Somebody has been doing a thing for three years — training, therapy, a practice, a discipline — and you want to know whether it is taking.
Ask them and you get a report on how they feel about it — the least reliable instrument available and the one everybody uses. Watch them for an afternoon and you see a performance, because you are watching. Wait for the visible result and you may wait past the point where the answer was useful.
The honest version is narrower: what small, ordinary things would be different about a person for whom this had started to work — things they would not think to mention and would not bother to fake, because they do not look like evidence of anything?
Madhya 23 answers that question about its own practice, and the answer is a list of nine.
The corpus gives them as the signs that the seed has sprouted — that something has actually begun rather than being merely attempted.1
Forgiveness. That no moment be wasted. Detachment. Absence of false prestige. Hope. Eagerness. A taste for the holy name. Attachment to descriptions of his qualities. Affection for the places associated with him.
Read it once and it looks like a virtue list. It is not, and the difference shows up on the second reading.
Not one of the nine is an ecstatic state. No trembling, no tears, no faltering voice, no standing hair. The entire apparatus of dramatic bodily transformation — the corpus's most famous evidence, catalogued at length in this very chapter — is absent from its own list of first signs.
Look at what the nine actually describe, because the register is unusual for this corpus.
They are dispositions and habits, not experiences. Forgiving somebody, not wasting an hour, declining to claim credit, wanting to hear about something, liking a place. These are things a person does over weeks, and they are visible to anybody who lives with them.
They are small. No item would make a scene. Nobody notices somebody forgiving a minor injury.
And they are cheap to hold and expensive to fake. A single act of any of the nine is easy to produce on demand; sustaining seven of nine over a year, unwatched, is not — the property a display of trembling conspicuously lacks.
So the corpus, in the middle of the chapter that supplies its rasa taxonomy, has quietly produced the most practical diagnostic instrument in the whole book. And it does not present it as one.
That no moment be wasted is the strangest item and the most revealing.
It is not a virtue in the sense the other eight are. Forgiveness, detachment and humility are recognisable moral qualities; wanting to hear about somebody is an affection. This is a relationship to time.
And it is the only item on the list that is continuous rather than occasional. The others describe what a person does when the occasion arises. This one describes what happens to the gaps — the queue, the walk, the hour between things — and gaps are where a practice either exists or does not.
Which makes it, in practice, the load-bearing item. You can hold the other eight and still be a person who does the practice at scheduled times, and the corpus's own creeper metaphor is emphatic that the watering is daily and small rather than occasional and large.2
The corpus does not rank the nine. If it did, the argument for putting this one first is that it is the only one that cannot be arranged around.
Here is what makes this a page rather than a list, and it is an internal collision.
Madhya 23 also contains the doctrine of rati-ābhāsa — that convincing symptoms occur in people who lack the thing entirely, that observers who praise such symptoms are foolish, and that only an expert can tell the semblance from the real.3
So one chapter supplies:
These are not compatible as stated, and the resolution the corpus never offers is available in the material. The two doctrines are about different signs. Rati-ābhāsa concerns the dramatic ones — the tears and trembling, which are cheap to produce and arise from many causes. The nine are the dull ones, which are not.
Which is a real distinction and a good one. The signs the corpus rules uninformative are exactly the ones it takes most seriously everywhere else, and the signs it lists as diagnostic are the ones no chapter builds an argument on.
The corpus has the better instrument and uses the worse one.
Against which, the list is not as clean as it first looks, and the exception is instructive.
Hope and eagerness are interior. They are not habits and not visible; they are exactly the kind of state the corpus's own epistemology says nobody but the holder can attest.
Seven of nine are observable. Two are not, and they sit in the middle of the list without any indication that they are a different kind of item — which is the same structural fault as the six limbs of surrender, where four performable actions and two required beliefs are presented as one sequence.4
It is a recurring habit rather than a slip. This corpus lists actions and states together as though a practitioner could work on both, and the consequence is always the same: a person executes the performable items, cannot execute the others, and experiences the shortfall as the practice failing rather than as an instruction that was never actionable.
Layer A supplies the nine, compactly, inside the Madhya 23 material on the sprouting of bhāva.5
Layer B expands several of them into practical instruction — avyartha-kālatva especially, which becomes a doctrine about the use of a devotee's whole day.6
The direction is worth marking and it is mild. Layer A lists a symptom; Layer B converts it into a duty. That no moment be wasted as a sign that something has begun and do not waste a moment as an instruction are different sentences: one describes what turns up, and the other tells you to produce it.
