Rainbow Body

If nothing is found, what turns into light?

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• Is energy the substrate? → Isn't Energy the Substrate?

Last updated 3 Nov 2026

Dzogchen and the Gelug school both hold a view that leaves nothing standing from its own side. Both also say that practice can change the body itself. In Dzogchen the body of a great practitioner can dissolve into light at death, leaving only hair and nails. In Gelug the yogi forms a body of pure wind that becomes the body of a buddha.

This can look like a contradiction. If nothing is found, what is there to turn into light? And why would seeing emptiness, which is a matter of view, reach as far as flesh and bone?

The reason in one line: the body is not a lump that stands by itself; it is held together by grasping, through the energy grasping rides on. When grasping ends at its subtlest level, the form it held is freed as well.

What both traditions start from

Four points are shared.

1. The body is dependently arisen, like the mind. It is not matter that stands by itself. It is a stream of elements (earth, water, fire, air, space) that hold each other in place, and none of them is found apart from the others.
2. Mind and energy move together. The tantras describe a subtle body of channels, winds and drops. The wind (prāṇa, rlung) is what the mind rides on. Every thought moves on a wind, and every movement of wind carries some knowing.
3. Grasping keeps the coarse body coarse. Karma and clinging drive the winds through the side channels. That keeps the elements locked into a heavy body that seems to be there from its own side.
4. So the deepest insight reaches the body. Remove the grasping and the winds that serve it, and the elements are no longer held as a solid body.

The two traditions agree on this. They differ in how they describe the body, which practice does the work, and what they call the result.

Dzogchen: the body is light not recognised

The view

Dzogchen speaks of the ground in three aspects:

• Essence: empty, primordially pure (ka dag).
• Nature: luminous, spontaneously present (lhun grub).
• Energy: the unceasing display, also called compassion (thugs rje).

The display first shows as sound, light and rays, and the light as five lights. The Seventeen Tantras then tell how saṃsāra begins. When the display is not recognised as the ground's own radiance, it is taken as something other, standing over there. The five lights are grasped, and they harden into the five elements. From the elements come the body and the world.

So in Dzogchen the ordinary body is light not recognised. The rainbow body is the same process run backwards. When the display is recognised through and through, nothing holds the elements as solid any more, and they return to their essence, the five lights.

The practice

• Trekchö, cutting through. The practitioner recognises rigpa, the knowing that is empty and clear at once, and settles in primordial purity. This frees the mind from grasping. Some teachers add that trekchö alone leads at death to the body dissolving into tiny particles, not into light.
• Thögal, direct crossing. This works with the spontaneous display itself. With particular postures and gazes, the lights appear directly in space, as drops and lines of light, and unfold through four visions:
  1. The direct seeing of the nature of things: drops and threads of light.
  2. The visions increase.
  3. Rigpa reaches its full measure: whole mandalas appear.
  4. The exhaustion of phenomena: every appearance is freed as it arises, and the display returns into the expanse.

At the fourth vision nothing is grasped as solid any more, the body included. Its elements resolve into light.

The results

In essence a realization

The shrinking body is what people see, and it is easy to take it for the rainbow body itself. Teachers within Dzogchen warn against this.

• It is first a realization. When the fourth vision is complete, everything, the body included, is seen as the display of the five lights. That seeing is the rainbow body. What happens to the corpse is a sign of it, and not always a sign at all.
• A shrinking body is a partial rainbow body. Acharya Malcolm Smith, a Dzogchen teacher, calls the body that shrinks and disappears a sign that the fourth vision was not fully finished in this life.
• Control of the elements is not it. Mastery over the four elements is a worldly power. Hindu yogis can gain it, and so can arhats.

These points were set out on Awakening to Reality in 2013 (Rainbow Body and Thusness's Advice to Me), with the advice: "rainbow body, in Dzogchen, does not mean that your body disappears."

Why Dzogchen in particular

Many paths free the mind from grasping. Dzogchen gives the appearing side a path of its own, and that path is thögal. Its claim is precise. Seeing emptiness frees the mind. Recognising the display as the knowing's own radiance frees appearance too, and the body is appearance.

Gelug: the body made of wisdom-wind

Gelug does not teach thögal. It does not use the language of the five lights, and it does not make the rainbow body a goal. Its tantric path leads to a parallel result, described with great care: the illusory body (sgyu lus).

The view

• The sūtra view is Tsongkhapa's Prāsaṅgika. Nothing exists from its own side. Everything is a dependent designation, and as such it is fully valid and functioning.
• The view alone does not change the body quickly. On the sūtra path, the realisation of emptiness takes three countless aeons to ripen into buddhahood. Highest Yoga Tantra is fast because it works directly with the subtle body.

The tantric account (Guhyasamāja)

• Mind and wind are one entity with two aspects. At the subtlest level they are the very subtle wind and the very subtle mind of clear light. They rest in the indestructible drop at the heart.
• Everyone meets this at death. The elements dissolve in order, earth into water, water into fire, fire into wind, wind into consciousness. Then come three appearances, white, red and black. Then the clear light of death. Ordinary beings do not recognise it, so habit carries them on to a new birth.
• The eighty conceptions ride on wind. As the winds dissolve, the coarse conceptions stop. Stilling the winds and stilling conceptual mind are one process seen from two sides.

