wind and breath are familiar natural phenomena, and ideas about wind and breath have a long history in human thought. In pre-modern times, ideas of wind and breath often became the basis of ways of understanding the universe.

Speaker A

Wind in the external world is often seen as related to breathing within the human body.

Speaker A

Breathing in the body begins at birth, it continues throughout life, and it ends when we die. So it's easy to make a linkage between breathing, consciousness, and some kind of vital energy that maintains life, and many languages have built ideas of soul, spirit, or life force around words for breath. Ruakh in Hebrew, psyche and pneuma in Greek are examples, also words like spirit and inspiration in English, and so too are the two Sanskrit terms I shall be discussing here, prana and vata, and the Tibetan word that came to translate both of them, rlung.

Speaker A

So I'm going to talk about two of these early concepts, prana and vata in Sanskrit, which came from India to Tibet as part of the transfer of Buddhist knowledge and Buddhist civilization across the Himalayas, and I shall look at how they came to interact and develop further in their new home. These terms prana and vata, like their equivalent in European languages, words like soul, spiritual, mind, may be familiar but they're not entirely straightforward.

Speaker A

This becomes apparent even in the European context when you try to translate between English, French, or German. These words have become more than words for just natural phenomena, they're also tools through which we attempt to grasp processes that are intrinsically difficult to understand.

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It's not, after all, as if we today in contemporary science have got the nature of consciousness and its relationship to physiological processes neatly sorted out and explained. If anything, we've attempted to push the problem to the side by treating consciousness as if it's no more than neural impulses. These concepts are also

Speaker A

tied up in India and Tibet, as elsewhere, with religion and with religious authority. When they are transmitted from one cultural context to another very different one, as when they came from India to Tibet, further layers can be added to the complexity.

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This is particularly so when they are translated into the vocabulary of a very different language.

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The transfer of Buddhism to Tibet was also a translation from Sanskrit and other Indian languages into the Tibetan language, which had grown out of a very different way of life to that of India.

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So I begin with prana, which is probably the more familiar of these concepts to people outside South Asia, for example, in the compound "pranayama" as a term for breathing exercises associated with yoga. Prana is a word for breath and it's also intrinsically bound up with life processes.

Speaker A

Breath in this sense occurs quite early on in the earliest of the Upanishads, most notably in the Taittiriya Upanishad, perhaps around the 4th or 5th century BCE. Here we find both the idea of a body made of prana, so prana forms a kind of body of its own, and also five types of prana with different locations in the body. These ideas are picked up and developed in the later Yogic and Vedantic literature. Over time, the five types of prana, of which the first is also called prana, became associated with specific bodily functions,

Speaker A

and here you can see a list of them, and this set was to go on to Tibet at a later period.

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The early Buddhist ascetics used breathing practices in their meditation, as we know, and these practices spread through other Yogic and ascetic circles so that we find the term pranayama in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, maybe 400 CE, as a way of calming and controlling bodily processes. In these Buddhist and Yogic literatures

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we also begin to get a sense of controlling the breathing as a way of controlling consciousness, and so of an intimate connection between breathing and consciousness.

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What we now refer to as the Tantric literature starts to appear in Buddhist, Saiva, and to a lesser extent also Vaisnava and Jaina sources from the 7th and 8th centuries onward. In this literature we find a noticeable change in the understanding of prana towards a more complex model. Here we find prana being conceived of as flowing through a series of channels within the body. This particular diagram shows the channels as visualized in the Chakrasamvara Tantra, one of the main Buddhist tantras. These channels meet at wheels or junction points along a central channel running up the spinal column, from the genital area to the top of the head.

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Now these wheels are the famous chakras, nowadays popular in new age thought. The flow that goes through the channels is associated with the movement of consciousness, so this model is somewhere in between a physiological model and a map of consciousness.

Speaker A

Models of this kind are often referred to as "subtle body models," so the English phrase "subtle body" originated as a translation for one specific model of this kind, which means that using subtle body in this more generic sense is more a kind of shorthand to point to a variety of approaches, all of which assume some kind of substrate that's neither quite material nor quite non-material, but rather between mind and body, in contemporary Western terms.

