The list is traditional, and its first item is oddly specific in a way the rest are not.
The "eighteen transformations": emitting water from the upper body and fire from the lower or the reverse, walking about in space, lying down and sleeping in space, diving into the earth, travelling at great speeds, "and all sorts of other miraculous things."1
The paired-opposite item is the signature. Water from the top and fire from the bottom, or the reverse — and the reversibility is the point. It is not a display of one element; it is the two most opposed elements, simultaneously, in one body, in either configuration.
Which reads as a demonstration of control rather than of power. Anyone can be hot. Being hot at one end and wet at the other, and able to swap them, is a claim about command over the elements as a set.
The rest of the list is spatial. Walking in space, sleeping in space, diving into the earth, travelling at great speeds — the body released from its ordinary relationship to ground and distance.
And the list is open: all sorts of other miraculous things, with eighteen as the traditional count and only five named here. See Koshas, Skandhas and Elements as One Ladder.
The mechanism given is continuous with everything else in this material, which is what makes it worth recording rather than dismissing.
Arhats purify the chi of the body and penetrate through to the source of the five elements, and so learn to gain control of them; rising into the air before death and transforming the body into water or fire.3
Penetrating to the source is the operative claim, and it is a claim about depth rather than about acquiring an ability.
The model running underneath is stated elsewhere: the body is composed of the five elements, purification proceeds element by element, and the far stages involve their separation and refinement. On that model, control of an element is not a power added to a person. It is what becomes available when you have reached the level at which the element is constituted.
The prior stage is described accordingly: "transforming the dense material body into pure chi so it can appear and disappear at will" — the stage of an Arhat, rishi or Immortal.2 The body's density is the variable. A body converted to chi has no fixed relationship to space, which is what the spatial items on the list are describing.
Which makes the eighteen transformations, in this reading, not miracles but consequences — the observable behaviour of a body that has finished a physical process. See The Five Elements in the Extrudate and Yin-Shen and Yang-Shen.
The timing rule is the most interesting item here, because it comes with a stated reason.
"Traditionally there are 'eighteen transformations' that they can typically demonstrate upon their death. They usually do not demonstrate these accomplishments earlier so as not to mislead individuals into thinking that gong-fu abilities are the Tao, the purpose of the Tao, or road to the Tao."4
Three things are being denied in one clause, and they are distinct errors.
Not the Tao — the abilities are not the thing itself. Not the purpose of the Tao — they are not what it is for. Not the road to the Tao — and this is the sharpest: they are not a route. Cultivating them does not take you anywhere.
And the restraint is pedagogical rather than modest. The reason for withholding is that a demonstration would teach the wrong lesson — an observer seeing an ability would conclude that abilities are the goal, and would reorganise their practice around acquiring them.
Which is why death is the permitted occasion. A demonstration at death cannot recruit anyone into pursuing it, because the demonstrator is leaving and there is nothing to imitate.
The complementary observation is that these deaths are commonly reported: Arhats about to pass away "commonly arising in the air and displaying superpowers that manipulate the physical form," with Elijah and Ānanda named as demonstrating mastery over fire and water before dying.2
Which produces a strange and internally coherent picture. The abilities are held for a lifetime and used once, at the only moment when using them cannot mislead. [n=2 REPORTED] — two named figures, neither cited to a text. 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY. See Concealment and Strategic Opacity.
The most deflating claim about the whole category is that it is elective.
Arhat attainment involves siddhis "if the Arhat chooses to cultivate them," with many not setting out to do so — Confucius, Socrates and Nisargadatta given as examples.7
If the Arhat chooses to cultivate them. The powers are a separate curriculum, taken up or not, sitting alongside the attainment rather than following from it automatically.
And the named decliners are the argument. Three figures from three traditions, none of whom is associated with a single reported miracle, all offered as having reached the level and not pursued the abilities. Which severs the correlation entirely — an absence of powers is no evidence about attainment, and their presence is evidence only of a choice.
