Here is a question nobody normally asks about supernormal powers: not whether they're real, and not whether they prove anything, but where they come from — by what route a person ends up with one. The obvious answer is training. You do the practice, the capability appears, like flexibility or a golf swing.
A completely different answer gets printed, from Nāgārjuna, and once you see the pattern in it you can't unsee it:
By offering a chain of lamps at reliquaries, / And lamps in dark places, / And oil lamps as well, / You will attain the divine eye.1
Lamps for sight. Then the same shape again:
By offering musical instruments and bells, / For the veneration of reliquaries, ... / And by offering drums and trumpets / You will attain the divine ear.1
Sound for hearing. And a third time, with something less tangible than a lamp or a drum:
By not relating others' mistakes and / Not speaking of their defective limbs, / But by protecting their minds, / You will attain knowledge of other's mind.1
Protect people's minds and you get access to minds. That isn't training. It's exchange, and the exchange rate is a structural match: whatever faculty you supply to others is the faculty you receive.
Set the six out and the symmetry is unmistakable. Each entry names what gets given away, and then names the faculty that comes back, and the two always belong to the same category.
Five of the six are mirrors. Give the means of seeing, receive seeing. Give the means of moving, receive the power to move without means. Give the means of remembering — texts held and transmitted — receive memory that crosses death.
The mechanism implied isn't a mechanism at all in the ordinary sense. There's no causal chain from a donated lamp to a functioning faculty. What there's instead is a claim about how the universe settles accounts: in kind, at the level of the capability, across whatever interval it takes.
Directly before the verse, on the same page, sits a short piece of Chinese Buddhist verse that changes how the list should be read — and the two are never connected.
The Heavenly eye penetrates without obstruction. / The Fleshly eye sees obstacles but does not penetrate. / The Dharma eye only contemplates the mundane. / The Wisdom eye understands true emptiness. / The Buddha eye shines like a thousand suns. / Although their illumination differs, their substance is one.1
Five eyes, ranked by reach — and then the last line takes the ranking back. The differences are differences of illumination. The substance is single.
Which matters for what follows, because the divine eye that a chain of lamps is said to buy is one of these five. If their substance is one, then acquiring the heavenly eye isn't the acquisition of a new organ. It's the same seeing, less obstructed.
And that quietly undercuts the transactional reading before the transaction is even described. You can't purchase a substance that is already there and single. What a purchase could plausibly buy is a change in obstruction — which is exactly the third account given two paragraphs later, and exactly not the account the verse's grammar suggests.
The fleshly eye entry is the one worth sitting with. Sees obstacles but does not penetrate — an eye defined by what stops it. On the one-substance reading, every eye above it in the list is the same eye with fewer stops, which makes the whole hierarchy a description of interference rather than of capability.
The couplet is printed, the text moves on to how Buddhism defines these achievements, and the two are left in the same room without being introduced to each other. Which is the pattern of this whole passage: three incompatible accounts, all present, none set against the others.
This gets flagged in the text, and the framing is the most useful sentence in the passage:
How does Buddhism choose to define the achievement of the five penetrations and six clairvoyances? As merits rather than as purely yogic achievements. You have to particularly note this method of explanation, for it is a very unique way for discussing these things.1
Merits rather than purely yogic achievements. That's a genuine fork, and it matters more than it looks. Under a yogic account, powers are the output of a technique. Anyone who runs the technique correctly gets the output, ethics are a separate matter, and the powers are therefore uninformative about the person — which is precisely the argument of the page next to this one.
Under a merit account, powers are the settlement of a debt incurred by specific ethical acts. They're informative by construction: if the divine eye is what a lifetime of lighting dark places buys, then a person with the divine eye did something particular to get it.
These two accounts can't both be right about the same power, and the difference isn't academic — it's the difference between a capability that says nothing about its holder and one that reads their history. The distinctiveness gets pointed at. What goes unnoticed is that it contradicts the position taken elsewhere in the same book.
You won't test this scheme. Nobody will. What it's actually good for is a reversal you can run today, and the reversal is the interesting part.
Instead of asking what practice would give me X, ask what would I have to have given away for X to be owed to me. Take any capability you want — to understand people, to be trusted with what they are actually thinking, to be somewhere when it matters. The list's logic says: supply that to others first, at cost, without the transaction being visible.
Notice how different that instruction is from a training instruction. Training is done to yourself, in private, and you keep the results. This is done to other people, and the results are said to come back later by a route you can't audit.
