This first module traces the history and development of yogic practices in Tibet through a series of seventeenth-century murals in what was formerly the private meditation chamber of Tibet’s Sixth Dalai Lama. The inscriptions that accompany the wall paintings derive from a ‘treasure text’ attributed to Padmasambhava, an eighth-century tantric Buddhist master who categorized Vajrayāna Buddhism’s innermost practices as Mahā Yoga (‘Great Yoga’), Anu Yoga (‘Subsequent Yoga‘), and resultant Ati Yoga (‘Supreme Yoga’), through which mind and body awaken to their indwelling Buddha Nature. This module explores the reputed origins of tantric Buddhist yoga in the legendary Silk Road kingdom of Uḍḍīyana, its subsequent transmission through realized male and female adepts called Mahāsiddhas, parallels in tantric Śaivism in Kashmir and Bengal, and procedural adaptations within Tibetan monasticism.

This module addresses the fundamental practices of Mahā Yoga, Anu Yoga, and Ati Yoga in the context of four tantric empowerments that overturn habitual conceptions of body, breath, and mind. While Mahā Yoga activates the creative imagination through existential visualization techniques, Anu Yoga cultivates subtle energy as a basis for awakening to the infinite expanse of pure awareness, or Ati Yoga. Physical yoga (Tsalung Trulkhor) in Tibetan Buddhism is primarily practiced in the context ‘Fierce Heat’ (Caṇḍālī; Tummo) and Consort Practice (Karmamudrā) which, in turn, facilitate accomplishment in Clear Light (Ösel), Dream Yoga (Milam), Projection of Consciousness at the time of death (Powa), and post-mortem unification with the Natural State (Bardo Yoga). Based on an esoteric model of human embodiment, these so-called Six Yogas expand awareness of energy and matter towards their experiential coalescence as Sahajānanda, or innate rapture, often associated with the flow of psychophysical ambrosia (Amṛta) and realization of Mahamudrā and Ati Yoga, known in Tibetan as Dzogchen, or ‘Great Perfection’.

Ati Yoga transcends all effort, and foundational Dzogchen texts recast physical yoga as spontaneous, unprescribed movement, as opposed to the regimented, breath-led sequences of Trulkhor, sometimes known as ‘Yantra Yoga’. Specific postures are nonetheless indicated in the Dzogchen practice of Kordé Rushen, ‘Distinguishing Samsara and Nirvana’, and Thögal, ‘leaping over the skull’ into a luminous dimension beyond birth and death. This module elucidates the role of somatic (body and breath) practices in Dzogchen (Ati Yoga) in facilitating nondual experience and physiological familiarity with Buddha Nature, which Vajrayāna refers to as Sugatagarbha, or incubational ‘womb of bliss’.

This concluding module explores ethnographic and scientific engagement with Vajrayāna Buddhist yoga and meditation, as well as contemporary transformations in the ways in which Tibetan yoga is presented and practiced in medically informed global contexts. Reference is made to psychoendoneuroimmunology and current research in experiential neuroscience of the role of introceptive attention, vagal tone, interstitial integrity, piezoelectricity, and neuroplasticity in mediating human experience. Vajrayāna Buddhism’s foregrounding of wisdom and compassion is viewed in the context of Tibetan yoga’s radical methodologies for disrupting habitual perceptions of self and other towards a poetics and politics of self- transcendence, characterized as the dynamic union of Saṁsāra and Nirvāṇa, or, in contemporary terms, realization of endogenous human potential.