Confucius came away from meeting Lao Tzu unable to shut his mouth. That's what he reported: "Now I have seen a true dragon. The dragon will coil to reveal its form and will stretch out to display its power. It can ride upon the clouds and is nourished by the forces of yin and yang. After meeting Lao Tzu, my mouth gaped open and I could not close it. What can I say about Lao Tzu?"1
He can tell the man is a dragon. He can't say anything about him. Both halves of that are the subject here, because there's a rule about who can assess whom, and three paragraphs later there's a table with a dozen named figures on a ten-point scale.
The rule runs one direction:
The higher stage Bodhisattva will always comprehend the gong-fu stage of those who are at a lower stage of attainment, but those lower on the scale cannot fully understand the gong-fu achievements of the higher until they actually achieve those stages themselves.5
And there's a saying for it: "the first level Bodhisattva cannot understand the attainments of the second degree Bodhisattva, but the second degree Bodhisattva fully comprehends the gong-fu of the latter."5 The analogy given is families. It's "the same as parents understanding their young children while the children don't comprehend their parents yet thinking they do."1 The children's confidence is part of the description — not an absence of understanding, but a false impression of it.
One thing is exempted: "the wise individual, however, always knows who has attained a higher cultivation degree than himself."1 So you can detect that somebody is above you. That's Confucius seeing the dragon.
The same authors' earlier book supplies the case this rule needs, and it involves two named men. The Taoist Immortal Lu Ch'un-yang met the enlightened Zen master Huang-lung Nan — and could not tell that the master was anything other than an ordinary monk.7 An immortal, in the room with an enlightened man, reading him as ordinary.
That case explains a whole genre. The stories of Hindu and Tibetan masters challenging one another work the same way: the master with lower achievements knew nothing of the superior one's attainments, and out of ego and pride he challenged his betters, whom he perceived as lacking superpowers altogether.7 The challenge is itself the reading, and the reading was wrong in the direction the rule predicts.
Underneath sits the reason it keeps happening. Human beings are most impressed by tales of siddhi powers and external kung-fu, and totally ignore the invisible and much higher accomplishment of prajñā. In making the mistake of judging only what they can see, people end up grouping the high with the low and the low with the high.7 Not one error, but two running in opposite directions at once.
There's a second finding attached, and it removes the one shortcut a reader might have hoped for. If you open up all your chi mai, will you necessarily have superpowers? No, not necessarily.7 Some Arhats practise for the powers and get them; others practise for wisdom and, lacking the effort in that direction, get none at all.
Which produces the comparison the passage closes on, and it is the most useful thing here. It is hard for the public to distinguish between great men like Confucius, who never exhibited any superpowers at all, and adepts like Milarepa, who exhibited supernatural transformations in abundance.7 Two men at the top of the scale, one of them displaying nothing.
That is what makes the comprehension rule practical rather than merely humbling. You cannot read a stage off a display in either direction. A display does not prove attainment, and the absence of one proves nothing either — which is why behaviour and wisdom are named as the proper measuring sticks.7
There's a concession about the intellect and it's immediately withdrawn. "It's true that there is the possibility of understanding these things on an intellectual level, but when it comes to these realms, they are already at levels well past the realm of intellectualization. Only direct experience provides an understanding of the realms in question."5
So what does somebody do who has been there and wants to say so? The answer given is that they write four lines of verse. "In the past, when the Zen masters themselves wanted to talk about these states, they just tried to make analogies with a few lines of simple poetry, and that's about the best they could do."5
Two examples are printed. Bai Juyi:
I wondered why the covers felt so cold, And then I saw how bright my window was. Night far gone, I know the snow must be deep — From time to time I hear the bamboos cracking.5
And Hanshan:
My mind is like the autumn moon An emerald lake — pure, clean and bright There is nothing with which it compares; Tell me, how can I explain?5
Bai Juyi's is entirely made of things in a room at night: cold bedding, a window brighter than it should be, snow he hasn't seen, bamboo he can only hear. Hanshan's says the comparison fails and then asks how else it could be done. That's the method — not description, and not silence, but an analogy offered as the best available and known to be insufficient.
