Recently I listened to a Yogic Studies podcast with Professor Giacomella Orofino and decided to check what she says. The video of the interview can be watched at the end of the page. Here is what came out of it.

The legend of Krishnamacharya

Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) is considered the man who created modern postural yoga. His students were Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois. According to the well-known story, before he began to teach, he went across the Himalayas to a teacher named Ramamohana Brahmachari and spent about seven years with him, studying asanas, pranayama and a text called the Yoga Korunta.

There is no historical proof for this story. No independent evidence has been found that Ramamohana Brahmachari existed, and the Yoga Korunta manuscript, according to Pattabhi Jois, was eaten by ants. Mark Singleton, James Mallinson and Norman Sjoman argue that the Tibetan line of transmission cannot be verified. Krishnamacharya himself, in the preface to Yoga Makaranda, named Muktinath in the Kali Gandaki valley in Nepal as the place of his studies, not Tibet.

Professor Giacomella Orofino, a specialist in Tibetan language and literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, says the same in the podcast: there is no confirmation, and she cannot say anything about the legend itself. But what comes next is interesting.

The Buddhist root

In 2002 the American Tibetologist Kurtis Schaeffer published an article about the text Amritasiddhi, “The Attainment of Immortality”, and brought it into scholarly use. The text was written in a Buddhist environment around the 11th century and is the earliest text of hatha yoga. At that time Schaeffer thought it was a Nath Shaiva text translated into Tibetan.

Then James Mallinson (SOAS) and Péter-Dániel Szántó took it up. Working from a very rare bilingual manuscript, they showed that the origins of hatha yoga lie in an eclectic tantric Buddhist milieu, probably active in the second half of the 11th century. The author is named as Madhavachandra, and the place of writing is probably the Deccan. The text opens and closes with invocations to the Vajrayana siddha Virupa.

Jason Birch’s conclusion goes the same way. In his 2011 article he studies the word “hatha” itself, which literally means “force”. The term “hathayoga” appears in Buddhist tantras, but in Shaiva tantras it is absent until late works such as the Rudrayamalottaratantra. This is strange, because Shaiva tantras are full of the rest of the terminology of hatha yoga.

In simple words: hatha yoga did not grow out of a Shaiva environment, as was thought before. It grew out of Buddhist Vajrayana.

What Orofino found

Mallinson and Szántó mentioned that the Tibetan canon (the Tengyur) holds a whole group of texts attached to the Amritasiddhi, and that someone should read them. Orofino decided to try. There turned out to be more than twenty texts. She took the first one on the list, reasoning that it was put first for a reason.

This is “Dispelling the Hindrances to Immortality” (Amṛtasaṃkaṭanibarhaṇa, Tibetan ‘Chi med kyi ‘phrang sel). Its author, the Indian yogin Amoghavajra, came to Tibet in the second half of the 11th century. There is no Sanskrit original, and the text survives only in Tibetan.

It describes 108 dynamic postures (Sanskrit yantra, Tibetan ‘khrul ‘khor) meant to remove hindrances in tantric Buddhist practice. Many of them are strikingly similar to the asanas that were codified in Indian hatha yoga literature centuries later. The text is one of the earliest systematic formulations of physical yoga, and it comes before its codification in Shaiva sources.

The structure is simple: 36 hindrances, and three exercises for each (beginning, middle, final). That makes 108. It is written as a practical manual: put your hands like this, your head here, then breathe. The verse has seven syllables per line, so it is easy to memorize for oral transmission. There is almost no philosophy, only the list of hindrances, and from them you can see that the text is Buddhist: shamatha, vipashyana, pride.

For comparison: the Hatha Pradipika of the 15th century has about fifteen asanas, almost all of them seated. Dynamic standing poses and inversions appear in Indian texts much later. And here we are at the end of the 11th or the beginning of the 12th century.

The postures have no names. Where such physical training came from, Orofino does not know. The host of the podcast suggested two options: either such practices existed in India for a long time and were simply not written down, or the theory was brought over and the exercises were developed already in Tibet and the Himalayas. Orofino leans toward the second.

The “forceful method”

The podcast says something important about the word “hatha” itself. In Vajrayana tantric meditation there are two stages: the generation stage (visualization of a deity and a mandala) and the completion stage. On the second one the yogin works inside: channels, chakras, breath, the six-limbed yoga (shadanga yoga). If signs do not come and the practice does not move, the commentaries advise using the “forceful method”. This is hatha in Sanskrit. In Tibetan it is translated in two ways, and both mean roughly “through force”.

In the earliest descriptions this is only breathing. No asanas, no mudras. The prana is forced up from the navel and the lower chakras to the head. Orofino says this is close to the practice of transference of consciousness (phowa) from the six yogas of Naropa. The method is explained in most detail in the commentary on the Kalachakra attributed to Naropa.

The exercises, trulkhor, in her opinion, grew around this method later, as preparation.

This is not yoga for health

This is the main difference from studio yoga. The yogin does not stretch the body or improve the figure. He prepares the body for the highest tantric practices, the anuttarayoga tantras. The result is checked by concrete signs: inner heat, visions, the ability to dry wet sheets on your body in the cold.

That is why these practices are kept closed. They are not given without preliminary practices (ngondro), and it is not easy to find a teacher. But the tradition is alive. Orofino says that in the mountains of Tibet, India and Nepal yogins continue to practice, including in the Bon tradition.

Where Tsa Lung fits

For me this is not an abstract conversation. The practice I teach comes from the same root.

In the podcast Orofino takes the name apart: tsa means channels, lung means prana and wind, trul means physical movements that help the breathing and the work with chakras. The first two syllables are in the name Tsa Lung.

I do not claim that our exercises match the 108 from Amoghavajra’s text. That is not in the podcast, and I have not checked it myself. But the meaning is very close to me: movement, breath and attention work as one thing, and they do not work for the sake of the body. The body is here to bring you to meditation and beyond.

There is also a personal line in this story. Orofino writes in her book that her interest in the physical practices of Tibetan yoga came from her teacher Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, with whom she once studied Yantra Yoga.

In short

The legend said: hatha yoga died in India and survived in Tibet. There are no documents under this legend. But there is something else under it. Hatha yoga was indeed born in a Buddhist environment, the texts indeed went to Tibet, and there physical yoga indeed lived for centuries, closed and in different lines of transmission.

Sources

• Yogic Studies podcast, interview with Giacomella Orofino: https://youtu.be/ba1Jj-75ryU
• Giacomella Orofino. The Dawn of Physical Yoga: Dispelling the Hindrances to Immortality. UniorPress, Napoli, 2025. Open access: fedoabooks.unina.it, direct link to the PDF: fedoa.unina.it/15813
• James Mallinson, Péter-Dániel Szántó. The Amṛtasiddhi and Amṛtasiddhimūla: The Earliest Texts of the Haṭhayoga Tradition. EFEO / IFP, Collection Indologie 150, 2022: publications.efeo.fr
• Jason Birch. The Meaning of haṭha in Early Haṭhayoga. Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.4 (2011), pp. 527–554. Open access PDF: eprints.soas.ac.uk/23237
• Kurtis Schaeffer. The Attainment of Immortality: From Nāthas in India to Buddhists in Tibet. Journal of Indian Philosophy 30.6 (2002), pp. 515–533.
• Mark Singleton. Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. Oxford University Press, 2010.