A man goes into a secluded temple for a forty-day mantra retreat, alone, in order to wake up. In the last week of it, lights start appearing — through the temple and all around the outside of it. Anyone would take that as the thing arriving.
What he did was shout: "Stop it, don't try to cheat me anymore!" And the lights went away.6
That's the attitude the whole of this page is about, and it has two halves that are easy to run together. You have to refuse to be cheated by phenomena, and you have to refuse to cheat yourself.6 The second is much harder, because there's nobody in the room to catch you at it.
Hakuin is the standing example. His teacher spent years mocking him, deliberately, to make the point that he wasn't enlightened — because Hakuin kept concluding he'd attained the Tao at every small step forward he made.6 Ramana Maharshi gives the same warning in gentler words: bright lights, unusual sounds, visions of gods appearing inside you or in front of you, and the instruction is not to be deceived by them and forget yourself.6
So the position a reader is left in is uncomfortable. A committee can't certify you. A teacher might be mistaken and you'd have no way to tell. Your own verdict on your own state is the least reliable instrument in the room, and the tradition's most gifted students got it wrong repeatedly.
The question that leaves is stated flatly: in the absence of an enlightened teacher to confirm you, how can you know where you really stand?1 And the answer offered is a book rather than a person. Four are named — the Complete Enlightenment and Śūraṅgama sūtras for indications, the Saṃdhinirmocana for the ranks, and one that sets out "definitive criteria by which you can decide whether or not a person is really enlightened in the first place."1 That's the Source Mirror, by the Zen master Yen-shou, and what's printed from it is a list of ten questions. [POPULAR SOURCE]
Yen-shou names his audience before he asks anything, and the naming is itself diagnostic. The questions are for people who stubbornly cling to their own views, who don't believe the words of the Buddha, who create attitudes that block them, and who cut themselves off from other routes of study. "For their sake I will now discuss ten questions in order to firmly establish the guiding principles."2
That's a precise description of what the questions are built to catch, and it isn't ignorance. It's closure — somebody who has stopped taking in anything that could correct them.
The four traits are a sequence rather than a list, which is the part worth noticing. Cling to your own views and the Buddha's words become optional. Treat them as optional and you build a position that justifies the ignoring. Hold that position and you stop studying anything that might dislodge it. Each step makes the next one look reasonable from inside, which is why the condition is stable, and why breaking it needs an instrument from outside — a written test anyone can apply, which doesn't require the person to already suspect they're wrong.
It also explains how the questions are built. They aren't designed to persuade. They're designed to be answered honestly by somebody who isn't looking for a good answer, and every one of them can be failed in silence, at a kitchen table, with nobody watching.
In compressed form:
One. Can you see the true nature in all things as plainly as viewing a scene in broad daylight?
Two. In the presence of anyone and in any circumstance, regardless of sights or sounds, waking or sleeping, can you always keep to the teachings and the Tao?
Three. Can you completely understand all the Buddha's teachings in the sūtras, including the highest, and the sayings of all the Zen masters since antiquity — without fear and without doubt?
Four. When people put difficult differentiating questions to you and press you with probing inquiries, can you answer without difficulty and resolve their doubts?
Five. Does your wisdom shine unhindered at all times and places, penetrating from moment to moment, steadfast without the slightest lapse?
Six. Can you see through fortune and misfortune, good and evil, without being obstructed by them?
Seven. For every mental state listed in the Treatise on the Gate for Illuminating the Hundred Phenomena, can you see its fine detail, essential nature and point of origin, and not be confused by birth and death or by the sense faculties?
Eight. Can you discern absolute reality in all conduct — walking, standing, sitting, lying down, receiving instruction or responding, dressing or eating?
Nine. Can you remain unmoved when you hear there's a buddha or that there's none, that sentient beings exist or don't, when you're praised or slandered, affirmed or denied?
Ten. Can you comprehend all the forms of wisdom you hear, and both true nature and apparent form, noumenal and phenomenal, absolute and relative, without hindrance — and discern the source of all phenomena, even the appearance of the thousand sages, without doubt?2
(In the text as it reaches this vault the tenth is printed before the ninth. Treated as a typesetting artefact; nothing here is built on the order.)2
Look at what the ten are asking about, because it isn't what a reader expects. Not one of them asks what you have experienced. No question about lights, bliss, dissolution, oneness, visions, the breath stopping, energy in the spine — nothing about any of the phenomena this material spends hundreds of pages sorting.
What they ask instead falls into three groups. Continuity. Two, five and eight are one question in three settings. Waking and sleeping. Moment to moment without the slightest lapse. Walking, sitting, dressing, eating. The test isn't whether the thing happened but whether it ever stops.
Imperturbability. Six asks about fortune and misfortune. Nine asks about praise and slander, and then goes further — can you stay unmoved on hearing that there's a buddha, or that there's none. That's a test of whether the doctrine itself has become something you can be moved by.