The practice

• The generation stage. The yogi rehearses death, the in-between state and birth as the three bodies of a buddha: death as the dharmakāya, the in-between as the sambhogakāya, birth as the nirmāṇakāya.
• The completion stage, in five stages (Nāgārjuna's Pañcakrama, and Tsongkhapa's commentary on it, A Lamp to Illuminate the Five Stages):
  1. Isolation of body and speech. The winds are drawn into the central channel, through inner heat and vase breathing.
  2. Isolation of mind. The winds dissolve at the heart, and the yogi passes through the stages of death while alive. The clear light that dawns is called the "example clear light".
  3. The illusory body. From the very subtle wind that carried that clear light, a subtle body of pure wind arises in the form of the deity. It is separate from the coarse body, like a dream body but stable. At this point it is still called "impure".
  4. Clear light. The very subtle mind realises emptiness directly, as bliss and emptiness together: the "meaning clear light".
  5. Union. The pure illusory body and the clear light are joined. At "union beyond learning" this is buddhahood: the clear light becomes the dharmakāya, the illusory body the sambhogakāya.

Why Gelug's view and practice give this result

• The body's material is wind, and wind is one with mind. When the subtlest mind is a direct realisation of emptiness, the wind it rides on arises as a pure body, not as a body of karma.
• The view decides it. Gelug insists that the clear light must realise emptiness. Clarity alone, however deep, frees nothing. A clear light that is only experienced, and not seen as empty, is still a place where grasping can rest.
• Emptiness makes the body workable. A body with no nature of its own can be formed anew from its subtlest conditions. This is Prāsaṅgika logic taken all the way into the body.

What Gelug shows, and what it does not say

• Tukdam, not rainbow body. The sign best known in Gelug is thugs dam. After death, a master rests in the clear light for days, sometimes weeks, and the body does not decay. It is the clear light of death recognised. A study from the Center for Healthy Minds (University of Wisconsin–Madison; Frontiers in Psychology, 2021) found no detectable brain activity in thirteen practitioners in apparent tukdam, measured from about 26 hours after death. It tested brain activity, not the claim that the body does not decay.
• Tsongkhapa is said to have become a buddha in the in-between state through the illusory body. No rainbow body is claimed for him.
• Gelug lamas who practised Dzogchen. The Fifth and the Thirteenth Dalai Lamas practised Dzogchen. The Fourteenth, trained in Gelug, has said that Dzogchen and Highest Yoga Tantra each give the emptiness side of the one view a special treatment of its own.
• Earlier critics. Some earlier Gelug writers attacked the Dzogchen view as a quietism that only stops thinking. That criticism was about the view, not about the rainbow body.

Side by side

The two say the same thing in different words: form is the display, or the mount, of the subtlest knowing. When that knowing is freed by emptiness, the form is freed with it.

The five lights, the aggregates and the senses

If the body is light not recognised, what exactly is the light? The tantras answer in two ways: through the five aggregates, and through the senses. Both lead back to one ordinary moment: holding an apple (What the Logic Is Looking At).

The aggregates are the lights, seen without grasping

In the tantras each of the five aggregates, freed, is one of the five buddha families, with its own wisdom and colour. The Bardo Thödol shows it most plainly. After death each aggregate appears as a bright light of wisdom, and beside it a dull, soft light that leads into one of the realms of rebirth.

The first row is shared because the texts differ. Some pair Vairocana with form and Vajrasattva with consciousness; some, the other way round. The other three rows hold across the texts.

The point does not depend on the colours. The five lights are not a sixth thing beside the aggregates. They are the aggregates, seen without grasping. The dull lights are the same aggregates, grasped. One appearing, two ways of taking it.

The senses are the doors the lights appear through

• Elements and senses. Indian and Tibetan texts often pair each element with one sense and its object: space with hearing, air with touch, fire with sight, water with taste, earth with smell. The pairing varies from text to text. Since the five lights are the pure side of the five elements, each sense stream is, in this reading, one light's way of appearing.
• The lamps of thögal. Thögal speaks of lamps. One of them, the "far-reaching water lamp", is the eyes. The lights appear through the doors of the senses. The visions are not a show apart from perceiving; they are perceiving, recognised as display.

Holding an apple

What the Logic Is Looking At takes the apple one sense at a time. The same passage can be read with the aggregates.

• Form. The hardness, the coolness, the weight, the red. Each arises only as its conditions meet: skin and fruit, light and eye. None is found stored in the apple.
• Consciousness. Touch-consciousness, seeing-consciousness, tasting-consciousness: each sense gives only its own appearing. The streams do not mix, and no one stands behind them gathering them in.
• Feeling. The sweetness is pleasant; right after brushing your teeth, it is not.
• Perception. Memory recognises the shape, and the word "apple" comes.
• Formations. Then the knot. In the passage's own words, mental formation, from the habitual tendencies of the inherent framework, ties the separate appearings into one solid thing, as if hardness, red and sweetness all belonged to a hidden core underneath.

