"O Achyuta! What is the type of meditation and what is its form? How many siddhis are there? You are the one who bestows siddhis on yogis. Tell me about this."1
⚑ A quantity question, and he gets a number and a complete inventory.
"Those who are accomplished in the yoga of meditation have said that there are eighteen siddhis. Among these, eight are major and are in me. The other ten have the gunas as a cause."1
The eight, with their origin in him: aṇimā, mahimā, burdening the body, laghimā, using the senses for prāpti, prākāmya over visible and invisible things, īśitā and vaśitā.
The ten, with the guṇas as cause: immunity from bodily change; hearing and seeing at a distance; travelling by mind; assuming any form; entering another body; dying at will; seeing the gods play; playing with them; accomplishing one's resolutions; and being unimpeded in progress, like a king.1
And five further powers follow the eighteen — knowing past, present and future, and others — which the text places explicitly outside the count rather than folding in.
⚑ Eight and ten, announced and delivered, with the overflow marked as overflow. ⚠ This volume's counts fail repeatedly and this one does not — it belongs to the set of technical enumerations that check out, against the bibliographic and narrative ones that do not.
The chapter builds toward the yogi who has conquered senses, breath and mind, and asks what such a person could not obtain. And then:
"But those who are engaged in supreme yoga say that these are nothing but impediments. For those who wish to obtain me, these are nothing but a waste of time."1
⚑ Impediments.* *A waste of time. Applied to the eighteen he has just itemised.
⚠ And the sentence immediately before the dismissal has just made the strongest possible case for them:
"If a sage has conquered his senses, if he is controlled and if he has conquered his breath of life and his mind, if he is immersed in me and meditates on me, what siddhi will be impossible for him to obtain?"1
⚑ A rhetorical question promising all eighteen — and then the next sentence calls them impediments. The build-up and the demolition are consecutive.
⚠ And the withdrawal is not attributed to himself. Those who are engaged in supreme yoga say — the dismissal is quoted from a third party, in a discourse where everything else is stated in the first person.
And immediately, a piece of information the dismissal does not remove:
"Birth, herbs, austerities and mantras can accomplish siddhis. But all these can be obtained through yoga, and the destination obtained by yoga cannot be obtained through these other means."1
⚑ Four non-yogic routes to the powers, named — including birth and herbs, which require no practice at all.
⚠ So the powers are separable from the path. They can be got pharmacologically or by being born right, and the thing that cannot be got that way is the destination. ⚑ Which is precisely why they are a waste of time: they are not diagnostic of anything.
And the chapter's own opening supplies a capability it does not dismiss, which sharpens what is being refused.
"…has been perfected with yoga, fire and other things cannot harm him, just as aquatic creatures are not harmed by water. Because of yoga towards me, his mind is serene. My opulent form is ornamented with shrivatsa, weapons, the standard, the umbrella and whisks. If a person meditates on this, he cannot be defeated."1
⚑ Invulnerability by meditation on the form — stated flatly, in the first person, immediately before the eighteen, and never withdrawn.
⚠ So the chapter is not against efficacy. It is against the eighteen specifically, and the difference between them is where they come from: the invulnerability follows from the relation, and the siddhis can be had from birth or herbs.
⚑ Which is the argument the dismissal never states and the alternate-routes clause supplies. ⚠ The volume prints both and does not join them, and the joining is a reader's.
You ask how many and get a complete inventory and then a dismissal. Both were true. The inventory was not a trap and the dismissal is not a retraction.
The capability can be reached by four routes, one of which is herbs. That tells you the capability was never evidence of the thing you were using it to evidence.
Somebody hands you a full specification of what you should not want. That is more useful than being told not to want it, because now you can recognise it.
The dismissal is quoted from somebody else while the specification is given in the first person. Note who is willing to be attributed to what.
The obvious question is why a text that regards the powers as impediments supplies the complete inventory in the first place.
⚑ Because a warning against an unnamed thing is unusable. A practitioner who has begun hearing at a distance needs to know that this is item two of the minor ten and not an arrival.