Using the bodhisattva stations as a scale, numbers get assigned to named figures spanning Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Greek philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism — Yeshe Tsogyel at least a two, Socrates about three, Wang Yang Ming three or four, Mencius five or six, Chuang Tzu six or seven, Confucius seven or eight, Huang-Po seven or eight, Milarepa and Tsong Khapa an eight, Ma Tsu eight or nine, Lao Tzu eight or nine, and Nāgārjuna a ten.2 Hui-neng, Vimalakīrti and Shakyamuni are put at the top of the list outright, and Śaṅkara in the upper tier.2 Jesus and Mohammed get separate handling: both had high samādhi attainments "without doubt", and "one could rightly argue" whether either had actually seen the Tao and reached the first bodhisattva bhūmi, or stood on the cusp of it.2 The rank-assignments are excluded from this build and aren't filed as vault knowledge. They're reported here at the resolution needed to describe the practice — the scale, its range, the kinds of figure on it — and no page in this vault carries the roster as a claim about anyone.
Three qualifications come attached. The scale is partial: "this ranking system is a bit unfair because it only has to do with Tao merits", and in terms of societal merits the gap between Lao Tzu and Confucius "becomes all the greater" — running the other way.3 The list is admittedly incomplete. Yun-men, Lin-chi and other Zen masters go unranked, though they "not only reached great realms of attainment, but became beacons for the ages and produced many enlightened students."3 That's a second axis — transmission — which the scale doesn't measure.
And the whole thing gets called "superficial" in the same sentence that uses it.3
What the list is for gets stated. "Such a superficial ranking does show that people like Yeshe Tsogyel and Milarepa, who followed very painful paths of form-school esoteric cultivation, could be easily matched and even eclipsed by people like Socrates, Lao Tzu or Confucius who followed much simpler cultivation approaches."3 A year of generated heat on a glacier and a lifetime of Himalayan hardship, placed level with or below men who thought carefully and behaved well. And the conclusion drawn: "You can definitely cultivate the mind rather than the body and thereby still achieve the greatest levels of spiritual attainment! … Cultivate prajna and you attain everything; cultivate the body and you may attain nothing at all!"3
The mechanism is one move. "The chi, mai, chakras and so forth are — like all matter — just transformations of consciousness, and so the highest way to cultivate is to focus on the mind and its active expression in behavior."3 And the man who scored seven or eight without a single austerity has a named method. Confucius "was always watching his personal behavior through shamatha-vipashyana cessation-contemplation practice" — stopping and looking, applied to conduct.3 The path "is all about freeing your inherent mind of artificial pollutions and exhibiting this purity through functioning behavior."3
There's a second route described alongside it, and it's the one the ranking rates lower. Some people cultivate the various samādhi-dhyāna and "actively work at transforming the physical body rather than letting it transform naturally as occurs on the path of prajna cultivation." They do get out of the Desire Realm heavens. But "even if they can attain all nine samadhi it doesn't constitute enlightenment" — theirs is "more of a gong-fu type of attainment."5 The Zen masters "rarely display superpowers because they know these things lead people astray, and some never even bother to cultivate them at all."5
You're at a talk, or reading, and you find yourself sorting. This teacher is further along than that one. That writer got somewhere the other didn't.
Stop at the first move and keep it. This person is further on than I am is the judgement the rule grants you, and it's the one Confucius made in the room. Anything past it — how much further, further than whom, where on a scale — is a comparison between two things you can't see. The place it shows up hardest is the top of your own list. Whoever you've put highest is the furthest point you can resolve, which is a fact about your eyesight rather than about them.
And there's the version from the analogy, which is the uncomfortable one. Children don't comprehend their parents yet think they do. So assessing somebody above you feels exactly like assessing them successfully — there's no interior signal that separates the two, and no amount of care produces one.
What you can do instead is what the Zen masters did. If you've been somewhere and want to say so, don't describe it and don't go quiet. Find four lines' worth of something ordinary that has the shape of it — the covers being cold, the window too bright, bamboo cracking in the dark — and hand that over, knowing it doesn't compare.
