The saints, prophets, sages, arhats and bodhisattvas all got there the same way. There's no room left in the sentence that says so:
All these individuals cultivated to achieve the samadhi attainments, and it was only their success in this objective which qualified them to become the spiritual guides of men. These people weren't "chosen" from above or randomly "gifted with grace" — which is something political religious leaders sometimes say to excuse themselves from not having the same capabilities.1
The same sentence names what those few words do, and it runs in two directions at once. "through these few words, they skillfully dismiss the possibility of individual spiritual achievement which they themselves don't understand or have, and also absolve you from the need to spiritually practice."1 Two people are let off by one doctrine. The leader who can't do it, and the layman who now doesn't have to try.
There's a sequence of three things people say when they read an account of somebody who succeeded, and they escalate.2
First: "That never happened, it was just a story."
Second: "That was him (or her), theirs was a special case, it couldn't possibly happen to me."
Third, and named as worse than either: that states of spiritual attainment are "acts of grace gifted by God without any personal cultivation work involved at all."
The third is worse because of what follows from it. "If they attach to this notion, they automatically excuse themselves from the personal need to work for these states because they believe they are out of reach 'unless God so ordains them.' With such an attitude, they excuse themselves from the personal responsibility of having to aspire for spiritual progress at all."2
The first excuse denies the event. The second concedes the event and denies its availability. The third concedes both and removes the obligation. And there's a stated reason people reach for any of them: they draw "only on their own limited personal experience and fail to refer to the accounts found in other religious traditions", and in most cases "they don't even personally cultivate even though that's the purpose of their spiritual tradition." So the accounts arrive with nothing to check them against, and get put aside.2
The alternative account isn't modest about the founders. Their achievements stay large, and they stay achievements.
The superpowers these people could perform, the future they could foretell, the gong-fu they could demonstrate, the teachings they could give were all made possible by one thing and one thing only — samadhi and prajna wisdom attainments! If they lacked these attainments, they were no different than ordinary men, and not saints or sages at all.3
One qualification behind the whole list — the saints of Christianity, the prophets of Judaism, the sages of Taoism and Confucianism, the arhats and bodhisattvas of Buddhism.3 And the title only attaches after the fact: "only when you succeed in some high samadhi attainment can you ever be truly labeled a saint, sage or liberated one."3 The institutional version gets named too. The "communion of saints" in Christianity is "simply a collection of those individuals, within the Christian tradition, whom the Catholic Church deems as having achieved samadhi attainments."3
What the ancients did about it is stated as plain labour: "the ancient greats whom we revere as having spiritual achievement worked at it! They worked to become proficient at samadhi spiritual attainments through their devotion to meditative practice." And when their teachings get read across traditions, "you will usually find that they commonly instruct us to follow a pure road of spiritual practice, and urged us to reach the same states that they did."1
There's a number attached to the availability claim, quoted from a Taoist source:
Anyone who seeks the Tao will attain the Tao. Those who fail in this lifetime can expect to succeed in a subsequent lifetime. There is no reason for anyone of unwavering faith and unrelenting effort not to succeed in attaining the Tao in three lifetimes.4
Then the conditions. The first step is to learn to cultivate samādhi and transcendental wisdom, and you won't get there "if you don't put in the required efforts to cultivate, if you cultivate incorrectly, or you cultivate properly and yet ignore the requirements of accumulating merit and cultivating prajna transcendental wisdom."4 Three further reasons are listed, and they're about access rather than effort. Many people "simply lack enough merit to come in contact with the true cultivation teachings, or a genuine teacher, or refuse to recognize these things when they come into contact with them."4 A talented teacher with real attainment matters, "because he knows how to help people awaken to their true fundamental source" — with the limit stated in the next clause: "if you don't practice diligently, however, then even a talented teacher won't be able to help you."4 And the general answer to why people stall: "it's usually because either they fail to make the necessary efforts, or they don't apply the correct principles when practicing meditation."2
The same page that says anybody can get there says most of the people teaching it haven't.
