Subtle Energies

Lung (Rlung)

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Lung (Rlung)." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/subtle-energies/lung-rlung.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Lung (Rlung). Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/subtle-energies/lung-rlung

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-lung-rlung,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Lung (Rlung)},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/subtle-energies/lung-rlung},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Lung, written rlung and cognate with the ordinary Tibetan word for wind, is one of the three nyepa, humors or dynamic principles, of Sowa Rigpa, traditional Tibetan medicine, alongside tripa (bile) and beken (phlegm). It is the subtlest and most mobile of the three, associated with the element of air and with movement, breath, speech, nervous function and the movement of thought, and is described as pervading the whole body while concentrating in particular sites, chiefly the region around the navel and the bones. Sowa Rigpa texts subdivide lung into five functional types by location and direction, closely paralleling the Ayurvedic five-vayu scheme with which Tibetan medicine shares deep historical roots, and treat lung disorders as a major and especially variable category of illness, since lung's mobility makes its imbalances hard to pin down and quick to shift form. Cultivation and balance of lung are addressed through diet, specific behaviors and, at the more advanced end, through the yogic breathing and visualization practices of Tibetan Buddhist tantra, which treats subtle winds moving through a system of channels as the vehicle for advanced meditative attainment, not only for ordinary health.

Facts

Practice

Seat in the Body

Pervades the whole body, concentrating around the navel and in the bones; the subtlest of the three nyepa 1

Cultivation Practice

Diet and behavioral regulation in ordinary medicine; controlled breath and visualization in tantric completion-stage practice such as the Six Yogas of Naropa 1

Position Profile

Key Text

Health Through Balance, Dr. Yeshi Dhonden's account of the three nyepa including lung 1

Attestation

Earliest Attestation

The Four Tantras (rGyud bzhi), the foundational text of Sowa Rigpa, Tibetan medicine 1

Learn More

Lung in Sowa Rigpa Medicine

Sowa Rigpa, the Tibetan science of healing, organizes the body around three nyepa, dynamic principles usually translated as humors: lung (wind), tripa (bile) and beken (phlegm), a framework the tradition's foundational text, the Four Tantras (rGyud bzhi), sets out as the basis of both physiology and diagnosis. Lung is the subtlest of the three, linked to the air element, described with the qualities rough, light, cold, subtle and mobile, and responsible for breath, speech, movement, sensory and mental function, and the passage of substances through the body; because it is the most mobile humor it is also the most prone to imbalance and the hardest to treat predictably.

Tibetan medical texts divide lung into five functional winds by location, a scheme closely paralleling the Ayurvedic pancha vayu with which Sowa Rigpa shares centuries of textual and doctrinal exchange, reflecting Tibetan medicine's own layered history of borrowing from Indian Ayurveda, Chinese medicine and indigenous Tibetan and Bon sources. Lung disorders are treated through diet, behavioral regulation, external therapies such as moxibustion and, in more advanced or stubborn cases, through medicated compounds specifically formulated to calm excess wind, reflecting the tradition's own diagnostic logic that lung's mobility makes it uniquely able to aggravate or complicate the other two humors.

Lung, Winds and Tantric Practice

Beyond ordinary medical usage, rlung carries a second, closely related sense in Tibetan Buddhist tantra, where subtle winds moving through a network of channels, rtsa (comparable to nadis), are the vehicle advanced practitioners work with directly in completion-stage practices, most famously the Six Yogas of Naropa, using controlled breath and visualization to draw these winds into the central channel as a basis for advanced meditative states. This tantric usage and the medical usage are historically and doctrinally connected rather than two unrelated ideas sharing one word, since Tibetan medicine and Tibetan Buddhist tantra developed within the same monastic and scholarly culture and share much of their subtle-body vocabulary.

In English-language scholarship and popular Tibetan Buddhist writing, lung is very commonly translated simply as "wind" or "inner wind," a literal and largely accurate rendering, though it can obscure the extent to which the term functions as a technical physiological and yogic category rather than the everyday meteorological one. As with prana and qi, lung is a concept internal to a living medical and religious tradition; it has not been the subject of a controlled scientific test of the kind applied to the Western esoteric claimants below, and is described here in the terms Sowa Rigpa and Tibetan Buddhist tantra themselves use.

Cross-Tradition Connections