Idries Shah's The Dermis Probe, printed as a marginal to Law 40.
Yusuf Ibn Jafar el-Amudi takes sums of money, sometimes very large, from those who come to study with him. A visiting legalist objects:
*"I am enchanted and impressed by your teachings, and I am sure that you are directing your disciples in a proper manner. But it is not in accordance with tradition to take money for knowledge. Besides, the action is open to misinterpretation."*1
El-Amudi answers on three separate grounds:
*"I have never sold any knowledge. There is no money on earth sufficient to pay for it. As for misinterpretation, the abstaining from taking money will not prevent it, for it will find some other object. Rather should you know that a man who takes money may be greedy for money, or he may not. But a man who takes nothing at all is under the gravest suspicion of robbing the disciple of his soul. People who say, 'I take nothing,' may be found to take away the volition of their victim."*2
⚠ The first two dispose of the objection and the third makes a claim nobody raised.
One: I have never sold any knowledge. ⚠ The money is not a price — there is no sum sufficient, so the payment cannot be the consideration. What the money is for is left unstated, which is the answer's weak point and its interesting one.
Two: misinterpretation… will find some other object. ⚠ A defence against being misread is not available, because the misreading is a property of the reader, not of the conduct. Removing this occasion supplies the next.
Three: ⚠ the inversion. And it is the sharpest sentence in Law 40.
⚠ A man who takes money may be greedy for money, or he may not. But a man who takes nothing at all is under the gravest suspicion of robbing the disciple of his soul.
The reasoning is a comparison of what remains unknown.
A teacher who charges — ⚠ you know what they are taking, and the accounts balance. Their motive might be greed, and if so, you have paid it and you are done.
A teacher who charges nothing — ⚠ is taking something, because nobody does this for nothing — and you do not know what. The transaction has no line item and therefore no settlement.
⚠ And el-Amudi names the likeliest thing: volition. People who say, 'I take nothing,' may be found to take away the volition of their victim.
The unpriced teacher is paid in the student's capacity to decide.
⚠ Law 40's Judgment: what is offered for free is dangerous—it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation.
Greene's danger is obligation — ⚠ you will owe something later. That is a debt, and a debt is a thing you can be aware of, resent, discharge or refuse.
El-Amudi's danger is extraction — ⚠ something is being taken now, it has no name, and the taking is invisible to the person it is taken from.
⚠ These are different claims and the second is worse. An obligation is a liability on your balance sheet; volition is the thing you would use to assess the liability.
And it explains why the free teacher is more suspect than the expensive one, which Greene's version cannot: ⚠ on the obligation reading, a large fee and a free service are both dangerous and the fee is worse. On el-Amudi's, the fee is what makes the arrangement safe.
⚠ El-Amudi says the money is not a price and does not say what it is.
Three readings are available and the marginal supports none over the others.
A filter — ⚠ large sums select for students who will value the instruction, which is a standard defence of fees. A settlement — ⚠ the payment closes the account so that nothing unnameable is owed, which is the reading his own third argument implies. A demonstration — ⚠ taking money proves he is not taking something else, which is the reading that makes the passage a defence rather than a doctrine.
⚠ The third is the most likely given the context — he is answering an accusation — and the corpus should record that the passage is forensic, not pedagogical. He is establishing his own innocence by the visibility of what he takes.
⚠ 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY · 🚩 TRANSLATION DISTORTION — attributed to Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe, 1970, a named work with a date — ⚠ better than most of this book's sourcing — but no page, and no indication of the story's provenance within any tradition.
🚩 ⚠ Idries Shah's presentation of Sufi material is contested. He is a twentieth-century popularising author whose sourcing and lineage claims have been questioned, and his collections mix traditional matter with his own framing. ⚠ Yusuf Ibn Jafar el-Amudi appears in Shah's books and the corpus has no independent attestation. [PLAUSIBLE — needs corroboration] on provenance. Third Shah appearance in the build (Laws 36, 38, 40).
🚩 ⚠ The passage is self-serving by construction. A teacher who charges large sums, defending charging large sums, arguing that teachers who charge nothing are the dangerous ones — and the corpus should mark that the argument's soundness and its convenience to the speaker are both high.
🚩 Greene prints it and never refers to it. ⚠ Every reading here is the corpus's.
⚠ The legalist's second point is the one el-Amudi answers least well.
The action is open to misinterpretation.
El-Amudi's reply — misinterpretation will find some other object — is true and does not follow. ⚠ That misreading is unavoidable in general does not mean every occasion for it is equivalent, and some conduct is more misreadable than other conduct.
⚠ The corpus should record this as a real gap, because the same move appears elsewhere in the build as a fallacy: you will be criticised anyway, therefore do the thing that attracts criticism. It licenses everything.
And the marginal's own strongest argument undercuts it. ⚠ If the visibility of what you take is what establishes your innocence, then how the taking looks is precisely what matters — and open to misinterpretation is a claim about exactly that.
