Naropa: Life, the Six Yogas and the Kagyu Lineage

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 27 October 2026

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Nāropa (also spelled Naropa, and called Naḍapāda) was an eleventh-century Indian Buddhist scholar and tantric siddha, an accomplished yogi. Tibetans remember him as the disciple of Tilopa, the namesake of the Six Yogas (or Six Dharmas) of Nāropa, which tradition says Tilopa passed to him, and the Indian master from whom the Kagyu schools that run through Marpa the Translator descend. Kagyu tradition dates him 1016–1100; modern scholars put his death about sixty years earlier, around 1040.

Almost everything else comes from sacred biographies (namthar) written in Tibet long after his death. The historian Ronald Davidson says so much hagiography has gathered around Nāropa that “it scarcely seems possible to find room for a real person”. This page reports each episode as the source that tells it, and says where the sources disagree.

Nāropa at a glance

• Names: Nāropā, Naḍapāda and Yaśobhadra (Buddhist Digital Resource Center, BDRC); as a monk-scholar in the biographies, Abhayakīrti.
• Homeland: Bengal in Gyaltangpa’s 13th-century homage, in Guenther’s introduction to Lhatsun’s life and for Davidson; Kashmir in many other Tibetan sources, which Davidson calls incorrect; northwest India for Sarah Harding and Cécile Ducher, who read the earliest lives as placing him only “in the west”.
• Teacher: Tilopa, traditionally 988–1069.
• Among the eighty-four mahāsiddhas: no. 20 in the list compiled by Abhayadattaśrī and Vīraprakāśa (BDRC), and named in the many sets of the Eighty-four Great Mahasiddhas (Himalayan Art Resources).
• Known for: the Six Yogas; the Cakrasaṃvara and Vajrayoginī cycles (Himalayan Art Resources); a Kālacakra commentary.
• Lineages: in the Dakpo Kagyu, one of “the two founding preeminent Indian teachers along with Tilopa”; present in the lineages of all the Sarma schools of Tibetan Buddhism (Himalayan Art Resources).

How we know about Nāropa

The lives come in layers. One of the earliest, Davidson notes, is a thirty-three-verse homage with prose commentary by the thirteenth-century Kagyu author Gyaltangpa (Davidson spells it Gyeltangpa) Dechen Dorje. A much later and far longer life is the one by Lhatsun Rinchen Namgyal (1473–1557), a disciple of Tsangnyön Heruka, the biographer of Milarepa. Herbert V. Guenther translated it as The Life and Teaching of Nāropa (Oxford, 1963), and Davidson places it in the tradition of the Rechung Oral Transmission (Ras chung snyan brgyud).

For Davidson such texts are “literary events”, not history, “although they might contain much historical information”. Against them stands a contemporary witness. Naktso (Davidson: Nagtso) Lotsāwa, the Tibetan who did much to bring Atiśa to Tibet, went to see Nāropa around 1038/39; his account survives in a letter by the Sakya master Drakpa Gyaltsen (Davidson: Gyeltsen), which Davidson translates. A month’s journey east of Magadha, at the monastery of Phullahari, Naktso saw an old man, “physically quite corpulent”, his white hair dyed red with henna, carried in a palanquin and chewing betel. Pushed back by the crowd, he “saw the lord’s face but did not actually hear his voice.” Davidson draws from this record the picture of “a Bengali lay guru”, some distance from the monk-abbot of the biographies.

Even this report ends in wonder: in Nepal, Naktso and Atiśa heard that Nāropa had died, and that at his cremation there were “many miraculous offerings, such as the sound of divine cymbals and a rain of flowers.”

When did Nāropa live?

Two dating systems are in use, and they should not be mixed.

A whole chronology hangs on the traditional dates: Guenther’s introduction, following the life, has Nāropa elected abbot of Nālandā in 1049 and setting out to find Tilopa in 1057. Newman accepts Wylie’s case for a death around 1040 but warns against the “miraculously precise dates” of late Tibetan sources, given in a sixty-year cycle “which was never used in India”. Davidson reads Naktso’s report as making 1041 the most likely year of death.

