Here's a way to sort every energy practice in the book that has nothing to do with which tradition it came from. Ask how many pieces it cuts a body into.
One piece: Master Hakuyu's soma egg, where a lump of butter melts on your head and soaks down through the whole of you as a single event. Two: the Mahāvairocana Sūtra and the Yoga Yājñavalkya, both of which run on a pair of sounds — fire above and water below, or right side and left. Three: Taoism, and Buddhism with Om Ah Hum. Four or five: various mantra and visualisation methods. Seven, if you use the chakras as your focus points. And bone by bone, then all at once, if you use the white skeleton visualisation.1
Qi is the body's live energy — the book uses the word interchangeably with the Sanskrit prāṇa — and all of these are ways of getting attention and effort into every part of a body without missing any of it.2 Laid out that way, the traditions stop looking like rival doctrines and start looking like different grain sizes. Which is exactly what the sorting is for: the schools disagree about how coarsely to slice, and agree about what the slicing is for.
The two-part version is the most drilled, and it comes with an exercise that shows what the divisions are actually doing. The basic form: recite Rah or Ram while feeling it through your whole chest centred on the heart, imagining the entire upper body red and on fire. Then Vah or Vam, felt through the whole abdomen from the rib cage down to the perineum, with everything below imagined as cool blue water.3
Then you swap them. Lower body fire, upper body water. Then you turn the axis: right side fire with Rah, left side water with Vah — and then switch sides. Then, in a different session, back and front: the back red and burning, the front blue and cool.4
Six configurations from two sounds. And the reason given is short: "moving Qi/prana opens up Qi channels."4 Every reversal sends energy through a boundary it hasn't crossed before, which is the whole point of reversing it. There's also a stated goal underneath: you're trying to tell your Yin and Yang energy apart and clean out the channels belonging to each.4
The colour advice comes with a small correction worth having. The sutra suggests white for the lower body, "representing smoothness, purity, lightness and coolness" — but "sometimes a better choice is to imagine that the lower part of the body is blue in color since this better represents the water element."3
The three-part version is the one with an argument behind it rather than a convention. Say Om, Ah and Hung aloud and most people feel them in the head, the chest and the belly respectively — which makes the three-syllable mantra a body map that happens to be lying around in every tradition on earth.5 The claim attached is that only a very few sounds "can be highly appropriated to certain body locations," and those three are the ones.6 So three isn't an arbitrary slice. It's the number of divisions the available sounds actually support.
The advice for the head is unusually specific and doesn't sound like a mantra book at all: look up a dermatome map — the chart of which patch of skin each spinal nerve root serves — and use it to check where the three bands fall. On that map the arms group with the head and the legs with the abdomen, so the sounds get extended accordingly.7
The five-part version is the most anatomically committed, because it's matched to something the tradition already had. Indian medicine divides the body into five cavities according to the five vāyu — the winds, or forms of prāṇa. Udāna in the head, arms and legs. Prāṇa in the chest. Apāna in the pelvic girdle of the waist, excluding legs and upper spine. Samāna in the belly or upper abdomen. Vyāna through the whole body.8
The mantra matched to that is the Vairocana one, and the recipe is given twice with slightly different assignments — first as Om (head, arms and legs), Ah (chest and heart), Vah (navel), Lah (pelvic girdle and legs), Hum (legs), Tway (the whole body, and then space); then restated as Om (head and throat), Ah (chest and head), Vah (navel), Lah (pelvis), Hum (legs), Tway (whole body and then space).8 Two things stand out. The last syllable isn't a region at all — Tway covers the whole body and then space, which is the closing meditation given a syllable of its own. And the two printed versions disagree with each other about where Om and Ah go, on the same page, without comment.
Seven is the chakra version, and the account of it here is deflationary rather than devotional. The seven aren't seven kinds of energy. They're "just seven different sections of the body that you cultivate in order to cultivate the whole" — logical segments of the spine, named as chakras because that helped with concentration practice.9 So the seven-part scheme is the same operation as the two-part and the three-part, run at a finer grain, and the imagery around it was a teaching aid.
There's a strong claim attached about what most schools leave out. Below the familiar seven sit the leg sections — atala, vitala, sutala, talatala, rasatala, mahatala and patala — "which are called the lower chakras of the body," and "most schools usually don't even discuss" them.9 A seven-piece body stops at the pelvis. A fourteen-piece one goes down the legs.
And a rule that applies to every spinal scheme regardless of count: "Whenever you cultivate a spinal section you should always cultivate the internal organs and flesh in front since the entire body must be cultivated."9 Each section is a slab through the body, not a point on the back.
Seven is where most accounts of this material end, and the ladder carries on well beyond it.
Twelve pieces: the Rasi Nyasa, which uses the twelve zodiac signs to cultivate twelve different body parts. Twenty-seven: the Nakshatra Nyasa, which does the same with the lunar mansions. Nine: the Planet Nyasa, "using the fact that there are nine planets to cultivate nine different body sections." Fifty-two: the Matrika sequence, built on the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet.13
The way that gets described is the giveaway. The Nakshatra version means "you cultivate the body by breaking it into twelve pieces instead of just two, such as with the Ram/Vam dichotomy" — the count is stated as the whole difference between one practice and another.13 Nothing about zodiac signs is doing anything. Twelve of them means twelve stations.
Which extends the argument in an awkward direction. If any list of the right length works, then the ladder has no top rung, and the choice of grain is limited only by what a practitioner can hold. Fifty-two is already more than most people manage. A tradition with a list of a thousand somethings could sell a thousand-station route, and on this account it would be a better practice than the seven-chakra one.
