One River, Many Sources: Yoga, Kundalini, and the Śramaṇa Current

Sometime around the fifth century BCE, something extraordinary happened across the breadth of the ancient world. In Greece, Socrates and the pre-Socratics were dismantling comfortable assumptions about knowledge. In China, Confucius was codifying an ethics of relationship, and Laozi was pointing at the unnameable source of all things. And in the Gangetic Plain of northern India, the old order of Brahmanical sacrifice and cosmic hierarchy was being challenged from within by a movement that would change the inner sciences of humanity forever.

We call them the Śramaṇas (巴利文: Samaṇa, 沙門) — the Strivers. Wandering renunciants, forest-dwellers, and contemplative radicals who rejected the authority of the Vedic priests and their elaborate fire-sacrifice rituals. They were not a single tradition. They were more like a cultural current — a shared instinct that the answers to suffering, death, and the nature of consciousness were to be found not in outer ceremony but in the rigorous investigation of inner experience.

From this current came the Buddha. From it came Mahāvīra, the great reformer of Jainism. From it came the lineages of naked ascetics, forest yogins, and wandering monks who would eventually crystallize into traditions as different as Advaita Vedānta, Hatha Yoga, Vajrayāna Buddhism, and Theravāda. Understanding this shared origin is not an academic exercise. It is, I believe, essential to understanding why traditions that look so different on the surface — in their cosmologies, their terminologies, their institutional forms — are recognizably describing the same territory from different vantage points.

The Shared Problem

Every tradition that emerged from the Śramaṇa movement — and those that preceded and paralleled it — began with the same clinical observation: the ordinary human mind is the source of its own suffering. The technical terms differ. The Pali Canon calls the root cause avijjā (ignorance) and taṇhā (craving). The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali call it avidyā and the kleshas (afflictions). Jainism calls the binding of the soul by karmic matter āsrava. The Upanishads speak of māyā, the veil of illusion. The Daoist tradition speaks of wú zhī (無知), unenlightened action. Our own Liuren lineage speaks of the practitioner's need to refine their Yi (意), the quality of intent, before ritual can transmit anything of substance.

Different metaphysics. The same diagnosis. The ordinary untrained mind produces suffering not because reality is inherently bad, but because the mind's habitual way of relating to reality — grasping what it wants, rejecting what it dislikes, and being confused about the nature of both — creates a knot. Liberation, Moksha, Nirvāṇa, Samādhi, Turīya, Kaivalya, Enlightenment, the Daoist Zhenren (真人, the Realized Person) — all of these point at what happens when that knot is untied.

Before the Texts: The Yoga of the Indus Valley

The iconography tells us that yoga is older than any of the traditions that would later claim it. Among the seals excavated from Mohenjo-daro and Harappa — cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (3300–1300 BCE), predating the Vedic period — there appears a figure sitting in what is unmistakably a meditative posture: legs crossed, spine erect, hands resting on the knees, attention gathered inward. The figure is surrounded by animals. Scholars debate whether this is a proto-Shiva, a deity of wild animals, or a representation of a yogin. But the posture itself speaks: the discipline of sitting still with gathered attention is at least five thousand years old.

This matters because it means yoga did not originate within the Vedic tradition — it was absorbed by it. The Rigveda, the oldest layer of Vedic literature (c. 1500–1200 BCE), contains references to the Vrātyas — wandering brotherhoods of non-Vedic ascetics who practiced breath-control, chanting, and techniques that look remarkably like early Pranayama. The Vrātyas were outsiders to Brahmanical orthodoxy, and yet some of their practices were eventually incorporated into the late Vedic texts, particularly the Atharva Veda (whose connections to Thai Wicha we explored in an earlier entry).

The great Upanishads (c. 800–300 BCE) — which form the philosophical bedrock of Vedic thought — are in many ways a record of this absorption: the forest sages turning the tools of inner investigation inward, asking not "How do we please the gods with the right sacrifice?" but "What is the nature of the Ātman? What is Brahman? What is the relationship between the self and the ground of all being?" These are not Vedic questions. They are Śramaṇa questions, asked with Vedic vocabulary.

The Buddha's Body of Practice

We know a surprising amount about the Buddha's training before his awakening — and it is entirely recognizable as the yoga of his time. Before sitting under the Bodhi tree, Siddhārtha Gautama studied under two renowned meditation masters:

• Āḷāra Kālāma, who taught the attainment of the sphere of nothingness (ākiñcaññāyatana) — a rarefied meditative state within the Brahmanical tradition, almost certainly related to what later Yoga classifies as the deeper samāpattis.
• Uddaka Rāmaputta, who had reached the peak of the Brahmanical meditative system: the sphere of neither-perception-nor-non-perception (nevasaññānāsaññāyatana).

