A man wants to learn to meditate. His tradition has a prayer practice, and he's been doing it for six years without much happening. Someone mentions a Buddhist breath technique with a two-thousand-year track record and a very large number of people who got somewhere with it.
He won't touch it. Not because he tried it and it didn't suit him — he won't try it, because it isn't his.
Now the awkward fact. The prayer practice he's protecting was itself borrowed. Practically every technique in every tradition was picked up from somewhere else and naturalised until nobody remembered. "most of the spiritual techniques within their own religion have already been borrowed from elsewhere."1
So he's defending the purity of a mongrel against an outsider, and the only thing that makes one of them native is that the borrowing finished before he was born.
Bodri gives the practice a name he lifts from business, and uses it relentlessly: benchmarking.
"take the best practices from somewhere else if your tradition is barren."2 And it isn't a grudging concession for the desperate — it's the recommended default. "It is wholly proper to employ cultivation practices from other traditions because this common sense borrowing, which I call benchmarking, is logical and has always been done in the past."3
The justification runs on two legs.
The first is that the results are non-denominational. If the physiology is the same in everyone, then a technique that reliably produces a result in one tradition will produce it in another, and the tradition boundary is a fact about human politics rather than about the mechanism. "These practices are human being science, not religion."4
The second is simpler and harder to argue with: it's what everyone has always done anyway. The boundaries being defended were drawn after the borrowing, not before it.
The advice comes with a selection rule that is much less permissive than "take what you like," and this is the part that gets dropped when people quote it.
"it's best to start out cultivation with those practices that have produced the most success stories in the past rather than exotic, rarely known and rarely used methods."5
That's a track-record criterion, and it is deliberately boring. Mantra and vipassana get named repeatedly as the two with the deepest history of producing results — and named alongside the observation that they're the two people least want to do.6
Then the diagnosis of why, which is the sharpest line in the cluster: "The search for novelty and wish to claim uniqueness is a big reason why many people fail in cultivation as well."7
So benchmarking is not eclecticism. Eclecticism collects the interesting. Benchmarking collects the effective, and the effective is usually the thing everybody already knows about and finds dull. The two failure modes it's built against are opposite: refusing a good method because it's foreign, and choosing a bad one because it's rare. Both are decisions made on the method's provenance rather than its record.
There's a second layer that turns this from a shopping rule into something with actual structure, and it's where the idea earns its keep.
You're not meant to assemble a set of practices you enjoy. You're meant to assemble a set that work on different principles, and the book spells out what those are.
Visualisation binds the mind by giving it one thing to hold. Vipassana works by subtraction — you stop feeding thoughts and they subside. Mantra occupies with a single repeated thought and, on this account, connects you to whoever offered it. Pranayama works on the body directly. The emptiness exercises of the Vijñānabhairava aim at the experience straight on, from a hundred-odd different angles.8
Why does the diversity matter? Because of the specific failure the whole scheme is designed against — the rut.
Practitioners settle into a state they've reached once, and then spend years reproducing it. They think they're practising. What they're doing is repeating a single act of clinging, at greater and greater refinement. "they usually start mentally abiding in some mental state they eventually cultivate, and they fall into a holding pattern by repeating the same clinging over and over again for years. This is why their chi and channels take so long to transform, and why they never seem to achieve anything."9
The image for the remedy is exact: "shaking the glass so it cannot settle."10 Not because motion is good, but because settling is what you're trying to prevent, and a method you've mastered is a method you can now perform without letting go of anything.
Sunday evening, and you're building the week.
The instinct is to pick the practice you like best and do more of it. Resist that — the one you like best is the one you've already learned to perform.
Instead, take four slots and fill them from different principles. Mantra while you walk to the station, which costs nothing and takes no scheduled time. Ten minutes of breathing before dinner, which fits where brushing your teeth fits. Twenty minutes of watching the mind, scheduled properly. And one full-body visualisation two or three times a week.
Notice that only two of those need a diary entry. That's not an accident — the book's own version of this stack is built around the fact that the two most portable practices are also two of the most effective.11
Now the part that actually does the work. Every few weeks, change one of them. Not because it stopped working — because it started working smoothly.