This is the place where the two languages meet. The knot is the formations aggregate, and it is the grasping that hardens the lights. In Dzogchen's words, the display taken as other, standing over there, condenses into the elements and the solid body. In the passage's words, the habit ties the appearings into an apple out there. It is one movement, described once from the side of the lights and once from the side of the view.

Untie the knot, and nothing is lost. "There is just this hardness, this red, this coolness, this sweetness, vivid, appearing as their conditions come together." That is the apple seen as display: many unmixed streams of vivid appearing, not one lump, and nothing owning them. Dzogchen would say the five lights. The passage says: "just this, vivid and light."

What it adds to the rainbow body

The body is held the way the apple is held. Hardness, warmth, weight and the felt sense of "mine" are tied into one solid body in here, as the apple is tied into one solid apple out there. The rainbow body, in essence a realization, is this knot untied all the way through, the body included: the aggregates seen fully as display, with no core underneath and no holder apart from the holding. What happens to the corpse is a sign of how far the untying went.

A caution

"The aggregates are made of light" is easy to hear as light being the stuff underneath them. That is a substrate again. Better: the aggregates are empty and luminous, and "the five lights" names that luminosity in its five qualities. Clarity is never missing from the aggregates; the error is lifting it out of them and making it a thing.

Seen with dependency

None of this needs a ground, and none of it proves one.

• Clarity is never absent; the error is abstracting it (Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3, "Clarity is never missing"). Both traditions rest on this. The body is never apart from knowing. In Dzogchen, grasping the display as other is what hardens it. In Gelug, conceptions riding on wind are what keep it coarse. In neither is the trouble the clarity itself.
• Light, magical and plastic. Once dependent arising is seen, mind and matter lose their weight (Step 2, "Your own weight"). The rainbow body is the furthest point of the same insight. A body that was never found as solid can stop appearing as solid.
• Not a return to a source. "Dissolving into the light of the ground" is easily heard as going back into a luminous substance beneath everything. Read that way it is a substrate, and the Canon View sets it aside. In Dzogchen's own terms the ground is empty in essence. The five lights are its display, not a stuff it is made of. In Gelug's terms the illusory body is a dependent designation, as empty as the coarse body it replaces.
• Nothing is produced. The rainbow body is not made by a meditator, and it is not uncaused either. When the conditions that kept the elements coarse no longer come together, the coarse body no longer appears. That is dependent arising, the same way a flame goes out when the wick, the wax and the air no longer meet.

Is it logical?

Put plainly: how can releasing and purifying the aggregates turn a physical body into a body of light? The answer depends on what "physical body" is taken to be.

Where it fails

Suppose the body is matter that is there from its own side, and the aggregates are only what goes on in a mind. Then purifying the mind cannot reach the body. Nothing joins the two. Read this way, the rainbow body is not logical, and it sounds like magic. Most modern readers start here.

Where it holds

Neither tradition starts there.

• The body is one of the aggregates. Form is the first of the five. Purifying the aggregates is not a mind working on a body outside it. It is the whole way experience is put together coming loose, the body included.
• Solidity is partly the knot's work. In Holding an apple, the formations aggregate ties separate appearings into one solid thing. The body is tied the same way. Dzogchen says it with light: grasped, the lights harden into the elements. Gelug says it with wind: a coarse mind rides a coarse wind.
• Untie the knot, and that hardness has nothing to stand on. Nothing is swapped for anything else. Colour, warmth and touch still appear. What drops is the extra solidity the knot added.

So the logic is dependent arising itself. The coarseness of the body depends in part on grasping, and what depends on a condition does not stay when the condition is gone.

Where the logic stops

This shows how the body is known and lived. It does not show that other people will see a corpse shrink. A body as others see it also depends on conditions that one person's realization does not remove: physical causes and decay, and the senses and habits of the people looking. The step from "I no longer harden appearing" to "my body leaves less behind for everyone" is a claim about the world, not a conclusion of the logic. What supports it is the reports of those who were there (see Cautions), and the tukdam study tested the brain, not the body.

This is why the advice of 2013 matters (In essence a realization): the rainbow body "does not mean that your body disappears." Read as a realization, it follows from the view. Read as a vanishing corpse, it is a report to weigh.

In one line

Purifying the aggregates changes the body because the body's solidity was partly the knot's work. That a body physically vanishes is reported, not proved by the logic.

Outside Buddhism: the yang spirit and others

Buddhism is not the only tradition that says practice can change the body. Taoist inner alchemy speaks of the yang spirit (阳神), a body beyond the body. Indian yogis speak of a divine body, Christian monks of the uncreated light, Sufis of a man of light. Some of these accounts are very close to the rainbow body. The reason in one line: the method is shared widely; the view is not. Most traditions read the transformed body as a self made perfect, or a return to a source. The Buddhist rainbow body is read as the end of the holding: nothing is made, and no one survives.