Mixing the systems misleads: the UVA exhibit pairs a traditional Tilopa (988–1069) with Nāropa c. 956–1040, making the teacher younger than his disciple.

Birth, family and marriage

“Many Tibetans incorrectly locate him in Kashmir,” Davidson writes, “while others accurately place him in Bengal.” Sarah Harding, quoted by Cécile Ducher, argues the reverse: the earliest lives, such as Gampopa’s and Lama Zhang’s, “do not name a specific birthplace other than simply ‘the west’”, and Nāropa has been “widely viewed in the Western world as a Bengali” because two English translations render the Tibetan Bha ga la as Bengal. Ducher concludes that he “came from northwest India, although he did not spend his spiritual life there”. The question is open. Some make him a Brahman, others a prince; the Indian compendium of siddha lives attributed to Abhayadattaśrī makes him the son of low-caste liquor sellers. Gyaltangpa’s homage models his youth on the Buddha’s: born in Bengal, of the Śākya clan, son of a king. In Guenther’s text the boy is named Samantabhadra and his father is the “king” Śāntivarman, which Guenther takes to mean only that the family was gentry; the boy studies in Kashmir from eleven, is married against his will to a Brahmin girl, Vimaladīpī, and the marriage is dissolved after eight years. The Karma Kagyu account, on the site of the 17th Karmapa Thaye Dorje, tells the same story with the same names: a “Bengali prince named Samantabhadra” married to “Vimaladipi, a Brahmin girl”.

The scholar at Nālandā, or Vikramaśīla?

In Guenther’s life, Nālandā had four great scholars, one at each gate. When the head of the northern gate died, the monks begged Nāropa for nine days to take his place, “and so they installed him at the northern gate”. Gyaltangpa and Guenther’s introduction call him the abbot, as Naropa University does.

Thirteenth-century Sakya chronicles of the translator Drokmi’s studies put four gatekeepers at Vikramaśīla instead, with “Lord Narotapa” at the northern gate; Davidson judges that curriculum “creatively elaborated”. He accepts that Atiśa’s biography shows Nāropa visited Vikramaśīla, but thinks it “unlikely that he was a scholar in official residence” there while Drokmi studied, and suggests that later Tibetans confused the two institutions. The place a witness attests is Phullahari, Nāropa’s retreat, which Davidson locates in East India, in Bihar or Bengal, not in Kashmir as some colophons claim. (On the great monastic universities, see Buddhism in India.)

The old woman and the search for Tilopa

In Guenther’s text, Nāropa is studying grammar, logic and the spiritual precepts when a shadow falls on his books. Behind him stands an old woman with thirty-seven ugly features, who asks:

“Do you understand the words or the sense?”

When he says the words, she laughs and dances. When he adds that he understands the sense too, she weeps, because, she says, that was a lie. Only her “brother” understands the sense, and she vanishes “like a rainbow in the sky”. She is the first of what Guenther’s text heads “the twelve minor visionary experiences”; the other eleven come to him while he searches for Tilopa. The chapter heading names this first one as an exhortation by Vajrayoginī to go to Tilopa. In Gyaltangpa’s earlier homage the messenger is Jñānaḍākinī, and Nāropa leaves his monastery against the wishes of its monks.

In Guenther’s summary, each vision is more terrible than the last, and Nāropa is in “utter despondency” when he finally meets Tilopa. Tilopa tells him that they had met already, “in the form of the leper woman”, one of the visions, and that the visions were “the defilements of your evil deeds”, which had kept him from recognising his teacher.

The trials under Tilopa

Guenther’s text counts “twelve great acts of self denial”, the first a leap from a temple roof after Tilopa remarks that a true disciple would jump; after each, Tilopa gives an instruction. The Karmapa’s site speaks of “twelve hard tests”. Davidson, writing of the hagiographies in general, speaks of “the thirteen trials” and notes that their nature “varies according to the hagiographer”. Gyaltangpa’s homage names a jump from a fortress roof, a stake in the kidneys, a leap into a sandalwood fire and making himself a bridge in a swamp, “and so forth”.