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It's not really clear how this model came about in the Indian context, where it seems to have appeared over a fairly short period of time without much in the way of obvious predecessors.

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In the earliest texts we have, the chakras are already associated with deities and symbols.

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This is a fairly recent 18th or 19th century Newar model, but you can see how the chakras down the center of the body have both lotuses, colors, symbols, and deities linked to them. Now, this suggests a possible connection with earlier Chinese models which similarly involve centers within the body associated with deities and symbols. This is a modern Chinese image, it's a redrawing of quite an old diagram, and this gives you an idea of the way the Chinese depict the spinal column and these various sites along it, again with figures and symbols.

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Now certainly, the details on the Indian side and the Chinese side are quite different.

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Those on the Indian side are thoroughly Indian. If there was a borrowing from China, which is by no means impossible because there were certainly contacts in those days, the scheme was thoroughly rethought in Indian terms. But whatever its origin, this set of ideas seems to spread rapidly throughout the ascetic communities of India, whatever their formal religious identity, and it became the basis in Tibet of what was to be known as Vajrayana, Tantric Buddhism. It was thoroughly absorbed within Buddhism that operating with the subtle body was to become the central process for the attainment of buddhahood within the Vajrayana. It

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continued to be cultivated into that through many different lineages of practice until modern times.

Speaker A

A key idea here is that the mind or consciousness is carried by the flows of prana within the body.

Speaker A

Prana, in a common image, is like a horse on which the mind rides. Prana and consciousness are not then the same thing, but they are closely related to each other. Almost, one might say they are two aspects of a single process. To give a glimpse of how this operates in relation to the attainment of the awakened state of Buddhahood, here is an excerpt from the contemporary Tibetan lama, the late Dingo Khyentse Rinpoche. He distinguishes between two kinds of prana, which his translator refers to as "karmic wind."

Speaker A

This is a fairly recent 18th or 19th century Newar model, but you can see how the chakras down the center of the body have both lotuses, colors, symbols, and deities linked to them. Now, this suggests a possible connection with earlier Chinese models which similarly involve centers

Speaker A

within the body associated with deities and symbols. This is a modern Chinese image, it's a redrawing of quite an old diagram, and this gives you an idea of the way the Chinese depict the spinal column and these various sites along it, again with figures and symbols.

Speaker A

Now certainly, the details on the Indian side and the Chinese side are quite different.

Speaker A

Those on the Indian side are thoroughly Indian. If there was a borrowing from China, which is by no means impossible because there were certainly contacts in those days, the scheme was thoroughly rethought in Indian terms. But whatever its origin, this set of ideas seems to spread rapidly

Speaker A

throughout the ascetic communities of India, whatever their formal religious identity, and it became the basis in Tibet of what was to be known as Vajrayana, Tantric Buddhism. It was thoroughly absorbed within Buddhism that operating with the subtle body was to become the central process for the attainment of buddhahood within the Vajrayana. It

Speaker A

continued to be cultivated into that through many different lineages of practice until modern times.

Speaker A

A key idea here is that the mind or consciousness is carried by the flows of prana within the body.

Speaker A

Prana, in a common image, is like a horse on which the mind rides. Prana and consciousness are not then the same thing, but they are closely related to each other. Almost, one might say they are two aspects of a single process. To give a glimpse of how this operates in relation to the attainment of

Speaker A

the awakened state of Buddhahood Here is an excerpt from the contemporary Tibetan lama, the late Dingo Khyentse Rinpoche. He distinguishes between two kinds of prana, which his translator refers to as "karmic wind" and "wisdom wind", but wind is here the same word as prana.

Speaker A

The karmic prana is the support of the ordinary mind, including the so-called kleshas, this is a term which is sometimes translated these days as destructive emotions, but it isn't really quite about emotions. Chief among these are desire and aversion,

Speaker A

along with the ignorance that underlies them, which is the ignorance of our true nature.

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The aim of meditators is to bind or restrain this karmic prana through cultivating wisdom prana, which represents the mind's true nature in its innate clarity, and cultivating the essence drop, or bindu in Sanskrit, which is a specific aspect of the wisdom prana

Speaker A

and is associated with bodhicitta, the central motivation for the attainment of enlightenment, the desire to liberate others from their suffering and bring them to the state of Buddhahood.