The Buddha mastered both. And then, famously, he declared them insufficient — profound as temporary experiences, but not liberation. They didn't untie the knot. He then spent six years with a group of extreme ascetics, practicing severe body-mortification — the path advocated by the Jains and many Śramaṇa factions. He mastered that too, and declared it the other extreme: the body destroyed as an enemy rather than trained as an instrument.

What the Buddha discovered, sitting alone under the Bodhi tree, was something he later described as the Middle Way — and the specific practice he used was the one he had known since childhood: Ānāpānasati, mindfulness of breathing. Pranayama is the common root. The Buddha did not invent breathing meditation. He used the most fundamental tool of the entire Śramaṇa tradition and investigated what happened when it was taken all the way — through the four jhānas, through the three knowledges, to the complete cessation of craving and ignorance.

Pranayama: The Technology of Transformation

The breath is the only autonomic function we can also control voluntarily. It is the bridge between the conscious and unconscious nervous system — between what we can command and what runs beneath our awareness. Every tradition that has seriously investigated consciousness has arrived at the same discovery: regulate the breath, and you regulate the mind.

The Yoga tradition developed this into an extraordinary science. Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras devote an entire limb of the eight-limbed path (aṣṭāṅga) to Pranayama — the extension and regulation of the vital breath. The classical techniques:

• Nāḍī Śodhana (alternate nostril breathing): purifying the energy channels (Nāḍīs) — specifically balancing Idā (left, lunar, cooling) and Piṅgalā (right, solar, heating) to clear the path for Suṣumnā (central channel)
• Kumbhaka (breath retention): the arrested breath as a state of stillness in which the mind's habitual movement is temporarily suspended
• Ujjāyī (victorious breath): the throat-constricted breath that generates internal heat and focuses awareness
• Kapālabhāti and Bhastrikā: rapid breathing techniques that purge the system and generate Prāṇic energy

Now consider: in the Theravāda tradition, the Ānāpānasati Sutta (MN 118) describes sixteen steps of breath meditation that systematically move from awareness of the physical breath to the subtle body to the liberation of mind. The Tibetan tradition developed Tummo (inner heat) — one of the Six Yogas of Naropa, which we catalogued among the supreme Siddhis — as a practice of igniting an internal fire at the navel centre through specific breath patterns, visualizations, and Mudrās. The Chinese Qigong tradition speaks of circulating Qi through the Microcosmic Orbit (小周天) and Macrocosmic Orbit (大周天) — using breath, intention, and posture to move vital energy through the meridian system.

The vocabulary is different. The phenomenological maps overlap so precisely that practitioners from different traditions, comparing notes honestly, invariably find themselves describing the same landscape.

Chakras, Nāḍīs, and the Subtle Body

The systematic mapping of the chakra system as we commonly know it crystallized relatively late — the Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa ("Description of the Six Centres") dates to the sixteenth century CE, and the more familiar seven-chakra model that reached the West was largely popularized through Arthur Avalon's The Serpent Power (1919). But this late systematization should not mislead us about the age of the underlying insight.

The Atharva Veda (c. 1000 BCE) describes the body as a "city of eight wheels." The Yoga Upanishads, composed between c. 100 CE and 1400 CE, describe networks of energy centres in the subtle body under various schemas — three, four, five, six, seven, or more centres depending on the text and tradition. The early Tantric texts, particularly the Kaula and Śākta schools (c. 5th–8th century CE), develop the nāḍī-cakra framework explicitly.

But in Vajrayāna Buddhism — the Tibetan tradition we have been exploring — a nearly identical mapping appears, developed entirely independently from within the Buddhist meditation tradition, using different names but describing recognizably the same structure:

• The Navel Centre (maṇipūra in Yoga; the navel chakra in Tibetan, seat of Tummo inner heat)
• The Heart Centre (anāhata; the Tibetan heart chakra, seat of the indestructible bindu and the Clear Light nature)
• The Throat Centre (viśuddha; throat chakra, the gateway of the dream yogas)
• The Crown Centre (sahasrāra; the Tibetan crown chakra, where consciousness exits at death in the Phowa transfer)

The Suṣumnā — the central energy channel of the Yoga tradition — maps directly to the Tibetan dbu ma rtsa, the central channel through which the awakening process moves in the Six Yogas of Naropa. Even the Daoist tradition's Chong Mai (衝脈, Penetrating Vessel), the central meridian of the eight extraordinary vessels, traces the same anatomical line: spine, centre of the torso, crown of the head.

