The Brill Dynamics in the History of Religions 17: The Kusāli Yogi

This book offers a new interpretation of early Kagyupa Buddhism by demonstrating that Vinaya, tantric yoga, and mahāmudrā are not separate domains but integrated aspects of a single path. Focusing on Jikten Sumgön and his lineage, it shows how disciplined conduct functions as a method for transforming the mind and stabilizing awareness. Tantric practices involving channels, winds, and bindus are reinterpreted as techniques for generating and regulating experience, subordinate to realization. The study further argues that practices involving a karmamudrā were marginal, highly restricted, and increasingly internalized. The ideal of the kusāli yogi emerges as the key to this integration, embodying a path in which all experience becomes a means to realization.