Tapihritsa achieved total enlightenment by staring completely naked at the empty Himalayan sky for years

A closer look

While other monks were memorizing dense philosophical texts, the 8th-century Bön master Tapihritsa opted for full-frontal nudity under the open sky. In the ancient Tibetan tradition of Bön Dzogchen, the practice of 'sky-gazing' (Thögal) involves sitting utterly motionless, stripping away all cultural conditioning (hence the nakedness), and staring into the vast, cloudless expanse. By perfectly mirroring the mind with the boundless, empty sky, Tapihritsa supposedly bypassed all intellectual traps, instantaneously realizing the luminous, void nature of reality.