Most of the lives, Davidson observes, say little about the yogic content of the teaching. They dwell on devotion to the guru and on suffering, casting Nāropa as “a latter-day Herakles”, and the trials themselves are his training. Guenther notes that Nāropa’s life is still “held up as an example” of values won only through years of toil. (Milarepa’s ordeals under Marpa are on our Milarepa page.) This page reports the trials as story, not as a model to imitate.

The Tengyur holds the Ganges Mahāmudrā (Toh 2303), ascribed to Tilopa, which Lotsawa House calls a “well-known and important source for the Mahāmudrā tradition”, containing instructions “that Tilopa imparted to Nāropa on the banks of the River Ganges”. Mahāmudrā, the “Great Seal”, is in Gampo Abbey’s words “an uncontrived recognition of an uncontrived state”; it is also one of the twelve instructions in Guenther’s life. For Mahāmudrā and the Six Yogas in the Kagyu school, see the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

The Six Yogas of Nāropa

The practices that carry his name (Tibetan na ro chos drug) are, in the UVA exhibit’s list:

1. Inner heat (tummo, gtum mo), which Davidson calls “psychic heat” (Sanskrit caṇḍālī);
2. Clear light (‘od gsal), also translated luminosity;
3. Illusory body (sgyu lus);
4. Dream (rmi lam);
5. The intermediate state (bardo); the Kagyu tradition, the UVA exhibit notes, counts three such states: ordinary life, dream, and the passage between death and rebirth described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead;
6. Transference of consciousness at death (phowa).

This page outlines the practices only; it gives no instructions. In Guenther’s text the instruction on the mystic heat follows the trial of a leech-filled pool, and the word gtum mo is explained as “fierce” (gtum) and “mother” (mo). In the tradition of Pema Karpo’s A Brief Synopsis of the Six Yogas of Naropa, the UVA exhibit explains, clear light is “the most subtle, profound, and powerful level of consciousness”, the nature of mind itself. In the Kagyu and Gelug schools the six are tantric (Vajrayana) practices taken up under a teacher and after other tantric practice: at Gampo Abbey, as described below, they follow retreats on Vajrayoginī and Cakrasaṃvara.

Where the six come from, as the tradition tells it

The Tengyur, the Tibetan canon of translated treatises, contains a work ascribed to Tilopa, Esoteric Instructions on the Six Yogas of Naropa (Saddharmopadeśa, no. 2330), which the UVA exhibit says presented the practices as a system “perhaps for the first time”. The lineage accounts hold that Tilopa gathered them from several masters; Davidson reports a standard list of four (or six) transmissions, while noting “some difference of opinion”, and adds that “all the authorities are adamant” that Tilopa brought the practices together first.

The number six is not fixed either. Davidson gives a version that ends with corpse reanimation: entering another’s body (grong ‘jug), which the UVA exhibit identifies with the “forceful projection” of Tsongkhapa’s list, and which Marpa’s biographies count as a seventh doctrine (see our Marpa page). The abstract of Glenn Mullin’s translation of Tsongkhapa’s commentary lists inner heat, illusory body, clear light, transference, forceful projection and the bardo yoga. Guenther’s life frames Tilopa’s teaching as twelve instructions, among them inner heat, dream, clear light, transference, resurrection, Mahāmudrā and the intermediate state. Tsongkhapa also wrote, the UVA exhibit reports, that forceful projection was taught secretly and “is never to be discussed publicly”.

Who practises them

The Drikung Kagyu order describes the Six Yogas as meditations “considered an essential teaching of the Kagyu lineage”. At Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, whose retreat follows texts by Kagyu masters such as the Ninth Karmapa, the Six Dharmas are the third phase of the three-year retreat, after retreats on Vajrayoginī and Cakrasaṃvara: in the abbey’s words, “the completion stage of Vajrayogini-Chakrasamvara practice” and “methods for transforming all states of mind into the wisdom of Mahamudra”. The Gelug adopted them too. By the Drikung order’s account, Tsongkhapa went to Drikung in 1373 and received them there; his A Book of Three Inspirations, the UVA exhibit says, “is regarded as one of the finest works on the subject”.