That's the counterintuitive rule and it's easy to get backwards. Smoothness is the signal to switch. When a technique becomes comfortable you're no longer figuring out how to let go; you're executing a routine you already know. Swap in a method that works on a different principle and you'll be clumsy again, and the clumsiness is where the letting-go has to be rediscovered rather than remembered.
And when you're choosing what to swap in, check the record before the appeal. The question is not does this look interesting — interesting is a warning sign — but how many people got somewhere with this, and over how long? A method with two thousand years and a large sample beats one with a beautiful lineage story and forty practitioners, every time, and the second one will be far more attractive.
Bodri runs into this problem constantly and one of his responses shows what benchmarking looks like when it meets an actual objection.
The white skeleton visualisation — strip the flesh from the body in imagination, offer it away, leave a shining skeleton, let that become dust, let the dust become empty space — is one of the two or three practices he recommends most insistently. And it reads, to a western practitioner, as unmistakably Buddhist and faintly morbid.
So he goes looking for a native anchor, and finds two.
Ash Wednesday: your forehead is marked with ash and you are told your body will become ash and dust. And the 1662 Book of Common Prayer funeral rite, which he quotes at length — earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection ... who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body.12
Then the admission of what he's doing: "It was not necessary to add this part to our story, but I'm always scratching my head as to how one might make basic cultivation practices more acceptable to people within different religions."13
That sentence is the whole page in miniature, and it cuts both ways.
Read generously, he's found a genuine structural rhyme. The final phase of the skeleton practice and the final clause of the funeral rite are doing the same thing — dissolution of the body, then transformation into something not made of the same stuff. The Christian practitioner isn't being asked to import a foreign technique; they're being shown that their own liturgy already contains the shape.
Read sceptically, this is retrofitting. He picked the technique first, then went hunting for a permission slip, and the Book of Common Prayer is not a meditation instruction by any reading its authors would recognise.
Both are true, and the honest version of benchmarking has to live with that. If you're going to argue that the boundaries are artificial, you will end up demonstrating it with parallels that are partly real and partly constructed — because a parallel strong enough to persuade a reluctant practitioner is usually stronger than the evidence supports.
He borrowed the term deliberately, and the borrowing carries assumptions worth surfacing.
Benchmarking in its commercial sense means: find whoever performs a given process best, study how they do it, and adopt it regardless of industry. It assumes processes are separable from the organisations that run them — that a fulfilment method can leave one company and work in another.
Applied to contemplative practice, that assumption is doing a lot of quiet work.
It might be right. If the physiology is identical in everyone, a breath technique is as portable as a warehouse layout.
But the same author argues elsewhere that context isn't neutral. Practitioners are said to need the right view before tantric methods are safe; forceful techniques without preliminary work produce years of avoidable damage; and the entire warning about premature chakra concentration is a warning that a method's effect depends on the state of the system receiving it.14
A process that only works given prior conditions is not portable in the business sense — it's portable given a compatible installation. The commercial metaphor smuggles in an interchangeability the book's own safety warnings deny, and nothing in the text reconciles the two.
There's a conditional inside the advice that changes who it's aimed at: take the best practices from somewhere else if your tradition is barren.
That's not a general licence. It's triage — and it presumes the practitioner can already tell.
Which is a harder judgement than it sounds. To know your tradition lacks something, you need to know what's missing, and knowing what's missing means you've already been outside it. Someone fully inside a barren tradition doesn't experience barrenness; they experience normality.
So the advice reaches only people who have already partly left. The comparison that would justify benchmarking is the same comparison that benchmarking is supposed to authorise.
Which explains the observed distribution better than the book does. Benchmarking is embraced by the marginal, the disappointed, and the well-read — people whose tradition has already visibly failed them — and it makes no impression at all on the satisfied. Not because the satisfied are closed-minded, but because the diagnosis it depends on is unavailable from where they stand.
The strongest support is historical rather than theoretical. Techniques have moved between traditions constantly — Indian tantric material into Tibet, Buddhist breath practice into China, contemplative method across the entire Mediterranean. The purity being defended is, as a matter of record, recent. This is the part of the argument that doesn't depend on any of Bodri's metaphysics being right.