These are not borrowed descriptions. Each tradition developed this map from the inside out — through sustained practice that produced reproducible phenomenological landmarks. When three independent contemplative traditions separated by thousands of miles and vastly different metaphysical frameworks all map the same interior geography, the most parsimonious conclusion is that they are, in fact, describing the same thing.

Kundalini: The Coiled Power

Kundalini (昆達里尼, literally "coiled one") is the most dramatic — and most frequently misunderstood — concept to emerge from the Indian subtle-body traditions. In the Tantric yoga framework, Kundalini is a latent evolutionary power described as a coiled serpent resting at the base of the spine (Mūlādhāra chakra), waiting to be awakened. When it rises through the Suṣumnā, passing through each chakra and purifying it, the culmination is union with pure consciousness at the crown — the ultimate liberating experience.

The language is dramatic. The reality it points at is precise.

What the Kundalini model is describing — stripped of its Tantric symbolic language — is the same process that every major contemplative tradition has observed: the reorganization of the nervous system at progressively deeper levels of relaxation and attentiveness, producing a cascade of experiences (heat, light, ecstasy, fear, dissolution of self-concept, expansion of awareness) that eventually stabilize as a fundamentally different relationship to consciousness itself.

The Theravāda tradition has a careful word for the energy phenomena that arise in deep meditation: pīti — rapture or energetic joy. The Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification, c. 5th century CE) describes ten categories of insight knowledge (vipassanā ñāṇa), several of which include experiences that map precisely onto classical Kundalini phenomenology: spontaneous bodily vibrations, feelings of light and dissolution, stages of terror and equanimity, dissolution of the sense of a fixed observer. The Tibetan tradition's descriptions of the Clear Light experiences in the bardos, and of the dissolution of the aggregates in deep samādhi, are recognizably the same territory.

What differs is the theoretical framework. Yoga says Kundalini is the awakening of Śakti — the universal feminine creative power, inseparable from Śiva, pure consciousness. Buddhism says there is no self that awakens, no soul that rises — there is only the ceasing of ignorance and the end of identification with impermanent conditions. Jainism says the soul's inherent qualities — infinite knowledge, infinite perception, infinite bliss, infinite energy — are revealed as karmic bondage is burned away. The experiences are documented with remarkable consistency. The interpretations diverge.

This is not a contradiction. It is a feature of the territory. A mountain looks different from every side. It is still the same mountain.

The Question of the Self

The single deepest point of divergence — and the most philosophically interesting — is the question of what it is that gets liberated.

The Yoga tradition (and the Advaita Vedānta that grew from the same soil) asserts an eternal Ātman — an unchanging inner witness, pure consciousness, that is ultimately identical with Brahman, the universal ground of being. The practice of Pranayama, Dhāraṇā, Dhyāna, and Samādhi progressively peels away the false identifications (with the body, the mind, the emotions, the ego) until the Ātman stands revealed as its own luminous nature.

The Buddha rejected this formulation explicitly. In the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta — the second discourse after his awakening — he analyzed the five aggregates (body, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness) and found no permanent, unchanging self in any of them. The liberating insight is not "I am Ātman" but "there is no 'I' that permanently exists to be liberated." The knot unties not because it reveals something behind it, but because it is recognized as having never been a fixed thing in the first place.

And yet: the description of what happens after this recognition is strikingly similar. Patañjali's Kaivalya — the ultimate independence of pure consciousness — is described as a state of perfect clarity, freedom from suffering, and non-grasping. The Buddha's Nibbāna is described as the "unborn, unbecome, unconditioned, unfabricated" — beyond conceptualization, not a state of annihilation but of complete peace. The Jain Siddha (liberated soul) rests in its own nature of pure knowing at the apex of the universe, free from all karmic matter. These are not descriptions of the same thing fitted into different boxes. They are genuinely different metaphysical commitments producing descriptions that sound, from the outside, remarkably similar.