Someone is offering you something valuable and asking for nothing.
Ask what they are taking instead. ⚠ This is the marginal's whole contribution and it is a better question than what will I owe? An obligation is a future liability you can see; an extraction is happening now and has no name.
Look specifically at your own decisions. ⚠ Volition is el-Amudi's answer and it is the thing most often taken from people receiving free instruction, free advice, or free access. The test: are you making fewer of your own choices than before this arrangement began?
Prefer the priced version, even at a worse price. ⚠ A fee is a settlement. You know the amount, it is paid, and the account is closed — and the corpus recorded the demonstration one Observance away at Fushimiya's free cup, where the absence of a price made a false belief uncorrectable.
⚠ And if you are the one giving: take something visible. El-Amudi's forensic point is sound whatever his motive — the visibility of what you take is what establishes that you are not taking something else, and a person who takes nothing has supplied no evidence about themselves at all.
Strongest evidence. A three-part answer in which the third part makes a novel structural claim — that unpriced transactions have no settlement and therefore permit unnameable extraction — with a specific named object of extraction (volition) that is testable against experience.
Tension — the passage inverts the law it is printed in and is not addressed.
Tension — misinterpretation will find some other object is a general truth used to dismiss a specific and correct objection.
Tension — the argument is maximally convenient to its speaker.
🚩 [POPULAR SOURCE] for the placement · 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY · 🚩 TRANSLATION DISTORTION — a named work with a date but no page; Shah's presentation of Sufi material is contested and his collections mix traditional matter with his own framing. [PLAUSIBLE — needs corroboration] on provenance. Third Shah appearance.
Open questions. Does the settlement reading hold at any price? ⚠ El-Amudi says "there is no money on earth sufficient to pay for it" — which means the payment explicitly does not settle the account for the knowledge. So either the money settles something else, or it settles nothing and is only a demonstration. ⚠ The passage needs the settlement reading for its third argument and denies it in its first, and the corpus cannot resolve this from the text.
⚠ This is the seventeenth-plus instance of marginals-outargue-the-chapter, and one of a small number that invert the law rather than sharpening it. The others are Law 38's water fable (which falsifies its law's central promise) and Law 39's Schopenhauer (which rules out its law's Reversal).
Against Fushimiya in the same chapter, the pair is the chapter's real argument about free things: ⚠ el-Amudi states the principle and Fushimiya's artisan is the casualty. What the free cup took from him was the ability to know what he had — which is volition in the specific sense el-Amudi names.
⚠ And against the law page: Greene's hidden obligation and el-Amudi's unnameable extraction are printed forty lines apart — and only one of them explains why a free teacher should be more suspect than an expensive one.
Contemplative practice — the transmission that costs the recipient something. Guru Authority and Divine Instruction examines the structure of authority in a teaching relationship and what the student surrenders in entering one.
People who say, "I take nothing," may be found to take away the volition of their victim.
The insight neither produces alone: el-Amudi frames the extraction as a hazard of the free teacher specifically. ⚠ The transmission frame says something broader and less comfortable: every teaching relationship of this kind involves a surrender of judgement, priced or not — that is what submitting to instruction consists of. ⚠ Which means el-Amudi's money is not preventing the surrender; it is making it a transaction the student can see. The fee does not protect the volition — it establishes that the volition is what is being exchanged, and a student who has paid knows they have entered something. ⚠ That is a stronger defence of the fee than el-Amudi gives, and it identifies the actual danger of the free version: not that more is taken, but that nothing marks the entry.
Economics of exchange — the transaction that closes. Three Destination Points treats an explicit exchange structure as what allows both parties to know what has been agreed and when it is complete.
A man who takes money may be greedy for money, or he may not.
What the pairing produces: the chapter's hidden obligation reading treats the problem as information asymmetry — you do not know what you will owe. ⚠ The settlement frame identifies a different and worse property: an unpriced exchange has no completion state. There is no moment at which the recipient has finished paying, because nothing was ever specified as payment. ⚠ Which makes it structurally identical to the unbounded tasks the corpus recorded at Law 38's Schopenhauer (though you reached the age of Methuselah, you would never have done) and at Law 39's not worth the bother to understand. A relationship with no completion condition is not a relationship, it is a condition — and the fee's real function is to supply an ending.
Sharpest implication. ⚠ The free teacher is the suspect one, and the reasoning is about what remains unknown. A teacher who charges might be greedy — and if so you have paid it and you are done. A teacher who charges nothing is taking something, because nobody does this for nothing, and there is no line item and therefore no settlement. ⚠ El-Amudi names it: volition. Which inverts Greene's law — his danger is an obligation, a liability you can see and discharge; el-Amudi's is an extraction happening now, unnamed, invisible to the person it is taken from. An obligation sits on your balance sheet; volition is what you would use to read it.
Generative questions.