Speaker A

So here is Dingo Khyentse Rinpoche explaining the role of wisdom and karmic prana. "In fact, wisdom prana and karmic prana are the same thing.

Speaker A

If this prana is brought under control, it engenders wisdom; if it's not controlled it gives rise to the ordinary mind, together with its poisons. Thus the most important thing, at the perfection stage [of tantric practice] is to work effectively on the prana...

Speaker A

If as a result, one attains mastery of the essence drop [the bindu], the mind, which is supported by it, will also cease to move, thereby giving rise to the experiences of bliss, clarity, and non-thought". now the essence drop is closely associated with bodhicitta, as I said,

Speaker A

the central motivation for the attainment of Buddhahood, and it's also closely linked to the physiological and psychological processes aroused during sexual intercourse, dreaming, and death, and this combination of emotional, physiological, motivational issues is very typical of tantric practice. In experiential terms, mastery of the bindu, the essence drop,

Speaker A

involves freeing up through internal yogic practice the knots or blockages in the channels, and accumulating the bindu, which supports or constitutes bodhicitta in the central channel.

Speaker A

So it's both a physiological process, and a motivational one, and a spiritual one. This is the key process about which the various, often very elaborate Tibetan yogic practices are directed, and its ultimate goal is the attainment of Buddhahood.

Speaker A

During the same period that the these sophisticated tantric ideas about wind or breath were being brought to Tibet and becoming part of Tibetan society, another set of wind or breath-type concepts also came to Tibet, and this, also from India, came out of the rather different thought world of early Indian medicine,

Speaker A

the tradition that was to become known as Ayurveda. Like the Greco-Arabic medical system, often known as "galenic" after it's great example of Galen, and the Chinese medical system, Ayurveda operates in terms of a series of pathogenic processes within the body that cause disease.

Speaker A

These are sometimes referred to in English as humors, using a term from the Greco-Arabic system, but the details are rather different and it's best to use the indigenous term "dosha".

Speaker A

The number of dosha varies a little in early sources, but it eventually settled at three, which are named vata and/or vayu - both words mean wind, pitta - bile, and kapha - phlegm.

Speaker A

As these names suggest, they have some affinity or connection with breath, bile, and phlegm, but they're certainly not exactly the same thing, they are processes within the body which associate with these three. The term dosha literally means "fault"

Speaker A

and it refers to something which is wrong with the human organism, in this case. However vata, pitta, and kapha are also thought of as part of the normal functioning of the human system.

Speaker A

So the idea is more that one or more of these processes has become aggravated or out of balance and so has caused the illness. Illness may be primarily associated with one dosha, but can also be linked to two or three dosha acting at the same time.

Speaker A

Identifying and calming the dosha concerned is an important aspect of Indian medicine. Now, medicine, it might be added, was an important metaphorical resource for Buddhism from its early days. The Buddha is frequently described as a doctor, indeed as a king of physicians,

Speaker A

since he aims to cure the fundamental problem of life in the everyday world - the ignorance that allows us to be caught in the destructive emotions of ordinary existence.

Speaker A

So in this imagery, just as the ayurvedic physician heals ordinary illnesses caused by pitta, vata, and kapha, so the Buddha heals the illness caused by the three great poisons or three great kleshas of desire, hatred, and ignorance.

Speaker A

Medicine was practiced by Buddhist monks in India and it was an important part of a body of knowledge transmitted by Indian monks when they came to Tibet, which was learned by Tibetan Buddhists when they visited India. Much Buddhist tantric material is in fact about ritual

Speaker A

modes of healing, but here I'm referring to the ayurvedic literature which is quite separate from the yogic and tantric literature in many ways, and although it does include some ritual practices it's much more focused on pharmacology, on the use of herbal medicines and other substances,

Speaker A

diet, massage, and other physiological practices. Perhaps the most important single text to be translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan was the Astangahrdayasamhita of Vagbhata, an Indian medical scholar probably from the sixth century CE. Vagbhata may well have been a Buddhist, though we don't know for certain.