Taoist inner alchemy and the yang spirit

The path in stages

Inner alchemy (内丹) describes the path as a refining, in stages:

1. 炼精化气: refine essence into energy (qi).
2. 炼气化神: refine energy into spirit. The golden elixir (金丹) forms, and from it the sacred embryo (圣胎). The classical timeline is "ten months of gestation, three years of nursing" (十月怀胎，三年乳哺).
3. 出神: the spirit comes out through the crown (天门). This is the yang spirit, "a body outside the body" (身外有身).
4. 炼神还虚: refine spirit back into emptiness.
5. 炼虚合道: refine emptiness until it unites with the Dao. This is often linked with "nine years facing the wall" (九年面壁).

Yin spirit and yang spirit

• The yin spirit (阴神) can travel, but it has no substance. Only the practitioner sees it, as in a dream. It comes from cultivating the mind alone, and it leaves one a "ghost immortal" (鬼仙).
• The yang spirit (阳神) has form. Others can see it, and it can act in the world. It comes from cultivating mind and body together.

A saying attributed to Lü Dongbin puts the rule plainly. It is best known from the Song of Striking the Lines (敲爻歌); an earlier form is in a Yuan-dynasty song, the Song of Realising the True (悟真歌), with slightly different words:

To cultivate nature without cultivating life is the first fault of practice. To cultivate only the ancestral nature without the elixir, the yin spirit will not enter sainthood in ten thousand aeons. (只修性，不修命，此是修行第一病；只修祖性不修丹，万劫阴灵难入圣。)

Here "nature" (性) is the mind, and "life" (命) is the energy of the body. Cultivating both is called 性命双修.

How a life is said to end

• Liberation from the corpse (尸解). The body vanishes at death. Only clothes, shoes, a staff or a sword are left in the coffin.
• Rising in broad daylight (白日飞升). The person goes, body and all, without dying.

The parallels

The likeness is in the method. Both say that freeing the mind alone does not change the body. The energy side needs its own path.

The likeness is not only chance. The Wu-Liu school (伍冲虚, 柳华阳) uses Buddhist words freely, and Liu Huayang had been a Chan monk. The pictures of the Principles of Balanced Cultivation of Nature and Life (性命圭旨) show the spirit leaving through the crown much as tantric drawings do.

Where the view parts

• The Dao is a source. "The Dao gives birth to the One" (道生一). The path is a return (还虚, 合道) to where everything came from. In the terms of the Canon View, that is a ground: a source things come out of and go back into. The Dzogchen ground is easy to misread this way. The Taoist Dao is very often meant this way.
• The goal is not dying. The aim is long life and no death (长生不死): a spirit that lasts, made of refined energy. From the Buddhist side this is the finest form of permanence, a self that has at last become solid enough to survive.
• What is cultivated is a self. The yang spirit is "my" true body, refined. In the rainbow body nothing is made and no one is preserved. When grasping ends, the coarse body no longer appears.

The corpse-guarding ghost

Chan said this sharply, in the meeting of Lü Dongbin and the Chan master Huanglong Huiji (黄龙诲机, also called Chaohui 超慧, the founder of the monastery on Mount Huanglong), as the Chan tradition tells it, following the Compendium of the Five Lamps (五灯会元):

Lü: "One grain of millet holds the world; in half a pint of pot, mountains and rivers are cooked. What does that mean?" (一粒粟中藏世界，半升铛内煮山川。且道此意如何？)

Huanglong: "You corpse-guarding ghost!" (这守尸鬼！)

Lü: "But in my bag I have the medicine of long life and no death." (争奈囊有长生不死药。)

Huanglong: "Even if you last eighty thousand aeons, in the end you fall into empty ruin." (饶经八万劫，终是落空亡。)

In the story Lü then woke up to Chan, and wrote a verse that ends: "Since I once met Huanglong, I first see how I used my mind wrongly before" (自从一见黄龙后，始觉从前错用心). The Taoist tellings of the meeting leave out the "corpse-guarding ghost". A "corpse-guarding ghost" is one who guards a body, however refined, as if it were himself. Eighty thousand aeons is still a length of time. Whatever is made to last will end, because it was made.

Outside Buddhism and Taoism

Bön

Bön has its own Dzogchen, the Zhang Zhung Nyengyud, with thögal and the four visions as in Buddhist Dzogchen, and its own rainbow body. Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen is said to have attained it in 1934 (the Wood Dog year; some lists say 1935): his body shrank, with rainbow lights. Bön sees itself as separate from Buddhism; on this point the practice is the same.