Even those individuals who are considered "spiritual masters" — because they can enter some degree of samadhi — are not necessarily enlightened. In actual fact, there are many individuals in the world considered masters who cannot even enter the first dhyana.4
A master with samādhi but not enlightenment can still be useful, and that's said plainly: "the fact that a master only has samadhi rather than enlightenment attainments doesn't mean that they cannot help you, for not every famous 'master' of ancient times had reached the Stage of Seeing the Tao either."4 The difficulty gets stated twice in one sentence, with the condition attached. "It is very, very hard to reach the Stage of Seeing the Tao if you put your efforts into the wrong channel or fail to practice in the correct way… and yet if you put in the correct and proper effort, you can definitely find what's already there."4 Even the school with the best record gets the same treatment. The Zen school "seems to have produced the largest number of individuals who've succeeded" — and "many historical figures in the Zen school have received the title of enlightenment without actually having achieved it," having cultivated great samādhi or dry wisdom instead. "As to other spiritual schools that many champion, the track record is considerably worse!"4
The reversal is put directly to the reader.
People today refuse to recognize that the path is right now, right here in front of you. Everyone has Tao, all beings are the womb of Buddhahood and you just have to clear away mental busyness so that you realize this state and actualize it. In fact, you are the "ancients" for the future generations, the ones the following ages will read about as having succeeded on the spiritual path if you work at it.2
The requirements come as four words: "it's all a matter of exposure, motivation, patience and effort." And the secrecy question is closed off in the same breath — "the pathway is the same, the principles are unvarying, the gong-fu is standard, there are no secrets I'm keeping from you."2 There's a matching claim about the ground itself, from earlier in the book, and it's what the chosenness doctrine has to contend with. "Your 'annihilation' or 'extinction' is not a possibility in this universe even if you wanted this possibility because you are the Tao, you are that ground state of enlightenment! All you have to do is experientially awaken to your original unity with that state."5 Nothing is being conferred, because nothing is missing.
You're in a study group and somebody says it — those were different times, those people were given something we aren't. The room agrees. It always does, because the sentence costs nobody anything.
Put the three excuses next to what was said, in order, and see which one you just heard. Did they deny it happened? Did they grant it happened to that person and rule it out for themselves? Or did they say it was given rather than earned? Only the third removes the obligation, and it's the one that sounds most pious.
Then run it on yourself, because it works better privately. Six months of poor practice, and the thought arrives that some people are simply wired for this. The reply the text gives isn't reassurance — it's the four words. Exposure, motivation, patience, effort. Three of those are yours this week.
Then the next time you read an account of somebody who did something you can't, watch which of the three you reach for. The reason given for putting such accounts aside is that people have nothing to compare them with. No cultivation of their own, and no reading across other traditions where the same thing turns up under a different name. Both are fixable, and neither requires being chosen.
If you want the honest scale of the thing, hold the two numbers together. Three lifetimes of unwavering faith and unrelenting effort is the figure given for anyone who wants it. And most people currently called masters, on the same account, can't enter the first dhyāna. The path is open and almost nobody is on it, and those two facts aren't in tension.
Take one institution's machinery and read it the way the passage does. The Catholic communion of saints is a formal category. There's a process, a body that runs it, and a list of names it has produced over centuries. On the reading given here it's "simply a collection of those individuals, within the Christian tradition, whom the Catholic Church deems as having achieved samadhi attainments."3
The list stands, the process stands, and nobody comes off it. What changes is what the list is of. Not a record of who was chosen, but a record of who succeeded at something specific — and something that, on the same account, was open to any of their contemporaries who had done the work.