Speaker A

The Tibetan medical tradition Sowa rigpa involved elements from Greco-Arabic and from Chinese medicine, as well as from Ayurveda, and it also clearly included material from indigenous Tibetan sources and was developed further in Tibet. However, large parts of the Tibetan medical classic text,

Speaker A

The Gyu-Shi, "Four Tantras" or " Four Treatises", probably from the 12th century... this is a modern version of it you can see as a block print in the background here. Large parts of this text were closely adapted from the Astangahrdayasamhita of Vagbhata and other parts from other origins,

Speaker A

and among these were the basic building block of Ayurveda, the scheme of the three dosha. The three dosha were known in Tibet as a three nyepa and they became central to Tibetan medicine.

Speaker A

As in Ayurveda, illness may be primarily associated with one nyepa but it can also be linked to two or three nyepa acting at the same time, and diagnosis and treatment involves identifying and calming the nyepa.

Speaker A

By comparison with Indian literature though, the Gyu-Shi includes one important innovation in relation to the dosha or nyepa, and this is the idea that the three root klesha, or poisons, desire, aversion, and ignorance are not just analogous to the three dosha, which as we've

Speaker A

seen was a common idea in India but actually cause the dosha, that is, cause harmful manifestation.

Speaker A

This is an idea which is quite consonant with Buddhist thought where ignorance, desire, and aversion are seen as fundamental problems within samsara. So to see them as actually directly responsible on a one-to-one basis for the the three dosha is taking things a little further,

Speaker A

but it's perhaps a natural development. As far as we can tell though, this is an Indian innovation. It may be linked to the important connection between medicine and yogic practice.

Speaker A

The Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism in particular contained medical teachings aimed at yogic practitioners, and this may have been the context in which this association built up.

Speaker A

The person probably responsible for compiling The Gyu-Shi, a 12th century medical expert and spiritual teacher named Yuthok Yonten Gonpo also founded an important Dzogchen lineage intended for medical practitioners, and here you can see him in fact visualized as the

Speaker A

founding lama of this lineage, the Yuthok Nyingtig. Now, this lineage has continued to the present day, many doctors have studied it over the centuries and still do, and it includes ritual teachings associated with medical practice, with the consecration

Speaker A

of medicine, and with healing through tantric means. But other Nyingtig texts, Nyingtig is the kind of genre of texts within the Dzogchen tradition, probably predating Yuthok Yonten Gonpo also include healing techniques, and the point here perhaps is that we're talking about

Speaker A

yogic practitioners who are often practicing in isolation, in remote places, and essentially need ways of healing themselves. They don't have doctors around, they may not have medicines around, so they work much more in terms of consciousness.

Speaker A

Thus, Tibetans drew on two rather different sets of ideas involving wind-like concepts, the ayurvedic ideas about vata as one of the three dosha, and the Buddhist ideas about prana as an internal flow that could be manipulated by yogic practice. What is interesting is when these ideas

Speaker A

start interacting. Now in fact there were already elements of interaction in India, the five prana associated with the different bodily processes, for example, can be found in Vagbhata's work, but the process was to develop further in Tibet. Here it's important to appreciate that both prana

Speaker A

and vata were translated by the same Tibetan word, rlung. This does not necessarily reflect any confusion on the part of the Indian or Tibetan translators who were well aware of the specific literatures with which they were working, and so for the most part were later Tibetan scholars,

Speaker A

even if they were not familiar with the original Sanskrit. Tibetan has a much smaller technical vocabulary than Sanskrit and there are many cases where the same Tibetan word necessarily had to be used to translate different Sanskrit words, but the use of the same Tibetan word for ayurvedic

Speaker A

vata and Buddhist prana paves the way for a closer relationship between these concepts. Both ayurvedic doctors and tantric yogis were concerned with processes within the body, and in the Tibetan context the same people were often specialists in both disciplines.

Speaker A

The Gyu-Shi's discussion of the channels within the body is actually quite problematic and difficult to understand. It appears to see the channels as having physiological reality, but it's not clear with what structures within the body they're being identified,

Speaker A

and Tibetan medical specialists were familiar with the internal structure of the body from anatomical examination. They realized that the channels described in the tantric text could not easily be identified with anything they could find inside the body.

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So this whole question of the material or physiological reality of the flows through the channels remains a controversial one throughout Tibetan medical history, and I think it's a different issue in the meditative and tantric realm where these are essentially visualized processes and their material reality is not an issue of the same kind.