The track-record criterion is unusually testable for this territory. Prefer methods with the most documented successes is a claim anyone can act on, and it would be checkable if anyone kept the numbers. Nobody does — which is itself worth noting, since the criterion is offered as though the data existed.
The tension the argument runs into is with the same author's other position. Identical Metaphor, Different Attainment argues that shared vocabulary across traditions is the weakest possible evidence of shared experience. But benchmarking depends on being able to identify which foreign technique targets the same thing as yours — and the only tools available for that identification are the descriptions, which is to say the vocabulary. You cannot both distrust cross-traditional vocabulary and use it to shop.
A second tension, unresolved: if all traditions are borrowing anyway and the results are non-denominational, why does the book spend so much effort ranking traditions by effectiveness? Either the boundaries are arbitrary and the rankings are noise, or the boundaries track something real and the borrowing is riskier than advertised.
Across both Bodri books in this vault, benchmarking is the operational side of one consistent commitment — that the phenomena are non-denominational — and the two books deploy it differently.
Various Stages uses it comparatively: build a grid, apply it to everyone, see who delivers. Buddhism as a Comparative Reference Grid is that project, and it's about evaluation.
Hercules uses it acquisitively — go and get what works, from anywhere, and don't ask whose it is. Same premise, different verb.
The convergence with Method Accepted, Result Rejected is exact and worth stating. That page names the earlier book's characteristic operation: decode a rival vocabulary into your own scheme rather than argue with it, and note that the practice always survives the decoding while the mystique never does. Benchmarking is what you do after that operation succeeds. Once a foreign practice has been translated into terms you can evaluate, the only remaining question is whether it works — and the tradition it came from has stopped being relevant.
Which means the two ideas are a pipeline, not two positions: translate to see what it is, benchmark to decide whether to take it. Neither book says this, and it's the more useful formulation than either alone.
Esoteric Interests as an Irreplaceability Moat — the business page argues that hard-to-acquire knowledge is defensively valuable precisely because it's hard to acquire.
That is the exact economic force that benchmarking runs against, and putting them together explains why the advice is so unpopular. A tradition's distinctive practices are its moat. Concede that a rival's breath technique works better and you have surrendered the thing that makes membership worth anything. The refusal to borrow isn't stupidity — it's a rational defence of a position, and it's made by institutions long before it's made by individuals.
The insight neither page produces alone: an individual practitioner and their institution have opposed interests here, and the institution's interest is the one that gets encoded in the culture. The practitioner wants the method with the best record regardless of source. The institution needs the method to be theirs. Bodri's advice is individually optimal and institutionally corrosive, which is why it will be transmitted informally, by independents and books, and essentially never from a pulpit. That's a testable prediction about where benchmarking advice comes from, and it seems to hold.
The Fourfold Learning Formula — Gurukula Quarters — the craft page carries a traditional allocation of learning across four sources, of which the teacher is only one.
Set beside the rut problem and something sharpens that the shaking-the-glass image only gestures at. The gurukula formula isn't merely acknowledging that you learn from several places — it's a structural guarantee against the single-source rut, built into the pedagogy so that no learner can spend a decade refining one input.
What the pairing gives: the diversity requirement is a design feature of durable teaching systems, not a personal preference. Bodri arrives at it by observing failure — people settle, so shake the glass. The gurukula version arrives at it by construction — the learner is never permitted a single source long enough to settle. The second is more robust, because it doesn't depend on the practitioner noticing they've gone smooth, and noticing is exactly what a rut prevents. Which suggests the weak point in Bodri's version: he hands the diagnosis to the person least able to make it.
Sharpest implication: benchmarking requires an instrument the same author has argued doesn't exist. To take the best from another tradition you must first identify which of their practices does the job yours does — and the only available basis for that identification is their descriptions of it. But shared vocabulary, on his own account, is the weakest evidence of shared experience. Either cross-traditional description is reliable enough to shop with, or it isn't reliable enough to compare with. The two positions are both his, and they are not compatible.
Generative questions: