The physical transformations are real, useful, and misclassified by almost everyone who has them.
"These are important benchmarks for successful cultivators who need some confirmation that everything is okay when they occur. But these are just the signposts of physical transformation that naturally occur on the path rather than markers of real progress in spirituality."2
Two roles, and the distinction is the whole page.
A benchmark confirms that nothing is wrong. That is what the phenomena are for — a practitioner in the middle of something alarming gets to know it is expected.
A marker of progress would tell you how far you have come spiritually. They do not do that.
Which is a narrower function than it looks. The information content of a stage is roughly: this is normal, continue. Not: you are advancing, and certainly not: you are nearly there. See Samadhi Without the Tao.
The category is broad, and knowing its extent prevents treating any one item as special.
Gongfu covers "the transformations you feel within your physical body, the opening of energy centers called chakras, feelings of warmth or cold, the softening of the personality, superpowers, visions and the like."1
Seven things, ranging from the mundane to the spectacular:
Body transformations. Chakra openings. Warmth and cold. Personality softening. Superpowers. Visions.
Which puts levitation and a feeling of warmth in the same box — and that is the point. They are the same kind of thing, differing in impressiveness and not in category.
One item in the list is worth singling out because it is the only one that shows from outside: the softening of the personality, named again elsewhere among what Vajrayāna practitioners pray for, where "a softened personality and decreased bad behaviour are named as the mark of smooth chi flow."8
Which is the one benchmark other people can check — and it is the least dramatic thing on the list.
The alternative is stated plainly, and it is the thing the signposts are not.
"The objective of all religions and roads of spirituality is to search for the fundamental essence of the universe from which all matter and consciousness originates. Another way of saying this is that you cultivate or search for the true nature of the mind, or the 'true mind' that births all appearances."2
Search for the source of mind. That is the road; everything physical is scenery beside it.
And the causal direction is given, which is the useful part: "as you start to achieve success along this route, which involves learning how to detach from thoughts so as to realize an empty mind where clear awareness still functions without attachments, your body will naturally start to transform as you mentally align yourself with this perfection."2
Mind first, body follows. The transformations are downstream of the mental work rather than a parallel track — which is why they can be signposts at all. They appear because the real work is happening, which is exactly why they confirm and do not measure.
Which also explains why chasing them fails. You cannot produce a downstream effect by aiming at it. See The Form School's Catastrophe.
An unusually direct piece of advice is attached, and it is a list of traditions.
The physical representations "reveal the physical aspects of cultivation, but rarely the mental aspect which is paramount for success. For this you need to turn to Zen, Mahayana Buddhism, Vedanta, early Taoism, Mahamudra or Confucian introspection-witnessing practice."2
Six named sources for the mental half.
Which is a division of labour rather than a ranking. The iconographic and alchemical material — the Atalanta Fugiens, the paired gods, the symbolic corpora — carries the physical side and is largely silent on the mental one.
And the mental side is called paramount for success.
Which tells a reader what a book of decoded physical stages is and is not. It is half the material, and the half that does not decide the outcome — stated by the source about its own subject. See Zen Doesn't Discuss Gongfu But Has It.
The schools that produce the most successes are the ones that discuss this least, and the pattern is treated as causal rather than coincidental.
Zen students are taught from the very start to ignore the body and physical sensations and to concentrate on the ultimate aim — "which is why so many ultimately succeed."4
And the inference some scholars draw from that silence is rejected: "Some scholars have inferred from this lack of emphasis that Zen cultivators do not go through these experiences at all, but this is highly incorrect."4
They have the phenomena. They do not discuss them.
Which is a deliberate pedagogical choice with a stated payoff — and it is the strongest evidence for this page's central claim. If gongfu were a measure of progress, a school that ignored it would be flying blind. Instead it is described as the school that succeeds most.
The reverse case is also documented: a recognised Vajrayana master who refuses to teach the body material at all, stated three separate times and always with the same reason — that he has seen too many catastrophes.7
Nan Huai-Chin warrant flag applies to that attribution, and the teacher is the author's own.
Use a stage as a yes/no, not as a score. Is this expected? — that is what the map is for. How far am I? — the map does not answer that.
Do not adjust practice in response to phenomena. They confirm; they do not instruct.
Check the one benchmark that shows. Personality softening and decreased bad behaviour is the item on the list that other people can observe, and it is the only one not subject to your own interpretation.
Put the mental work at the centre. Detachment from thoughts, empty mind with clear awareness still functioning — and the body transforms as a consequence.
And go elsewhere for that half. Six traditions are named for the mental side, and none of them is a body-stage literature.
One thing to be clear about: knowing the map matters most when something frightening happens. Consulting it constantly is the failure mode. Read once, recognise when needed, otherwise leave it shut.
Worth extending the point, because the smaller phenomena get treated differently and should not be.
Clicks in the back of the head, visions when chi passes the occipital region, voices when it passes through the ear channels — all of these are named as things to ignore, and their origin is traced to psychological tendencies.9
Same category as levitation. Different scale, same status: produced by the process, informative about location at most, not a measure of anything.
Which is the useful generalisation. Every phenomenon on the gongfu list is a signpost, from a click to a body double — and the reason the small ones are easier to dismiss is only that they are less flattering.
The impressive ones are the dangerous ones, precisely because they are harder to hold as scenery. See Clicks, Visions and Voices Are Channel Artifacts.
Nan Huai-Chin warrant flag applies to that citation as well.
The one duration attached to this material is worth having, because it sets the pace against which every signpost should be read.
Hercules takes one year to capture the deer, "which is about the amount of time it takes to slowly transform the chi of the physical body."2
A year, for one transformation.
Which is the right scale to hold the signposts at. If a single stage runs on that clock, then the phenomena a practitioner encounters in any given month are sparse by nature — and the absence of anything happening is the ordinary condition rather than a problem.
Two consequences.
Frequent phenomena are not a good sign. On this timescale a practice producing something notable every week is producing something other than these stages.
And the confirmation function is rarely needed. If the benchmarks arrive on a yearly cadence, consulting the map monthly is consulting it for reassurance rather than for recognition — which is the behaviour this page exists to discourage.
Which also fits the release of the deer at the request of Artemis and Apollo, read as the left and right channels: the transformation completes and is let go of, which is the same instruction applied to a stage rather than to an image. See Artemis and Apollo Are the Two Channels.
Evidence. [PRACTITIONER SOURCE]. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY — the six recommended traditions are named without texts; the some scholars claim identifies nobody. Nan Huai-Chin warrant flag on two citations.
Tension — confirmation and non-attention. The phenomena exist to confirm that things are proceeding, and you are told to ignore them. A confirmation you must not consult is doing very little work.
Tension — a book of signposts. Four hundred pages of physical detail, in a framework that calls the physical side not paramount and recommends six other traditions for the half that decides success.
Open question — how much confirmation is enough? The stated function is reassurance for practitioners who need it, with no guidance on how often that need is legitimate.
Open question — does personality softening track anything reliably? It is the one externally visible item and no account is given of how much, how fast, or what would count.
Two things the phenomena are, held simultaneously.
Important. Important benchmarks, needed for confirmation, documented at enormous length, and the whole subject of the book.
And not markers of real progress. Signposts of physical transformation, downstream of the mental work, and the schools that ignore them succeed most.
Which is the same tension the whole project carries, stated here in its own words — and this is the page where the source is most explicit that its subject is the lesser half.
The convergence is with every ranking claim in the material: samadhi is not the Tao, the sushumna is not completion, superpowers are not attainment, and the rotation is a checkpoint rather than a destination. Nothing physical is ever the thing, at any scale, and the material says so each time while continuing to describe it.
Esoteric Interests as an Irreplaceability Moat — business.
Unusual, hard-won knowledge functions as a moat: it differentiates, it cannot be quickly copied, and it makes the holder difficult to replace. Two things carry.
The moat is real and it is not the product. Distinctive knowledge creates position; it does not by itself produce the outcome the position was meant to serve, and the two get conflated because the first is visible and the second is slow.
And accumulating moat is more satisfying than delivering. Depth is enjoyable, demonstrable and self-reinforcing — so effort migrates toward acquiring more of it, past the point where more of it helps.
Which describes precisely what happens to detailed gongfu knowledge. Knowing the stages is a genuine moat — few people have it, it takes years, and it makes a practitioner distinctive among their peers.
And it is not the practice. The stages are downstream effects of mental work; knowing their taxonomy in detail contributes nothing to producing them, and this material says so about its own contents.
The second point explains the pull. Learning more stages is gratifying, immediate and demonstrable; detaching from thoughts is none of those. So a practitioner with a map will tend to deepen the map — which is the recognisable failure of the form schools, arrived at through study rather than through practice.
Practical form: when a body of knowledge is both hard-won and downstream of the thing that matters, expect effort to accumulate in the knowledge — and treat your own fluency in the taxonomy as the signal that it is happening.
What the source leaves undetermined is what a real marker of spiritual progress would even be.
The phenomena are ruled out. And the objective — searching for the fundamental essence, realising the true nature of mind — is described as something you either have or do not, with no partial positions and nothing to display.
Which leaves the road unmarked from end to end.
One candidate appears on the list and is never developed: the softening of the personality. It is externally visible, it is gradual rather than binary, and it is named elsewhere as the mark of smooth chi flow.
Which makes it the only item that behaves like a progress measure rather than a signpost — and it is filed among the physical phenomena, between chakra openings and superpowers, as though it were the same kind of thing.
If conduct and disposition track the mental work, then a practitioner has one honest instrument: are you becoming easier to live with? The material supplies it, never proposes it, and buries it in a list of things it tells you to ignore.