India

• The Tamil Siddhas. Ramalinga Swamigal (Vallalar, 1823–1874) taught three bodies: the pure body (śuddha deham), the body of the sacred sound (praṇava deham), and the body of wisdom (jñāna deham), a body of light that does not die. On 30 January 1874 he went into his room at Mettukuppam, Siddhi Valagam, and the door was locked; he had asked that no one open it. When it was opened, he was not found. The accounts differ on when it was opened, and by whom. This is the closest Hindu parallel to the rainbow body.
• The Nath yogis. Hatha yoga aims at the divine body (divya deha) and mastery of the body (kāya siddhi). The Rasa Siddhas used mercury, like Taoist outer alchemy (外丹).
• Bodies that do not decay. Yogananda died in March 1952. A notarized letter from Harry T. Rowe, the mortuary director at Forest Lawn, quoted by his followers, says the body showed no decay for twenty days. Sri Aurobindo taught a "supramental" change of the body itself. He died on 5 December 1950; doctors found no sign of decay, and the first signs came only after more than a hundred hours. These are like tukdam, not like the rainbow body.

Christianity

• The light on the mountain. Jesus is transfigured, his face and clothes shining (Matthew 17). In Eastern Orthodox hesychasm, the prayer of the heart joined to the breath leads to seeing the "uncreated light of Tabor" (Gregory Palamas). Seraphim of Sarov was seen shining, in Motovilov's account.
• Taken without death. Enoch and Elijah, like rising in broad daylight and the great transference.
• The spiritual body (sōma pneumatikon, 1 Corinthians 15), and the saints whose bodies are said not to decay.
• A direct comparison. Fr. Francis Tiso, the priest who looked into the death of Khenpo A Chö in 1998 (some sources say 1999), compares the two in Rainbow Body and Resurrection (2016).

Islam and Iran

Henry Corbin wrote about these in The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism and Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth:

• the Sufis' "man of light";
• the subtle body of the world of Hūrqalyā, in Iranian Shi'ism;
• Suhrawardī's philosophy of light.

The West

• The Neoplatonists' "vehicle of the soul" (ochēma), purified by theurgy (Proclus).
• The alchemists' glorified body and philosopher's stone.

Three subtle bodies, one method

The parallels above are about what is said to happen to the body at the end. The likeness starts earlier, in the maps of the subtle body that the practice works with. Taoist inner alchemy, Indian tantra and Tibetan Vajrayana each have one. Set side by side, they show the same thing as the rest of this page, only more closely: as I see it, the method is shared; the view is not.

The three maps

• The Taoist orbits. Three elixir fields (丹田): the lower one below the navel for essence (精), the middle one at the heart for energy (气), the upper one between the brows for spirit (神). In the small heavenly orbit (小周天), energy gathered in the lower field rises up the back along the Governing Vessel (督脉), through three gates (三关: 尾闾 at the tailbone, 夹脊 between the shoulder blades, 玉枕 at the back of the head) to the crown, and comes down the front along the Conception Vessel (任脉). The tongue on the palate is the “magpie bridge” (鹊桥) that joins the two. Many schools tie the small orbit to the first stage, refining essence into energy, and the great heavenly orbit (大周天) to the second; what the great orbit covers differs from school to school. The shape is a loop, and the logic is reversal (逆): the ordinary flow, outward to dissipation, ageing and death, is turned back toward the source.
• The Indian wheels. In the Description of the Six Wheels (Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa, Pūrṇānanda, 1577; Arthur Avalon’s The Serpent Power), the central channel (suṣumnā) runs up the spine between a left and a right channel (iḍā, piṅgalā), with six wheels (cakra) on it and the thousand-petalled lotus above. Breath, locks (bandha) and attention wake the power (kuṇḍalinī) coiled at the base. It rises, pierces three knots (granthi), dissolves each element into the next above it, and joins Śakti with Śiva at the crown. The shape is a column, and the logic is reunion.
• The Tibetan channels, winds and drops (rtsa rlung thig le). The central channel (dbu ma) has a right and a left channel beside it (ro ma, rkyang ma), which wrap around it at the wheels; at the heart the wrapping is six-fold, the hardest knot. In the Gelug presentation the wheels have 32 spokes at the crown, 16 at the throat, 8 at the heart and 64 at the navel. Inner heat (gtum mo) is lit at the navel, rises in the central channel and melts the white drop at the crown; as it comes down, the four joys arise. When the winds enter, stay and dissolve in the central channel, the signs of dying appear in order: a mirage, smoke, fireflies, a steady flame, then white appearance, red increase and black near-attainment, as the eighty kinds of conception (thirty-three, forty and seven) cease, and last the clear light. The same sequence, the texts say, comes to everyone at death; the yogi meets it while alive. The shape is three parallel channels and wheels, and the logic is dissolution.

What the maps are

• The details differ, even inside each tradition. The colours and sides of the Tibetan channels change between lineages, and between men and women. Later Indian pictures often show the left and right channels crossing at each wheel; Tibetan texts have them run beside the central channel and wrap it. The number of Tibetan wheels is four, five or six, by text. What the great orbit covers differs by school.
• They are maps for practice, not anatomy. No dissection finds the channels. What has been measured is narrower: Herbert Benson’s team recorded fingers and toes warming during inner-heat practice (Nature, 1982), and Maria Kozhevnikov’s team found the core temperature rise with the forceful vase breathing (PLoS ONE, 2013). The breath stopping without harm, and the knots coming loose, are what the texts say, not what has been shown.
• Words from physics do not fit them. Some modern accounts speak of thermodynamic pressure breaking the heart knot, or of the left and right channels as the two halves of the nervous system. That turns a map for attention and breath into plumbing.