⚠ And the volume does this elsewhere. At 11(28) it lists the disturbances that rise in an unperfected yogi's body and the six ways of repelling them — yoga, āsana, dhāraṇā, austerity, mantras, herbs. At 11(21) it specifies exactly what makes a substance impure before saying purity is relative. ⚑ The specification always precedes the demotion, and the demotion is unusable without it.
Which makes this the clearest instance of the Skandha's disposal habit, because here the two halves are separated by only a few sentences and neither is disguised.
⚠ And 11(28) supplies the same withdrawal applied to a different prize:
"Some persevering people keep their body fit and maintain their youth by using different kinds of techniques. They engage in yoga for siddhis. However, those who are accomplished do not have any respect for these efforts and regard them as useless. Like the fruits of a tree, this body is destructible."2
⚑ The technique works — "If a person constantly engages in yoga, his body will become fit" — and the volume grants it and declines it in the same sentence: "but an intelligent person will not attach any importance to this. He will give up this kind of yoga and immerse himself in me."
⚠ [n=2 OBSERVED] on the volume specifying an effective technique in full and then instructing the practitioner to abandon it — the eighteen at 11(15), body-cultivation at 11(28). Two instances; the disposal-clause pattern they belong to is [n≥3] and is stated elsewhere.
The strongest support is the completeness. Eight plus ten, both delivered, in a volume whose narrative counts fail six times.
A second support. Birth, herbs, austerities and mantras. The alternate routes are the argument — they establish that the powers do not indicate the state.
The tension, preserved. ⚑ The dismissal is attributed to "those who are engaged in supreme yoga" rather than stated in the first person, in a chapter otherwise entirely first-person. ⚠ The volume does not explain the shift and none is constructed here.
Open question. ⚑ The eight major siddhis are said to be "in me." ⚠ If they are his own attributes, what is the status of a practitioner who obtains them and is told they are a waste of time? Not addressed in the range read.
Set against Teaching Is Friction Between Two Sticks, this is the disposal-clause pattern applied to a capability rather than to an instrument of knowledge — ⚑ and the only case where the volume supplies a complete specification of what is to be discarded.
Against He Promised to Explain All Twenty-Four and Explained Twenty-One, the eighteen are the counter-instance. ⚑ The technical enumerations hold and the narrative ones fail, and this is one of the four that were checked item by item and found intact.
Against Nothing Is Clean By Itself, the method is identical: specify exhaustively, then relativise or withdraw.
Against The Man Who Ate Dust for a Year, the powers-obtained-cheaply material sits against this directly. ⚑ Śālva eats dust for a year and gets a flying city; Vṛka mutilates himself for seven days and gets a death-touch — and here the volume says the whole category is an impediment. ⚠ The antagonists' boons are not siddhis in the technical sense, and the volume never brings the two accounts together.
Costly Signaling — a signal is credible in proportion to what it costs to produce. Cheap signals can be faked, so systems converge on ones nobody could afford to counterfeit, and the expense is the evidence.
The eighteen look like the perfect costly signal — years of conquered breath and senses, verifiable, spectacular. ⚑ And the chapter destroys their signalling value in one sentence: "Birth, herbs, austerities and mantras can accomplish siddhis."
⚑ What neither field gives alone: the signal is not devalued by being faked but by being cheaply obtainable in fact. Nobody is counterfeiting aṇimā. It can simply be had by being born a certain way or taking the right preparation — so possession of it is genuine and indicates nothing.
⚠ Which is a failure mode the framework has little to say about. A signal defeated by forgery can be re-secured by making forgery harder. ⚑ A signal defeated by a legitimate cheap route cannot be re-secured at all — and the volume's response is not to defend it but to abandon the whole category: nothing but a waste of time.
⚠ A second handshake was considered and cut. The disposal-clause material is a genuine neighbour and is carried on the page's own body from the volume's own instances; a second connection would restate it.
Sharpest implication. *Asked how many powers there are, Kṛṣṇa gives the number, the split — eight major "in me", ten with the guṇas as cause — and both lists in full, correctly, in a volume whose narrative counts fail six times.* Then he calls them "nothing but impediments… nothing but a waste of time", attributing the dismissal to somebody else, and notes that they can also be obtained by birth, herbs, austerities and mantras — which is why possessing them proves nothing.
Generative questions.