My own view — and I hold it with appropriate tentativeness — is that what we are looking at is the difference between descriptions of the map and descriptions of the journey. The liberating insight and the liberated way of being in the world that the great masters of all these traditions demonstrate are recognizably alike. The metaphysical accounts of what that insight reveals diverge — because metaphysics is, by its nature, the attempt to put into language something that the traditions all agree resists conceptualization. The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao. Neti neti. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

Pranayama in the Buddha's Last Instructions

Here is something I find quietly remarkable. The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta — the account of the Buddha's final hours — describes his death as a meditative process moving through the four jhānas and the four formless attainments, and then, on the way back down through the jhānas, at the boundary between the first jhāna and ordinary consciousness, he passed away. This is the same sequence any serious meditator trains in. The Buddha died in samādhi, having chosen the moment and manner of his departure with complete equanimity.

The Tibetan teaching of Phowa — consciousness transference at the moment of death, which we documented among the supreme Siddhis — is an explicitly Vajrayāna version of exactly this process: the practitioner trains to exit consciousness through the crown chakra (rather than through the lower orifices, which Tibetan teachings associate with lower rebirth states) at the moment of death, transferring awareness into the Clear Light. The yogin who has mastered Tummo and the subtle body has already rehearsed this journey many times in meditation.

The practices are different. The destination — a death that is fully awake, fully present, fully free — is the same aspiration.

Connection to What We Are Building Here

This platform began as a home for the Liuren Fajiao ritual tradition. It has grown into something that I think better describes what the tradition always actually was: a node in a global network of inner science that extends across cultures and millennia. The Supplementary Studies section — Tibetan Buddhism, Dhamma Talks, Brahmanism, Wicha Thai Magic — is not the main course decorated with exotic garnishes. It is the honest acknowledgment that the Chinese Five Arts exist within a world of related practices that share the same diagnosis of human suffering and the same fundamental commitment to its resolution through disciplined inner work.

The Siddhis we catalogued in the Tibetan section are not curiosities. Tummo is Kundalini expressed in Vajrayāna vocabulary. Phowa is the Yoga of the moment of death expressed in Tibetan liturgical form. Rainbow Body is the complete purification of the physical form into light — which the Daoist tradition would recognize as the crystallization of the Immortal Body through the completion of Inner Alchemy. The Yoga tradition calls it the mahāsamādhi of the perfected yogin whose body does not corrupt after death.

And the Energetic Studio — Kundalini, Chakras, Nāḍīs, Prāṇa — sits within the same landscape. The Dantians (丹田) of the Daoist internal alchemy tradition correspond to the three principal chakra clusters. The Microcosmic Orbit corresponds to the purification of Idā, Piṅgalā, and eventually Suṣumnā. The Chinese term Qi and the Sanskrit Prāṇa are descriptions of the same subtle vital principle that makes the difference between a living body and a corpse.

Different Rooms, Same House

I want to be precise about what I am not claiming. I am not claiming that all traditions say the same thing. They do not. The Buddha's anattā (no-self) is a genuine philosophical difference from the Yoga tradition's eternal Ātman. The Jain doctrine of the soul as a unique, individual monad that liberates independently is genuinely different from the Advaita identification of Ātman with universal Brahman. These are not superficial disagreements that melt away under close scrutiny. They are substantive commitments with different implications for practice, ethics, and community.

But I am claiming something about the directionality of these practices. They are all headed somewhere identifiable:

• The reduction of reactive, automatic, compulsive mental activity
• The cultivation of non-grasping awareness — the capacity to perceive without immediately turning perception into craving or aversion
• The recognition of something beyond the conditioned, constructed, habitual self
• A relationship to suffering and death that is transformed from terror and grasping into equanimity and, ultimately, freedom

Whether you reach this through Kundalini Yoga, Vipassanā meditation, Zen kōan training, Tibetan Deity Yoga, Daoist inner alchemy, or the Liuren Fajiao cultivation path — you are working with the same human nervous system, the same architecture of awareness, the same fundamental possibility of untying the knot that binds ordinary human consciousness to suffering.

The Śramaṇa movement of 2,500 years ago was, among other things, the recognition that this is possible — that the liberation of consciousness from its conditioned patterns is an achievable human project, not a divine gift to be passively waited for. That recognition produced the Buddha, Mahāvīra, Patañjali, Nāgārjuna, Milarepa, Padmasambhava, Bodhidharma, and the long chain of inner scientists who followed them.

We are downstream of all of them. And the water still runs.

Ekam sat viprā bahudhā vadanti.

"Truth is one; the wise speak of it in many ways."

— Rigveda 1.164.46

道可道，非常道。

"The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao."

— Dao De Jing, Chapter 1

Two languages. One silence at the end of the sentence.