Then run the honest version, which is the third entry and the one that needs no doctrine behind it at all. Not relating others' mistakes. Not speaking of their defective limbs. Protecting their minds. Try that for a fortnight — not as a discipline, as an experiment — and watch what actually happens. People start telling you things. You end up knowing what's in their minds.
That's a plain social mechanism, it's fully observable, and it produces something recognisably like the promised faculty. Whether the scheme intends it that way isn't knowable from the text. But it means at least one entry on the list is checkable in a fortnight, which is more than most spiritual claims offer.
And the guard: the moment this becomes bookkeeping — lamps donated, credit accruing — the ethical act has been converted into a purchase, and every tradition holding this doctrine says a purchase doesn't count. The list is a description of what generosity turns out to have bought, not a price sheet.
Five of the six mirror. The sixth doesn't, and the break is where the scheme shows what it is. Everything above depends on reading the list as a set of exchanges, so the entry that can't be an exchange is the one to look at hardest.
By knowing correctly, thoroughly and precisely / That all things have no entityness, / You will attain the supreme extinguishment, / The six clairvoyance extinguishing contaminations.1
There's no offering here. Nothing is given to anybody. The cause is insight — knowing that things have no entityness — and the effect is the one item on the list that is not a power at all but liberation itself.
So the list isn't a single scheme. It's five entries of one kind and one of another, and the one of another is the one that matters most.
What follows from that is the whole architecture of this book, arriving inside a verse from a different tradition. The five mirrored items are transactional, earned, and — being purchasable by conduct — available to anyone willing to spend. The sixth isn't for sale. No quantity of lamps produces it. It comes only from seeing something correctly, and it's the one that ends the contaminations.
Which means the verse itself sorts the powers from the point. The clairvoyances are things you can be owed. The extinguishment isn't the kind of thing that can be owed, because there's no act that constitutes payment for it.
Two smaller things about the list are worth keeping rather than smoothing over.
The pattern is not perfectly clean even among the five. The fourth entry bundles shoes, conveyances and service to the feeble into magical emanations, which is a mirror if the emanation is understood as motion — but the fifth bundles patience, giving of Dharma and remembering the meaning of texts into memory of lives, and the fit there's between two kinds of retention rather than between a gift and a faculty. The mirroring is a real pattern with strain at the edges, and stating it at n=5 with two loose fits is the honest strength.
And the acts are a mixed economy, which is worth counting because the obvious cynical reading is available. Two entries are offerings to religious institutions — lamps at reliquaries, instruments for the veneration of reliquaries. One is charity to persons: shoes, conveyances, serving the feeble. Three are non-material entirely: discretion about others' faults, patience, giving of Dharma, and the final insight. The text is Precious Garland of Advice to a King, so a king is being told what to fund — and a scheme that told him only to fund reliquaries would deserve the cynical reading. This one doesn't: half its items cost the donor nothing but restraint.
Immediately after the verse comes a third explanation of why the powers appear, and it's neither Nāgārjuna's nor the one on the facing page of this cluster.
Why do you attain these abilities and special states? Because you progressively cleave yourself away from all defilements masking your true mental nature, and when defilements melt away you can access all sorts of greater mental abilities.2
This is subtraction, not payment and not training. The capabilities were always there. Defilement was obscuring them. Remove the obscuration and what was inherent becomes usable — all the infinite functions of the original nature become possible when you can fully access its pure being.2
And the conclusion he draws is the strongest deflation of the three:
In essence these abilities aren't really superpowers, but just natural potentials of your true nature which is fundamental, essential mind!2
Not powers. Not acquisitions. Ordinary properties of an unobstructed mind, which look extraordinary only from inside an obstructed one.
It gets extended to the matter-manipulating abilities on one premise: mind and matter share one root source, so contacting that source makes you master of both — with the careful qualification that this mind isn't the sixth consciousness of thoughts but the fundamental nature.2
Put the three accounts side by side, because the book contains all of them and never sets them against each other.
Equipment. Powers follow from body structure and physical gong-fu; ghosts have them; anyone who works the body may get them; they're orthogonal to wisdom.
Merit. Powers are settlements of ethical debt, matched in kind to the act that earned them; they read a person's history.
Uncovering. Powers are inherent functions of the original nature, revealed as defilement is removed; nobody earns or acquires them at all.
These make incompatible predictions and the incompatibility is easy to state. Under equipment, a vicious person with a well-worked body has powers — and that's affirmed, with demons as the example. Under merit, powers track ethical conduct, so a vicious person shouldn't have them. Under uncovering, powers track purification, so they should appear only as defilement decreases, and the demon case fails again.