The passage opens on one dragon and closes on another. A monk asks Chia-shan: "How is it when the morning sun has risen and the night moon does not appear?" Chia-shan answers, "The dragon keeps the ocean pearl in its mouth and pays no attention to the sporting fish." At those words Yuan-an was greatly enlightened.6
The dragon has the pearl in its mouth. The fish dart around it and it doesn't look at them. Nothing is being suppressed and nothing is being attended to — the pearl occupies the mouth, and the fish are simply not what a creature holding a pearl is doing. Then Confucius, who has just met Lao Tzu, reaches for the same animal: coiling to reveal its form, stretching out to display its power, riding cloud, nourished by yin and yang.1 Faced with a man he can't describe, he describes a dragon's habits.
Both passages are the poetry method doing its work in place of a rank. Chia-shan doesn't explain the state to the monk; he hands him a picture and the monk wakes up. Confucius doesn't grade Lao Tzu; he says dragon and then says he can't say anything. The numbers arrive three paragraphs later — Confucius seven or eight, Lao Tzu eight or nine2 — and they're doing a different job from the thing the two men actually did in the room.
Source criticism, and this is the whole budget. The same episode sits on both sides of a collision: "what can I say about Lao Tzu?" illustrates the comprehension rule, and three paragraphs later the incomprehension has become a one-point interval on a numbered scale.1 2 Nāgārjuna is placed at ten with three figures above the scale, while the rule says only somebody at ten or above can comprehend a ten. The ranking is presented as an original construction — "we could even go so far to say" — rather than as a relayed tradition, and the two-truths move that would make it conventional-rather-than-actual is never invoked.
The tension the source doesn't close. The scale measures Tao merit and is called unfair for it, while societal merit is said to run the other way between the same two men.3 Neither measure is dropped and no rate of exchange is given.
A second. Transmission is named as a real axis — beacons for the ages, many enlightened students — and then not scored.3
Scope. The bodhisattva stations used as the scale are, by footnote 518, part of a scheme the book itself calls false stages, with three functions named for it: rest stops, verifications, motivational assists.4
Open questions. The Zen masters answered with poetry because analogy was the best available. Is there any tradition that built a second method for reporting these states, or is verse the ceiling everywhere? And if only direct experience gives understanding, what's a reader of a stage-scheme actually acquiring?
Follow the comprehension rule and you stop ranking. You can register that somebody is ahead of you and nothing beyond it, you can't place two people who are both ahead, and you certainly can't name a maximum — so the honest output is a short list of people you can tell are further on, unordered. Follow the ranking and you get a scale from two to ten with a top and three figures above it. It's offered with its own caveats attached — partial, incomplete, superficial — but it's offered, and it's used to make an argument that matters: that the glacier bought less than the careful life did.
Both are on the same page. What sits between them is the purpose each is put to. The rule is aimed at a practitioner sorting their own teachers. The table is aimed at a reader deciding whether austerity is worth it. Neither is withdrawn.
Against Yeshe Tsogyel's Eight Austerities as Stage Two, this page supplies the comparative verdict that page's guru delivers locally: the rebuke about being too repressed and too fervent is the same judgement made to one person that the ranking makes across a dozen. And with Superpowers Are Not Evidence, the Zen masters' reticence is the practical form of it — not displaying the powers because displaying them leads people astray.
You can only grade one rung above yourself — Ego Development Theory. That hub's territory is stage models of adult development, where a person at one stage can reliably interpret the stage below and systematically misreads the stages above — which is why scoring instruments in that literature are built around what somebody produces rather than around what they say about themselves, and why raters have to be trained to a level above the material they score.
The correspondence is exact and it arrived from a completely different direction. Here it's the parents-and-children analogy: downward comprehension is perfect, upward comprehension is absent, and the person above can't be described by the person below. There it's the rating problem: an instrument administered by somebody at a lower stage will compress everything above them into the highest category they personally have.
What the pair gives is a practical constraint neither states alone. If comprehension only runs downward, then any ranking of people is bounded by the ranker, and the ceiling of a published scale tells you where its author stopped. The developmental literature handles this by training raters upward and by scoring artefacts instead of self-report. The contemplative version has no equivalent, and the substitute the Zen masters used — hand over four lines of verse and let the reader do what they can with it — is a way of transmitting something without claiming to have graded it.
One handshake. The material has no second one that isn't decorative.
Sharpest implication. The only judgement the rule grants is that person is ahead of me, and the only report the tradition trusts is four lines of borrowed weather — so between detection and poetry there is nothing, and the ten-point scale sits in a gap the rule says can't be occupied.
Generative questions.