Authors — Huai-Chin Nan and William Bodri
Year — 2002 (previously published as Measuring Meditation)
Original file — RAW/books/bodri-how-to-measure-and-deepen-your-spirit.md (29,646 lines; 705 PDF pages; 361,468 words)
Source type — practitioner
Publisher — Top Shape Publishing, Reno, Nevada. ISBN 0-9721907-2-4.
Spiritual attainment can be measured, the measurements are the same in every genuine tradition, and most practitioners cannot read their own position because nobody has given them the scales. The book assembles those scales side by side — the four dhyāna, the five skandhas, the jing-chi-shen transformations, the Tibetan blisses and empties, the Mahāyāna stages of preparation, and the seven steps of Confucian self-cultivation — and argues they are one ladder described in six vocabularies. Its second and more insistent claim is deflationary: most of what practitioners take as evidence of progress, including opened chakras, psychic abilities, visions, the rainbow body and the athletic "zone," measures something much lower than they think, or nothing at all.
Authorship is genuinely split and the split is not marked in the text. Bodri states that roughly half the material came from Master Nan and half from himself: Nan supplies Zen, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, Bodri supplies Hinduism, yoga, Tantra, Christianity, Islam, Judaism and alchemy. No passage is attributed to one or the other. Pages built from this source should cite the pair.
This is the shorter precursor of a longer book already in ARCHIVES. Bodri says so in the preface: an even more complete treatment, "with far more cases and advanced detail," is The Various Stages of the Spiritual Experience, which "goes far beyond this initial text in scope and explanatory power." Where the two overlap, the later book is the fuller account.
Chapter 13 is a sustained polemic against Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism, and the doctrine in it has to be separated from the argument around it. The chapter supplies the chakra descriptions, the four blisses, the four empties, the dissolution signs and the sexual-cultivation protocol, and surrounds them with the claim that the school which teaches them ruins most of its adherents.
🚩 SINGLE SOURCE — the Tan Fu narrative, the instruction to clench the teeth during excretion, the five-year lifespan gain from a hundred thousand mantra repetitions, and the prediction that science will master chi and then stop, are uncorroborated anywhere else. 🚩 MOTIVATED REASONING — the authors' other books are advertised inside the argument as well as in the back matter, and the two recommended starting texts are their own. 🚩 TRANSLATION DISTORTION — a Western author representing Chinese and Tibetan traditions, working in part from a Chinese teacher's oral transmission. 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY — sutras are frequently characterised rather than quoted, though the Surangama, the Sandhinirmocana and the Complete Enlightenment Sutra are quoted at length where they carry the argument.
Cleary (trans.), The Five Houses of Zen and Stopping and Seeing · Keenan (trans.), The Scripture on the Explication of Underlying Meaning · Powers (trans.), Wisdom of Buddha: The Samdhinirmocana Mahayana Sutra · Yamamoto (trans.), The Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra · Lu K'uan Yü, Ch'an and Zen Teachings · Mullin (trans.), Tsongkhapa's Six Yogas of Naropa and Kalachakra Tantra · Cozort, Highest Yoga Tantra · Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines · Rieker, The Yoga of Light: Hatha Yoga Pradipika · Nan (trans. Chu), Tao and Longevity · The Life of Gampopa · Douglas Wile (trans.), the fifty mara-states.