Where the view parts

The three maps work in much the same way: breath, attention, an axis, heat, light. Each tradition also says what the practice reaches, and there the view parts, as it did for the yang spirit above. The Taoist and Indian answers are plain. The Tibetan one needs more care, because there I part in places from the schools’ own words, and I should say where, in my own name.

• A source. For the Taoist, the orbit turns the flow back to the Dao, the source everything came from. For the Indian tantric, Śakti returns to Śiva, a supreme consciousness. Both are grounds in the sense of the Canon View.
• Dependent arising is not a fourth source. It is easy to draw a chart with the Dao at the top of one column, Śiva at the top of the next, and dependent arising at the top of the Tibetan one. That puts it in the place of a source. Dependent arising is not where things come from. It is why nothing is found that they come from. Here Gelug, and Dzogchen read with Mipham, say the same.
• What the Tibetan schools teach. In Gelug, the very subtle clear light mind is always present beneath the coarse minds. When the winds dissolve at the heart it dawns: at death for everyone, and in the completion stage for the yogi. It goes on from life to life, a stream on which the person is designated, and it is empty of any nature of its own. Tsongkhapa holds that the view is the same in sūtra and tantra: one emptiness, known in both (Great Exposition of Secret Mantra). What tantra changes is the mind that knows it: the very subtle clear light mind is a sharper knower than the coarse mind, and that, for Gelug, is why the tantric path is faster. The indestructible drop at the heart is so called because it lasts until death; at death it opens, and only the very subtle wind and mind go on. At buddhahood that mind becomes the truth body, and its wind the form body, through the illusory body. Because every result needs a substantial cause of its own kind, and merit is only a helping cause of the form body, Gelug holds that the sūtra path alone stops at the tenth stage and that every buddha completes the path through highest yoga tantra; it even teaches that Śākyamuni did so in Akaniṣṭha before showing awakening in India. The insight into emptiness, it agrees, can be reached by the sūtra path. Dzogchen speaks of the ground luminosity, pure from the beginning and not made by causes and conditions. At death this mother luminosity dawns; one who has come to know it in practice, the child luminosity, meets it as a child meets its mother, and is freed into the ground, as the texts put it. Both schools train the practitioner to stay present through the dissolution: Gelug by mindfulness kept through the dark stage, Dzogchen by sustaining recognition without distraction. In neither school is any of this a self, or a thing with a nature of its own.
• Where I part. I keep their emptiness, and part from four of their pictures.
  • No deeper floor. I read “subtle” as fewer conditions, not a deeper level beneath the coarse minds. The coarse minds were never darkness (MMK 7.9), so what goes at the heart is the knot, not a covering over a hidden mind (Luminosity, “The lamp under the basket”). The ground luminosity I read with Mipham: emptiness and appearance together, with nothing behind the lights.
  • No carrier needed. I do not deny the stream. I deny that it needs a very subtle mind to carry it: the stream is neither carried nor cut. It is the same point I make on Tsongkhapa’s mere I, and where Mipham and I part (Causal Efficacy Without Causal Power).
  • No keeper. Sustaining without effort and without a keeper, as Dzogchen means it, is not what I refuse. What I refuse is a watcher kept lit by effort: maintenance is the split. Gelug’s training aims at emptiness; the danger is that it slides into keeping a state.
  • No cause of its own kind needed. Gelug’s need for energy practice at the end rests on one rule: a buddha’s form body must have a substantial cause of its own kind, and only the very subtle wind can be that cause. To me this is the same move as the mere I and disintegratedness: a bridge posited because something seems to be missing. The form bodies need no producer of their kind. Appearing is dependent arising without a producer, and that is spontaneous presence. Most other traditions do not make energy practice necessary either. Theravāda frees by insight alone, the ending of the taints. The sūtras, and Nāgārjuna’s Ratnāvalī, give the form body to merit and the truth body to wisdom. Chan says seeing one’s nature is buddhahood (见性成佛); Hakuin used breath and energy only to cure “Zen sickness”. Gampopa taught a sūtra Mahāmudrā, which Sakya Paṇḍita attacked. Most Dzogchen teachers say trekchö alone frees, the winds freeing themselves in recognition. Sakya, like Gelug, holds that full buddhahood needs tantra, and Taoism needs the energy side too (性命双修).
  These are my readings, not the schools’. Those who follow Gelug or Dzogchen will hear these points put differently by their own teachers, and should weigh mine against theirs.

None of this says the practices do not work. It says what they show. Energy can be gathered and the body changed, by Taoists, yogis and Vajrayana practitioners alike; that is the shared method. What frees is seeing through the inherent framework, not where the winds go. I have not practised forcing the winds myself, so I cannot judge how effective it is. What I have seen is that many who force these practices suffer sleeplessness and energy imbalances, and they need a qualified master. The insights of anatta and emptiness do not wait on them: they come from seeing through reification.