The related classification: Buddhas and Bodhisattvas have the Arhat attainments and are so called "because they shed the ego concept and chose to keep being reborn to help sentient beings."7
The distinguishing property is a decision, not a capacity. Same attainments; different disposal of them.
Which is consistent across this material — the Arhats who cling to the quiet side, the sage who decides to stay, the master who declines to demonstrate. The far stages are described as a series of choices about what to do with a condition, rather than as further rungs of capability. See Isis and the Three Bodies.
The one claim here that is publicly checkable is the one about what happens to the body afterwards, and it is worth isolating for exactly that reason.
A sufficiently transformed body does not decay at death but exhibits incorruptibility; St Francis of Assisi, Paramahansa Yogananda, Hui-neng and Tsong Khapa are named; the claim is made that no one had explained why this occurs non-denominationally, and the explanation given is thoroughly purified chi channels.6
Four figures, four traditions — Catholic, Hindu, Chinese Chan, Tibetan Gelug. Which is the structure of the argument: a phenomenon reported across unrelated traditions, in the same form, with each tradition explaining it by its own doctrine.
And the offered contribution is a non-denominational mechanism. Not that the phenomenon happened — that is taken as given — but that purified channels explain it in a way that works for all four cases at once.
Three things make this the sharpest case study on the page.
It is the only item that leaves physical evidence. Every other transformation is an event witnessed and gone. A body that has not decayed is a present object, and several of the named ones are on public display.
It is therefore the only one with an available ordinary explanation. Preservation conditions, embalming practice, mummification, low humidity, selection bias in which bodies get exhumed and reported. None of these is engaged, and the claim that nobody had explained the phenomenon non-denominationally is made without acknowledging that ordinary accounts exist. 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY [LOW CONFIDENCE].
And its strength is inverted relative to the rest. The item best positioned to be checked is the one where the argument does least work — asserting a mechanism, naming four cases, and passing over the obvious alternatives.
Which is a pattern worth naming, because it recurs: the most checkable claim in a body of work is frequently the one handled with the least care, and the reason is that checkability is not what the claim is being used for. Here it is being used to establish that the traditions are describing one thing. The four names do that work whether or not the mechanism is right.
Nothing on this page is a practice, and the whole page is a warning against treating it as one.
The instruction is unambiguous: "Cultivating the body is not the way to the Tao," and those who take physical cultivation as the path or run after superpowers "always get absolutely nowhere," the most being that "they become a bit healthier or a better athlete."5
Absolutely nowhere is the strongest phrase, and a bit healthier or a better athlete is the sting — the outcome is not damage but triviality. Years spent, and the result is fitness.
So the operative moves are all refusals.
Do not cultivate abilities. They are not the road, and the tradition's own masters withhold demonstrations specifically to prevent you concluding otherwise.
Do not read powers as evidence of attainment. They are elective, and three of the named exemplars have none.
Do not read their absence as evidence against it. Same reason, in reverse.
And postpone body work rather than pursuing it. The stated ordering is that physical cultivation is "something to concentrate on after seeing the Tao"5 — which places the whole subject after the event most readers have not reached. See Gong-Fu Is the Signpost, Not the Road and You Cannot Buy the Path.
What remains actionable is the ordinary programme — emptiness cultivation, conduct, the practices that need no permission — and the entire content of this page for a practitioner is that none of what it describes is a target.
The version of these abilities most emphasised is the least spectacular, and it is the one with the best-attested reports.
Enlightened Zen masters demonstrate control of death by dying at a time and place of their choosing in a dignified but unusual way; the Sufi saint Abdul-Qadir Gilani is said to have often chosen the same method; Padre Pio, Lü Chunyang and Milarepa are named for other powers.5
Time and place of their choosing is the claim, and it is a much smaller one than flight or elemental transformation.