Which puts the institution in an odd position with respect to its own archive. The list is evidence for the availability claim, because everyone on it got there by a route the text says is open. And the doctrine most often used to explain the list — that these were people singled out and gifted — is the doctrine that makes the route look closed. The reason given for why the two never collide is the same one behind the three excuses: the people maintaining the list mostly don't cultivate, so they have no way to read the accounts as reports of a procedure rather than as stories about exceptional people.2
Strongest content. The two-sided function is stated by the source rather than inferred — excuse themselves and absolve you, in one sentence.1 And the three excuses arrive as an ordered sequence with the third named as worst, which makes the whole thing usable as a diagnostic rather than as a complaint.2
Source criticism, and this is the whole budget. The target is unnamed throughout — "political religious leaders sometimes say" — with no institution, figure or instance given.1 And the replacement account is not more checkable than the one it replaces: chosenness is unverifiable, and so is lacking enough merit to come in contact with the true teachings, which is what does the explanatory work when somebody fails.4 Merit is earned rather than bestowed, which is a difference in the story and not a difference in how you would check either.
The tension the source doesn't close. Anyone who seeks the Tao will attain it, in three lifetimes at the outside;4 and most people currently called masters can't enter the first dhyāna, and many titled enlightened in the best-performing school never got there.4 Both are stated on the same page. Nothing reconciles the openness of the path with the rarity of anyone walking it, beyond the four words about exposure, motivation, patience and effort.
Scope. Everything measured here is measured against samādhi attainment, which footnote 518 places inside a scheme the book calls false stages, with three functions named for it: rest stops, verifications, motivational assists.6
Open questions. Three lifetimes is a number and the source it comes from is a Taoist one. Does any other tradition put a figure on it, and do the figures agree? And if the communion of saints is a record of attainment rather than of election, what would a tradition's canonisation records look like if they were re-read for the practices the candidates ran?
Follow one line and the path is wide open. Everyone has Tao, all beings are the womb of Buddhahood, nothing is being withheld and there are no secrets — you're the ancients for somebody in the future if you work at it. Lived out, that's a person who stops asking whether they're the type and starts asking what they did this week.
Follow the other and access is rationed by something you can't audit. People fail because they "lack enough merit to come in contact with the true cultivation teachings, or a genuine teacher, or refuse to recognize these things when they come into contact with them."4 Lived out, that's a person who has to accept that whether the right book or the right teacher ever reaches them is already decided by an account they can't inspect. Both are printed. What sits between them is that merit is described as earned rather than conferred — so the ration is a consequence of past work rather than of selection, which changes the story without changing what a person can do about it today.
Against He Did Not Found a Religion, that page carries the structural reason an institution can't teach what would end its adherents' need for it. This one carries the doctrine that makes the gap survivable: if nobody now living is supposed to be able to do it, nobody has to explain why nobody can. And with You Cannot Elect a Saint, the communion-of-saints reading is the same point from the institution's side — an office can record an attainment and can't confer one.
A belief that lets two people off at once — The Defense Mechanism Inventory and Three Ego-Exoneration Methods. That page works from the smoker who knows cigarettes cause cancer and keeps smoking, and catalogues the moves available for closing the gap between what somebody does and what they believe — including the ones that relocate responsibility outside the person entirely, so that the conduct stops needing a defence at all.
Set the third excuse beside that. Unless God so ordains them does exactly that relocation: the capability isn't absent because of anything you did or didn't do, it's absent because it was never on offer. And the passage names the two beneficiaries in one sentence — the leader without the capability, and the layman without the obligation.1
What the pair gives is a way to tell this doctrine from the ordinary kind. Most exoneration moves serve one person, and the people around them have some reason to push back. This one has no counterparty. The leader is relieved of a demonstration, the congregation is relieved of a practice, and nobody in the room is worse off for agreeing — which is why the sentence goes unchallenged in a way that a plainly self-serving claim wouldn't. The psychology literature explains the individual reach for it; the ordering of the three excuses explains why this particular one is the stable end-state, because it's the only one of the three that both denies nothing and demands nothing.
One handshake. The market-and-competition side of this material belongs to its own page in the business domain.
Sharpest implication. The three excuses escalate from denying the event to conceding it and removing the obligation — and the last one is the one that sounds most reverent, costs nobody in the room anything, and is therefore the one that survives.
Generative questions.