Niguma: sister or wife?

Tibet knows a second set of six, the Six Yogas of Niguma, kept by the Shangpa Kagyu, a lineage separate from the Kagyu that runs through Marpa. The UVA exhibit calls Niguma Nāropa’s “sister”, and so, Ducher notes, does Sarah Harding’s study of her. It says her teachings were transmitted “in a vision” through the yoginī Sukhasiddhi to the Tibetan yogi Khyungpo Naljor (d. c. 1135), the Shangpa’s founder, and that they are “essentially the same as those of Naropa, differing only in points of emphasis”.

Guenther’s introduction identifies her otherwise. Nāropa’s Brahmin wife, he writes, “seems to have gone by her caste name Ni-gu ma” and, by the custom of calling such a woman “sister”, became known as “the sister of Naropa”; her works, he adds, are in the Tengyur under that name. In the life itself the wife is Vimala or Vimaladīpī (Dri med sgron ma), whose mother is “the Brahmin Ni-gu”; the Karma Kagyu account also calls her Vimaladipi. The name Niguma for the wife is Guenther’s suggestion, made in his introduction, and the question remains open.

Nāropa’s writings

• The Sekoddeśaṭīkā, a commentary on the Sekoddeśa section of the Kālacakra Tantra, first edited in Sanskrit by Mario E. Carelli (Baroda, 1941) from a palm-leaf manuscript in Kathmandu. John Newman notes that Nāropa, “the renowned Indian Kalacakra master”, cites most of the revealed Kālacakra texts; with a death around 1040, that helps him date those texts to the early eleventh century.
• A brief Vajrayoginī sādhana (Toh 1579), called in its colophon “an oral transmission of the glorious Nāropa”. Lotsawa House marks its translation as restricted.
• The Guhyaratna (D1525), which BDRC records Marpa translating at Phullahari with its author. BDRC lists it under the name Akṣobhyavajra, adding “Presumbly this must be Nāropā”.
• Songs. A four-line praise of Milarepa, attributed to him, appears in Tsangnyön Heruka’s biography of Milarepa. A song on the “eight supreme difficulties”, preserved in Marpa’s collected works, is said to have been inscribed on the handle of Nāropa’s parasol. Two of its couplets concern the teacher and the disciple:

The eighth difficulty is that even when the other seven are assembled, it is hard to cultivate meditation single-pointedly.

Nāropa in the lineages

The Kagyu is a Tibetan school, which the UVA exhibit says was founded by “Naropa’s chief Tibetan disciple, Marpa”; in the Dakpo Kagyu, Himalayan Art Resources notes, Nāropa and Tilopa are its two founding Indian teachers. For Davidson, Nāropa was “the object of fascination” for the Kagyu as the siddha Virūpa was for the Sakya. The Karma Kagyu account adds that Nāropa saw to it that Marpa received teachings from other masters as well. Whether the two ever met was already doubted in Drakpa Gyaltsen’s letter, and the life Guenther translated, Davidson notes, has Marpa meet Nāropa after his death; that debate belongs to our Marpa page. For the Kagyu and its branches, see the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

Not all his disciples were Tibetan: Davidson names as Nāropa’s disciples the Phamtingpa brothers, Vāgīśvarakīrti and Bodhibhadra, who taught at Pharping in the Kathmandu Valley (see Buddhism in Nepal).

Beyond the Kagyu, Himalayan Art Resources counts Nāropa among the five foremost mahāsiddhas of the Sakya school, with Virūpa, Nāgārjuna, Vararuci and Padmasambhava.

Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, was founded in 1974 as the Naropa Institute by Chögyam Trungpa. It took its present name in 1999 and says it is named after Nāropa as Nālandā’s eleventh-century abbot. For his place among the great teachers, see the most influential Buddhist teachers.