The one-piece version is the extreme case, and running it shows what the divisions were buying. Master Hakuyu's method has no regions at all. You imagine a lump of soft butter, "pure in colour and fragrance and the size and shape of a duck egg," placed on top of your head. It melts. It saturates the head inside and out, oozes down the shoulders, elbows and chest, permeates the lungs, diaphragm, liver, stomach and bowels, moves down the spine through hips, pelvis and buttocks, and suffuses the legs with warmth until it reaches the soles of the feet, where it stops. Then you start again.10
No list, no syllables, no correspondence. One continuous downward motion that covers everything by construction, because a liquid poured on your head cannot skip your left calf.
That's the trade. A one-piece method needs no memory and no chart, and it can't miss anything — but it also can't concentrate anywhere, so a region that resists gets the same passing attention as one that doesn't. A fifty-two-piece method can stay on a stubborn instep for ten minutes, and requires a list you'll shorten the moment you're tired.
The book doesn't rank them and instead says to stack them: "The more methodologies you simultaneously add to your efforts, the better will be your results if you do the practices correctly."11 Which reads as evasion until you notice the two methods fail in opposite directions. The pour catches what the list skips, and the list works what the pour glides over.
Pick your grain size for the session before you sit down, rather than drifting between them. For a short session, use three. Recite Om Ah Hung with your attention in head, chest and belly in turn, saying each syllable from inside its region.5 Ten minutes, no equipment, nothing to remember.
For a longer one, use two and run the switcheroo. Upper body fire and lower body water, then reverse it. Next session, right and left, then swap. Session after that, back and front.4 You're looking for which configuration feels awkward — that's the boundary that hasn't been crossed.
When you're tired or ill, use one. Put the butter on your head and let it melt down through you, and start again when it reaches your feet.10 It asks nothing of your concentration.
Whichever count you pick, the same two rules hold. Cultivate the front of the body along with each spinal section rather than just the spine.9 And finish by evening the energy out and sitting still while it moves on its own.11
Strongest support. The ladder is a genuine organising insight — it sorts a dozen unrelated practices by a single variable and shows what they have in common without flattening them. And the three-part version is the one place where the number of divisions is defended by something checkable rather than by convention.
The central tension. The five-cavity recipe is printed twice on one page with different assignments for Om and Ah, and neither version is preferred. A practitioner following the paragraph gets one scheme and a practitioner following the next sentence gets another.
A second tension. More divisions is better on one account, because a fine map lets you stay on a stubborn region. Fewer is better on another, because each named location is somewhere attention can stick and start collecting attachments — the position argued in Three Elixir Fields Beat Seven Chakras. Both are this author's, and the stacking advice doesn't resolve which grain a beginner should start at.
Source notes. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE for the ladder itself, which is this author's organising scheme rather than any tradition's. 🚩 TRANSLATION DISTORTION — the five vāyu are an Indian physiological scheme being matched to a Vajrayāna mantra by this author. [POPULAR SOURCE].
Absence note. Drawn from printed pages 79–81, 118–121, 128, 131, 152–156, 71–73 and 174. Nothing here claims what the book says elsewhere.
Open questions. Is there a principled reason to prefer one grain size at one stage of practice and another later, and does any tradition say so? And if the two printed five-cavity recipes disagree, is either of them the one anybody actually uses?
Two ideas about what a body is run under this ladder, and they'd produce different practices at every grain size. On the first, a body has real seams. The five vāyu occupy real cavities, the spine has real segments, and a good scheme is one that finds them. On this reading getting the divisions right matters, and the disagreement between two printed recipes on one page is a defect.
On the second, a body has no seams and the divisions are purely a matter of what a person can hold in mind at once. Segments exist "because segments are easier to cultivate," and the real target is an energetic duplicate present in every cell.12 On this reading the two conflicting recipes are equally fine, because neither was tracking anything.
The book leans on the second and keeps using the vocabulary of the first, which is why the vāyu material reads as more precise than the surrounding argument allows. There's a convergence worth naming with The Regions a Nyāsa Actually Names. The fine end of the ladder turns out to contain the coarse end inside it — a full Mātṛkā sequence ends with tissue-wide targets and whole-body routes, so a fifty-two-piece practice finishes by asking for the one-piece attention. The grain sizes aren't alternatives so much as stages, and nothing here says that outright.
Constraint-Based Creativity is about why an arbitrary restriction produces better work than an open field. The constraint forecloses the drift toward the obvious and forces attention into corners it would otherwise skip — and crucially, the one thing you must not do is change it mid-task, because the version you swap to will always be the more comfortable one.
The ladder is a menu of constraints at different tightnesses, and the failure it predicts is the same. A practitioner who starts a fifty-two-station route and finishes it as a three-zone recitation hasn't switched methods; they've relaxed a constraint under fatigue, and the places they lost are precisely the ones the tight version existed to reach.
What the pairing gives that neither side supplies alone is the rule for choosing. In constrained work the tightness gets matched to the resource you actually have, not to ambition: a tight form on a bad day produces abandonment, and a loose one on a good day produces nothing. The equivalent here is picking the grain size for the state you're in — three when you're tired, fifty-two when you're not, one when you're ill — and deciding before you begin, so the choice isn't made halfway through by whichever part of you wants to stop.
It also explains why stacking is offered instead of ranking. In creative work no single constraint is best; what's best is a repertoire and the judgement of which to apply. That's an unsatisfying answer to a beginner in both fields, and in both fields it appears to be the true one.
One handshake. A second candidate — the five vāyu as an anatomy the practice is fitted to — belongs with the material on what a chakra turned out to be.
Sharpest implication. Sorted by grain size rather than by lineage, a dozen practices from four traditions turn out to be one practice at six resolutions. If that's right, then most argument about which method is correct is argument about how finely to slice, conducted by people who don't know that's what they're arguing about.
Generative questions.