Why the body matters

Somatic practices are not an optional preliminary, and they are not an obstacle course to finish before insight is allowed to come. They matter for a simpler reason. The habit of seeing things as inherently existent is not only a mistake of thought. It has been rehearsed until it is somatic, reflexive and preconceptual (The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness, “The Taste”). It is held in the body as bracing, guarded breathing and contraction. If insight stays a clean deduction, the body goes on with its old, defensive work underneath. The insight has to reach the body too, and the body has to stay balanced, rooted and supple while it does.

It works the other way as well. Energy practices work on the winds; insight practices work on deconstructing the mind’s reifications. Insight deconstructs reification, and that opens the mind; the opening is natural, and so is the balancing that comes with it. A lot of energy is tied up in keeping the ego and reified constructs in place. When they are seen through, that energy is freed, and the body is freed with it. Somatic practices help along the journey; the deconstruction is what frees.

Do not over-focus on the crown

The crown is extremely sensitive to energy. Over-focus on that region, or on the brow, often results in energy imbalances. When attention is held tight in the head, the body pushes back against the top-heavy pressure. The traditions report this with striking agreement:

• Chinese internal traditions speak of qigong deviation (气功偏差, qigong piancha): misdirected intent drives the qi upward, and the signs they report include dizziness, tightness in the chest, agitation and, in severe cases, disturbed perception. Their remedy is the same every time: let the breath sink to the lower field (气沉丹田).
• Tibetan medicine describes disorders of the life-sustaining wind (srog ’dzin rlung), brought on by forced concentration and grasping in the head: restlessness, palpitations, heat in the head, anxiety and sleeplessness.
• Hakuin, the Rinzai master, pushed his practice so hard that he fell into “Zen sickness” (zenbyō): his head burned, his lungs felt dry, his eyes watered and his feet were ice-cold. More striving did not help. The hermit Hakuyu taught him introspection (naikan) and the soft-butter method, bringing breath and attention down into the lower belly (tanden) until the feet were warm and the head was cool (Yasen Kanna).

What balances it

Balancing is settling, not a forceful intervention. The heat and tension in the head ease when the ground below is settled:

• Gentle vase breathing below the navel. The breath is drawn softly down past the navel and gathered gently, like liquid poured into a round vase, so that the lower belly fills and relaxes. The diaphragm is not clamped and the throat is not strained.
• An upright, unforced posture. In the seven points of Vairocana or in zazen, the spine is naturally upright: not rigid like a soldier at attention, but as if hung from above like a plumb line. The ribs soften, the shoulders drop away from the ears, and the jaw softens.
• The lower belly, still and moving. In stillness, attention rests in the lower field. Movement helps too: Daoist pelvic circling, qigong rooting, the Tibetan movement yogas (’khrul ’khor). They loosen the tension held in the hips and lower body, and, as the traditions put it, keep the winds moving through the whole body instead of gathering in the head.

Safety. These practices are a re-balancing, not an endurance test. Learn breath retention from a qualified teacher. Never force or strain the holding of the breath: that can bring dizziness, headaches and agitation. If you have high blood pressure or a heart condition, or are pregnant, ask a doctor before any retention or lower-belly breath practice.

Clarity must be natural

Luminous clarity must be natural, effortless and open. Its nature is free, clear and empty; restrict it and imbalance follows. Trying to make clarity by holding tight to the crown or the brow is the very effort that brings on the sickness. Straining to keep the light on is not awakening. It is a contraction in the body that passes for awareness.

As I put it in Luminosity, maintenance is the split. The moment clarity seems to need bracing, holding in place or a watchman, the separate self has come back in by the back door.

Dzogchen says the nature of mind is uncontrived (ma bcos pa). Rigpa, as Dzogchen names it, never needed a pump, an anchor or a watchman, and it is not a lamp standing behind what appears. It does not grow brighter because energy is pushed to the crown, and it does not dim when the energy rests in the soles of the feet. When contriving stops, the winds settle; once you stop treating the head as a command centre, it begins to cool.

The view frees: it clears away the belief that awareness must be defended or produced. The somatic practices keep the ground balanced, so that this freedom can reach the stubborn reflexes of the body. The channels open, the breath descends, the tension uncoils, and through it all there is still no keeper.

What this shows

• The method is shared. Energy, breath, the central channel, the crown, light, a body beyond the body. Many traditions found that working with energy changes how the body appears.
• The view is not. Almost all of them read the result through something that stands by itself: a soul that survives, a source to return to (the Dao), an eternal self (the Siddhas' ātman), or God's light that one comes to share.
• Buddhism expected this. In the early discourses, five of the six higher knowledges, the powers and bodily wonders among them, are shared with those outside the teaching. Only the sixth, the ending of the taints (āsavakkhaya), frees (The Six Powers). So a changed body shows that energy was mastered. It does not show that grasping has ended. Awakening to Reality made the same point in 2013: Hindu yogis gain control over the four elements, and so do arhats. And the rainbow body, in Dzogchen, "does not mean that your body disappears": in essence it is a realization (above, "In essence a realization").
• What makes the Buddhist rainbow body different is what it is said to be. Dzogchen calls it the exhaustion of phenomena, not an achievement. Nothing is produced, no one survives, and no source is returned to. The coarse body no longer appears because nothing holds it.