The demon is the test case, and two of the three accounts fail it. There's a reconciliation available and it never gets made: that the word powers is covering two different classes — the mundane four-dhyāna abilities, which run on equipment, and the alaya-level ones, which run on purification — with Nāgārjuna's list describing a third route to the first class. That reading is consistent with things he says elsewhere. He simply never assembles it, and each account is presented in its own passage as the explanation.
Strongest support. The mirroring is a real structural pattern in a primary verse, holding cleanly across at least three entries and loosely across two more, and it isn't the reading imposed on it — the verse is introduced only as merits rather than purely yogic achievements and lets the verse do the rest.1 The pattern is in the text.
The tension the source does not close. Three mutually incompatible accounts of where powers come from, in one book, none of them acknowledging the others, with the ghosts-and-demons case falsifying two of the three.2
A second tension, internal to the verse. Five entries are transactional and the sixth isn't, and the sixth is the only one that is liberation rather than a faculty. The verse's own structure separates the powers from the point, and neither Nāgārjuna's framing nor the comments printed around it.
A third, on transmission. The verse reaches Bodri through Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden's The Fundamental Potential for Enlightenment, an Australian Tushita edition — not through a translation of the Ratnāvalī itself.1 Standing citation rule applies: Bodri citing Loden citing Nāgārjuna.
And the standing scope limit. The five penetrations and six clairvoyances belong to a ladder footnote 518 calls false stages.3 A merit scheme that prices the rungs of a scaffold is doing careful accounting in a currency the author says is conventional.
Open questions. Is the mirroring pattern present in the Ratnāvalī more widely, or does it hold only for this passage — and does any commentator name it as a principle rather than as a list? And if two of the three accounts of powers fail the demon case, is the equipment account the only one the book can actually afford to keep?
Against Superpowers Are Not Evidence, this page is the direct contradiction and both pages must carry it. That page argues powers are uninformative because they follow body structure and are shared with demons. This one prints a scheme in which each power is the specific settlement of a specific ethical act — which makes powers highly informative, a readable record of what someone gave away. The two passages are three hundred pages apart, both presented as the Buddhist position, and the conflict is never named.
The convergence with The Atiśa Loop is exact on the merit mechanism and extends it. That page's problem is that merit is an unauditable ledger explaining present standing. Nāgārjuna's list is that ledger with itemised entries — and it's a better version of the doctrine for precisely that reason, because a scheme naming which act buys which faculty is at least specific enough to be argued with. It also inherits the loop's difficulty: nothing here is checkable, and the interval over which the account settles is unbounded.
Read with Samādhi States Are Images of Emptiness, the sixth entry does the same work from a different direction. There, anything with a knower in it is a construction. Here, anything that can be bought is a faculty rather than the point — and the one item that can't be bought is the one that extinguishes the contaminations. Purchasability and self-reference turn out to be two tests for the same boundary.
Where the vault's own material sits closest is A Sixth of Their Merit and All of Their Sin — another itemised merit-transfer scheme, from another tradition, specifying rates rather than mirrors. The comparison is worth someone's attention: both traditions found it necessary to make the invisible economy arithmetically explicit, and neither is checkable.
An exchange rate denominated in kind rather than in value — Reciprocity. The reciprocity literature describes a robust human disposition: a gift creates an obligation, the obligation is felt as pressure, and it discharges in roughly comparable value — which is why a small gift can extract a large concession, since the matching is loose and the recipient sets the rate. Nāgārjuna's scheme is reciprocity with the loose matching removed and replaced by something much stricter: the return is in the same faculty as the gift, not the same value. Lamps do not buy an amount of merit convertible into anything; they buy sight, specifically. What the pairing gives that neither side gives alone: a like-for-like return rule can't be gamed by cheap tokens, because there's no exchange into a general currency at any point — and that immunity is what a value-denominated reciprocity system structurally lacks, which is exactly the vulnerability the influence literature is built on exploiting. Read that way, the merit scheme isn't a naïve picture of how the world works but a norm with an anti-exploitation property built into its accounting: you can't buy the divine eye with drums, and you can't buy discretion about people's failings with anything at all.
One handshake. The other candidate — merit as an unauditable ledger — is carried in this hub by the Atiśa page, and repeating it here would restate that argument rather than extend this one.
Sharpest implication. Five of the six entries can be purchased with conduct and the sixth can't be purchased at all — so the verse itself sorts the clairvoyances from the extinguishment, and the only item on the list that ends the contaminations is the one nothing buys.
Generative questions.