Speaker A

So in this area the conflation of the meditative language of Buddhist tantra and the relatively empirical medical languages was fairly difficult and didn't go past a certain point.

Speaker A

However, I'm more concerned here with two other areas. One is the role of rlung in explaining illness. The Gyu-Shi's general chapter on rlung as a cause of disease includes a rather mixed collection of ideas from India and elsewhere. Perhaps its most influential section though is one

Speaker A

which picks up on the five kinds of prana found in the early Upanishadic and yogic texts which had already been taken up, as we've heard, in the work of Vagbhata and other medical authorities.

Speaker A

Now the Gyu-shi associates a series of rlung disorders with these five main kinds of rlung.

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Several of them involve what biomedicine would regard as psychiatric symptoms, and two in particular, soglung, which is associated with the rlung of the vital life force, and nyinglung, which is centered at the heart and involves the rlung that governs movement

Speaker A

and other bodily processes, became widely recognized syndromes. They provided both an explanatory structure and a basis for treatment for a series of disorders involving depression, anxiety, and similar issues, which in contemporary biomedicine would be the domain of psychiatry.

Speaker A

Now here the Gyu-Shi and other Tibetan medical authorities were taking up hints that can be found in Vagbhata's work, but they were developing them considerably further.

Speaker A

They were also, I think, building implicitly at least on the association of the nyepa with the three klesha or destructive emotions. The second area I want to mention here is that of the relationship between consciousness and physiological process. How do we understand

Speaker A

the relationship between consciousness and bodily physiology, neural processes, and so on? Now here the influence of the ayurvedic dosha is more conjectural, but I think it's real, and we can see it, for example, in the question of illnesses associated with meditation.

Speaker A

The Tibetans, like other Buddhist cultures, were well aware that meditation, particularly prolonged solitary meditation, could have a psychologically destabilizing effect.

Speaker A

As some of you will know, this has become an issue in the West, and it's hardly surprising. Meditation in the Buddhist context is after all intended to be part of a process which is meant to bring about a drastic reshaping of one's personality and identity.

Speaker A

It's not surprising if things can go slightly wrong at times. For the Tibetans, such problems are normally identified as disorders or imbalances in the flow of rlung, and they may be treated by Tibetan medical remedies. These could include dietary prescriptions, such as eating meat

Speaker A

or other heavy foods that will bring down the rlung and calm it, or behavioral prescriptions, such as spending time with friends in everyday, non-meditative activities, which could have a similar effect. But which rlung are we talking about here? The Tibetans seem

Speaker A

to take it for granted that we're dealing with a single process that has elements of both ayurvedic vata and tantric prana. What I would like to suggest here is perhaps somewhat obvious, but it nevertheless may be worth pointing out. We're not talking here about a confusion of terminologies,

Speaker A

but a creative merging of elements from two systems which somehow generates a new structure that is richer, more sophisticated, has greater explanatory value than either in isolation.

Speaker A

This is in fact one of the main ways in which contemporary science too develops.

Speaker A

Ideas and terms move from one scientific field to another and spark off unexpected insights.

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Everyday and technical meanings of terms overlap and interpenetrate. Imaginative flights of creative thought undermine and reconstruct precise definitional structures.

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As the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend argued years ago, when it comes to theory formation, the only real principle is that anything goes, anything is valid.

Speaker A

I find this similarity between the two systems, Tibetan Buddhist and contemporary scientific, rather comforting. It suggests that as people learn to work across two systems, as an increasing number of people are doing, we can expect a similar process of mutual enrichment to take place.

Speaker A

That enrichment doesn't depend on creating some kind of unified structure in which Buddhist thought is explained by science, or for that matter a science which accepts Buddhist concepts uncritically, but it does require an ability on both sides to allow for mutual interpenetration,

Speaker A

for mutual stimulation of ideas and concepts. I think there are many signs around that such a process is beginning to happen, and I believe that it could be a valuable process for both science and Buddhism. So that's where I'll finish this talk.

Topics:Tibetan BuddhismpranarlungtantraAyurvedasubtle bodychakrasconsciousnessbreathmeditation

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