That matters here more than usual, because the entire value of the list is that its items are things nobody produces on purpose. A symptom converted into a duty stops being diagnostic, and the commentary's version cannot do the work the verse's version does.
You want to know whether a practice is taking. Do not look for the dramatic signs, and do not ask the person how they feel. Look for small dispositions they would not think to report — and specifically for what happens in their unstructured time, which is the one thing nobody arranges.
You are being assessed on visible intensity. Notice that the corpus's own better instrument measures the opposite — dull, sustained, unremarkable behaviour — and that the intensity metric is the one every community actually runs on, because it is legible in a room.
You are building a checklist. Sort your items into things people do and things people feel, and be explicit about which is which. Mixed lists get executed as far as the doable items go and then quietly abandoned, and the person will read the abandonment as failure rather than as a badly built list.
Somebody turns your diagnostic into a target. It has stopped being a diagnostic. The value of no moment wasted as a sign is that nobody was trying to produce it; issued as an instruction it becomes something to perform, and you have lost the only reading you had.
The evidence is a nine-item enumeration inside Madhya 23, stated as the marks of sprouted bhāva and given without argument.7
The tension the source doesn't close: this chapter supplies a checklist of observable signs and a doctrine that observable signs are uninformative. The reconciliation is available — the two concern different classes of sign — and the corpus never states it, which leaves the rati-ābhāsa ruling looking as though it applies to these nine as well.
A second one. Seven items are behavioural and two are interior states, presented identically. The list cannot be executed as written, and nothing indicates it was not meant to be.
Open: whether the nine are ranked. That no moment be wasted is structurally different from the other eight and would carry an ordering if one existed, and nothing in the range read supplies it.
This page and Rati-ābhāsa are the two halves of one chapter's answer to how would anybody know, and they need to be read together or both are misleading. One says the visible signs cannot be trusted and require an expert; the other lists nine visible signs and appoints nobody. The corpus wrote both and never set them side by side.
It supplies the missing instrument for Good Qualities Follow Bhakti. That doctrine says virtues arrive as a byproduct and offers no way to read them backwards without licensing a community to judge each other's interiors. These nine are narrower, duller and checkable, and they are what that doctrine should have been operating on.
And it is the observational counterpart to The Bhakti-latā-bīja. That metaphor makes progress explicitly not the gardener's business and removes any way of seeing the plant. This list is the corpus quietly handing back a way of checking — not on the creeper, which has left, but on the gardener.
The Pre-Violence Diagnostic Inventory — that page's premise is that an act is never out of character, and that the observable history contains the seeds. It builds a checklist of small outward indicators standing in for an interior condition that cannot be inspected directly, on the ground that the condition reliably leaves ordinary traces before it produces anything dramatic.
Structurally the two lists are the same artefact aimed at opposite outcomes, and the comparison exposes the property that decides whether such a list is any good.
Both replace an unobservable interior state with a set of dull, ordinary, sustained behaviours — and both do so specifically because the dramatic indicators are useless. Violence assessment does not wait for the visible rage; it reads the unremarkable trail. The corpus does not wait for the tears; it reads forgiveness and how somebody spends an idle hour.
And both live or die on the same question, which is what a wrong reading costs. A violence inventory that fires falsely damages an innocent person; one that misses is catastrophic. The asymmetry is severe and known, and the literature is organised around it.
The nine have no such accounting. Nobody asks what a false positive costs here — and the answer is not nothing: a community that reads these signs as attainment will promote on them, and a person who reads them in themselves will conclude something about their own standing.
Which gives the finding. A behavioural checklist is only as good as its stated error costs, and devotional traditions almost never state theirs. The instrument itself is sound in both cases; what the violence literature has and this corpus lacks is any account of what happens when the reading is wrong in each direction. That absence is why a good diagnostic can sit in a chapter for four centuries and never get used — there is no framework in which using it would have consequences anybody had planned for.
Sharpest implication. The corpus's best diagnostic is its dullest, and it goes unused because a community can only run on signs that are legible in a room. Trembling is visible to forty people at once; whether somebody wasted their Tuesday afternoon is visible to nobody. Every tradition therefore selects on the sign it has ruled uninformative and ignores the one it built.
Generative questions.