Which is why it is the interesting one. It requires no suspension of anything — people do die, and the assertion is only about the timing and manner being selected rather than suffered. A tradition of masters announcing their death, arranging their affairs, sitting down and dying is documented across several schools, and the phenomenon at least has a shape that history can record.
Dignified but unusual is doing careful work. Not miraculous — unusual. Sitting upright, choosing the day, composing a verse and stopping.
And it fits the timing rule exactly. A death is the one demonstration that cannot recruit anybody, and control of death is the version of the eighteen transformations that a witness could actually report without the report becoming an inducement.
The named list mixes registers without distinguishing them — a Sufi saint, a Catholic stigmatic, a Taoist immortal and a Tibetan yogi, gathered as instances of one category. The gathering is the claim, and no case is described. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE. See Ji Gong's Timbers Through the Well.
One name recurs across the passages and its placement is the clearest statement of what the whole category is being used to argue.
The miracles of Elijah are given as examples of an Arhat's powers, and a non-denominational stage of attainment is named as what makes them possible.1 He appears again alongside Ānanda, both demonstrating mastery over fire and water before dying.2
A Hebrew prophet and the Buddha's attendant, paired, as instances of one attainment. Which is the move the whole page exists to support, and it is worth being explicit about its structure.
The claim is not that Elijah was a Buddhist. It is that the abilities reported of him are the abilities reported of Arhats, that the abilities have a stated physical prerequisite, and that the prerequisite does not care what tradition produced it.
The pairing does real work if the reports match in detail. Fire and water, specifically, in both cases — and the paired-opposite item is the signature of the eighteen. A generic he did wonders would establish nothing; mastery over two named opposed elements, before death, in two unrelated traditions, is a narrower coincidence.
And it does no work at all if the details were selected to match. Which is the standing hazard of the whole decoding method and is not addressed here: the two accounts are summarised rather than quoted, and neither is cited. Nothing shows what was in the sources and what was in the reading. 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY.
What survives regardless is the framing this material applies to every such report. The powers are consequences of a physical condition, the condition is reachable from any tradition, and no tradition owns it — which is the same argument made about the stages, the markers, and the word Buddha itself. See Isis and the Three Bodies.
Evidence. [PRACTITIONER SOURCE]. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE. 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY throughout — Elijah, Ānanda, St Francis, Yogananda, Hui-neng, Tsong Khapa, Padre Pio, Lü Chunyang, Milarepa, Abdul-Qādir Gīlānī and Nisargadatta are all named and none is cited. [LOW CONFIDENCE] on the incorruptibility explanation specifically, where no ordinary account of preservation is engaged. Recorded here as what the tradition asserts.
Tension — held for a lifetime, used once. The abilities are said to be withheld until death so as not to mislead. The same passage says many Arhats never cultivate them at all. Whether the withholding describes a general practice or only the choices of those who did acquire them is not distinguished.
Tension — not the road, and a marker of the road. Powers are emphatically not the Tao, its purpose, or its route. They are also used throughout as evidence that a figure reached the far stages. Both readings run at once.
Tension — a non-denominational explanation with denominational examples. The incorruptibility argument's strength is that four traditions report one phenomenon. Its weakness is that all four reports come from within traditions with an interest in them, and none is examined.
Open question — what are the other thirteen? Five of eighteen are named, and the count is treated as traditional. The remainder are all sorts of other miraculous things.
Two attitudes to the spectacular material run through this body of work and they are both fully committed.
Record it in detail. The eighteen transformations, the incorruptible bodies, the controlled deaths, the named figures across four traditions — collected, cross-referenced, and offered as evidence that the stages are real and non-denominational.
And declare it irrelevant. Not the Tao, not its purpose, not its road. Chasing it gets you absolutely nowhere. Masters withhold it precisely so nobody concludes otherwise.
These sit together more comfortably than most tensions here, because the recording serves the argument and the warning serves the practitioner — the material is being used as evidence for a reader and denied as a target for a practitioner, and those are different jobs.