The yang spirit is a self made perfect. The rainbow body is the end of the holding. A body of light still guarded as "me" is still a corpse-guarding ghost, only a very refined one.

Cautions

• It is not the measure of insight. Both traditions say so. Many great Dzogchen masters left ordinary bodies, and many Gelug masters who rested in tukdam did not dissolve. Insight is measured by the freedom of the mind, not by what happens to the body.

• The accounts cannot be checked. The modern cases often told (Sonam Namgyal in 1952; Khenpo A Chö in 1998 (some sources say 1999), looked into afterwards by Fr. Francis Tiso) rest on the reports of those who were there. They are not confirmed, and a shrinking body is not, by itself, a rainbow body.

• It is not a goal to grasp. To practise for a body of light is still to practise for something. Both traditions place the result where grasping ends, not where it is aimed.

• The stories outside Buddhism. The dates and stories here (Lü Dongbin and Huanglong, Shardza's passing, Vallalar's locked room, the letter about Yogananda, Aurobindo's body) are given as the traditions and their followers tell them. Searches on 2026-10-30 found the same dates in several sources, but most of them are devotional. None is a checked fact, and none is needed for the argument. The argument is about the view.

In brief

Read more

• The Six Powers (Knowing From Somewhere): the six higher knowledges, and why only the sixth frees.
• One Flame Lights Another, Part on Tibet: "The Stages of Dissolution", "The Very Subtle Mind" and "The Clear Light Read Without a Ground".
• What the Logic Is Looking At, "Holding an apple": the senses one by one, and the knot.
• Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3: how it ends in spontaneous presence, and "Clarity is never missing".
• Vivid and Nowhere: What a Phenomenon Is: clarity, vividness and unfindability as one appearing.
• Isn't Energy the Substrate?: why energy, wind included, is not a ground.
• Energy Practices: the three subtle bodies as an exploration of their own.
• Luminosity ("The lamp under the basket" and "Not maintenance: a wisdom practice"): the subtle clear light read without a ground, and why keeping a lamp lit is the split.
• Neither Carried Nor Cut: the stream with no carrier.
• The Canon View: emptiness never a ground, luminosity the knowing clarity of appearing.

Words to know

Rainbow body ('ja' lus)

In Dzogchen, in essence the realization that everything, the body included, is the display of the five lights; its outward sign, the body's elements resolving into light at death, with only hair and nails left.

Great transference ('pho ba chen po)

A body of light attained without dying.

Trekchö (khregs chod)

"cutting through"; recognising rigpa and resting in primordial purity.

Thögal (thod rgal)

"direct crossing"; the practice of the spontaneous display, unfolding as the four visions.

Five lights

The first display of the ground; not recognised, they become the five elements.

Five aggregates (skandha)

Form, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness; freed, the five buddha families and their lights.

Wind (prāṇa, rlung)

The subtle energy the mind rides on.

Clear light ('od gsal)

The subtlest mind, dawning fully at death; in Gelug it must realise emptiness to free.

Illusory body (sgyu lus)

In Gelug tantra, a body of very subtle wind that becomes the sambhogakāya.

Tukdam (thugs dam)

A master resting in the clear light after death, the body not decaying.

Inner alchemy

(内丹): Taoist practice that refines essence, energy and spirit within the body.

Essence, energy, spirit

(精, 气, 神): the three treasures refined in turn.

Nature and life

(性, 命): the mind and the energy of the body; cultivated together in 性命双修.

Yin spirit

(阴神): a spirit body without substance, from cultivating the mind alone.

Yang spirit

(阳神): a spirit body with form, visible to others; "a body outside the body".

Liberation from the corpse

(尸解): the body gone at death, only clothes or a staff left.

Rising in broad daylight

(白日飞升): leaving with the body, without death.

Small and great heavenly orbit

(小周天, 大周天): energy circled up the back and down the front; then, by school, through the whole body.

Kuṇḍalinī

In Indian tantra, the power coiled at the base of the central channel, woken to rise to the crown.

Channels, winds and drops

(rtsa rlung thig le): the Tibetan map of the subtle body.

Vase breathing

(bum pa can, kumbhaka): the breath guided gently below the navel and lightly met by a slight lift of the pelvic floor, so that a soft, rounded fullness forms in the lower belly without straining the chest.

Lower field

(丹田, dantian; Japanese tanden): the centre of gravity about three finger-widths below the navel, deep in the belly; in the internal traditions the root of vitality and grounding, where the breath is let sink.

Four empties

White appearance, red increase, black near-attainment and the clear light, as the winds dissolve at the heart; a map from Indian tantra (the Guhyasamāja and the Pañcakrama), taught in all the Tibetan schools.

Corpse-guarding ghost

(守尸鬼): Chan's name for one who guards a refined body as self.