What is not resolved is the recruitment problem the masters themselves identified. Their stated reason for withholding demonstrations is that seeing an ability makes people pursue it. Reading a catalogue of abilities is not obviously safer than seeing one — and this page is that catalogue.
The convergence is on the diagnostic value being zero in both directions. Powers present, powers absent: neither tells you anything about attainment, because the powers are elective and three of the highest-named figures declined them. Which is the one instruction that survives the whole page, and it disqualifies exactly the inference the collection invites. See Don't Be Wed to My Interpretations.
The Mumia: The Incorruptible Body as the Self — psychology.
The alchemical tradition arrived at the incorruptible body too, and read it as a description of a psychological achievement rather than a physical one — which is the reading this page never considers and which explains the phenomenon's cross-traditional persistence better than purified channels do.
The alchemists called it the mumia — the subtle body, the incorruptible body — emerging at the end of the opus, after the putrefaction and the recombinations. And the reasoning behind the image is explicit: iron rusts, wood rots, flesh putrefies, and gold does not. The alchemists were not interested in literal gold; they were interested in the principle. What is the quality of consciousness that resists the universal law of decay? What state, once achieved, cannot be lost?
The mumia is that: consciousness refined to a stability no longer subject to the laws that govern the defended ego. It does not decay because there is nothing in it that was ever corrupt.
Set that beside the four incorruptible bodies and two things become visible.
The image is doing philosophical work in both traditions and physical work in only one. The alchemical version never required a preserved corpse — it required a metaphor for permanence, and decay was the most available one. Which supplies an explanation for why four unrelated traditions report incorruptibility that does not require the bodies to be undecayed: every tradition that wants to say a state is permanent will reach for the body that does not rot, because that is what permanence looks like in a world of decaying things.
And it identifies what the physical reading costs. Read as a psychological achievement, the mumia is checkable against a life — a person whose stability does not degrade under conditions that degrade everyone else. Read as a physical preservation, it is checkable only against a corpse, and a corpse has ordinary reasons for not decaying that nobody here engages.
The insight neither field produces alone: the incorruptibility claim is strongest as evidence and weakest as fact. Its evidential value is that four traditions converged — and the alchemical case shows they could converge on the image without any of them observing the object, because the image is what a claim about permanence naturally produces. Which means the convergence, offered here as the argument's foundation, is exactly what a purely symbolic origin would also predict.
The unresolved thing is whether a catalogue of powers can be published without doing what the demonstrations were withheld to prevent.
The masters' stated reason for holding these back until death is precise: a demonstration would mislead individuals into thinking that gong-fu abilities are the Tao, the purpose of the Tao, or the road to the Tao. That is a claim about what seeing an ability does to an observer's motivation.
And nothing in that reasoning depends on the ability being seen rather than read about. If the failure mode is a person encounters a spectacular attainment and reorganises their practice around it, then a list — water above and fire below, walking in space, diving into the earth, bodies that do not decay, deaths chosen to the day — is the same stimulus in a more durable medium, reaching more people, permanently.
The page's own defence is the warning it attaches, and the warning is unusually blunt: chasing this gets you absolutely nowhere. Which is a real answer and it is the answer that has always been attached to this material, in every tradition that recorded it — and the recording continued anyway, and so did the chasing.
Three readings, and the page chooses none.
The warning is sufficient, and readers who take it are safe — in which case the masters' caution was excessive and the withholding unnecessary.
The warning is insufficient but the evidence is worth it — the catalogue establishes that the stages are real and non-denominational, and some readers being misdirected is the price.
Or the catalogue is the thing the masters declined to give, published, with a caveat.
The material knows the general shape of this objection and answers it elsewhere by function: the descriptions exist so practitioners do not quit. That answer does not extend here. Nobody is going to encounter emission of fire from the lower body and mistake it for regression. This is the one class of material with no reassurance function at all — and therefore the one where the recruitment cost has nothing on the other side of it.