Comprehension without fear. Three, seven and ten, and fear is the striking word. An unprepared reader meeting the highest teachings is expected to be frightened of them, and the absence of that fear is treated as a sign.
There's an inset definition a page later that makes the shape of all this obvious: a state is "every attribute which you can have at one time but not another, like intoxication, obliteration, absence, and satisfaction; or its existence depends upon a condition, so it disappears when the condition ceases to exist, like patience in adversity or gratitude for blessings."4 So a state is anything that comes and goes, or that stands only while something props it up. The ten questions are systematically the negative of that. Every one asks whether the thing survives the removal of its supports.
And the examples in the definition are usefully unflattering. Patience in adversity. Gratitude for blessings. Both are ordinarily called virtues, and both are classified here as states, because each rests on a condition and falls when the condition goes — which means the good qualities most people would offer as evidence of their own development are exactly the ones this definition rules out.
The principle underneath the continuity questions is stated on the previous page, and from a completely different tradition. The Doctrine of the Mean says: "The Tao cannot be left for an instant. If it could be left, it would not be Tao."6
That's the same criterion as questions two, five and eight, arriving from Confucian rather than Buddhist material, and it explains why the questions look so unreasonable. They aren't asking for a high score. They're asking whether the thing you've is the kind of thing that has gaps, because on this reading anything with gaps is by definition not it.
Which is why the surrounding teaching is so insistently ordinary. "In the cosmos the highest truth is absolutely ordinary — it's always there right before you."6 And in the teacher's own words from a seven-day retreat: ordinary people have no wisdom and are always looking for something mysterious instead, so "a practitioner must find this treasure, which is not worth a single penny. After enlightenment, you can truly understand that the highest is the most ordinary."6
There's a detail attached to that teaching worth keeping. The transmission of it involved being made to kowtow, which is called an exceptional event — and the teacher said this particular lesson is difficult to teach, that across decades and thousands of students he had not once found somebody else he could transmit it to.6
Two traps are named around it, and they catch different people. The first catches most: looking for mysterious things outside the mind's own basis — miracles, marvels — without realising these are the mind's functions rather than its nature. The second is specifically for people practising correctly, and it's the one the ten questions exist for: mistaking a mere glimpse of reality for complete realization.6
Nine of the ten are interior. Only one can be administered by somebody else:
When people pose difficult differentiating questions to you, and press you with all sorts of probing inquiries, are you able to answer them without any difficulties, and eloquently resolve all their doubts?2
This is the question the whole Zen encounter tradition rests on, and it's why that literature is so full of confrontations — the challenge on the mountain road, the exchange that exposes a claim, the master's laugh. It's the only externally observable item on the list, so in practice it has carried an enormous share of the load.
It's also the most confoundable, and the wording shows why. Look at eloquently. The test rewards fluent, unhesitating, doctrinally literate response under pressure — and that capacity can be got by other routes. Long study produces it. Rhetorical talent produces it. Familiarity with the specific questions produces it, and in a tradition with a canonical stock of challenges, the questions are knowable in advance.
So question four measures something real through a channel with a known false positive, and the false positives cluster exactly where the risk is worst: in the articulate, well-read, long-practising person. Which is Hakuin's situation precisely, and the reason his teacher had to resort to mockery rather than examination.
There's a false negative too and nobody names it. Somebody who genuinely can't be perturbed has no particular reason to perform well in an examination — and question nine, staying unmoved by affirmation or denial, arguably predicts they won't bother. The two questions pull against each other. Four rewards the person who answers well under challenge; nine describes a person for whom the challenge isn't an occasion.
None of which makes the encounter test worthless. It makes it what the record shows it to be: a filter that catches the obviously unprepared and lets the eloquent through.
Straight after the ten comes a passage that complicates every test on this page.
While there is even an outward physical sign by which you can inspect someone and know if they have reached the ranks of attainment, this isn't something that can be publicly revealed, otherwise people would use even this information to cheat others.3
So a physical, externally inspectable marker is claimed to exist — the one thing that would solve every problem in this cluster — and it's withheld. Take the reasoning seriously, because it isn't obviously wrong. Publish the sign and people will learn to produce it. A criterion's value depends on nobody optimising for it, and publication is exactly what starts the optimising. That's a real principle about tests and it generalises far past this one: any observable marker of an unobservable quality decays once the marker is known.
But notice what the withholding costs. A test nobody can apply isn't a test. The reader is told a solution exists, can't use it, and now has one more reason to defer to whoever claims to know it.
And the objection that bites hardest is internal. Every criterion on this page is subject to the same argument. The ten questions are published, in a book written to circulate, and anyone can learn to answer them correctly. Yen-shou published anyway. Whatever principle justifies withholding the physical sign would have justified withholding the ten — and the tradition's most careful attempt at a criterion was made public by the man who wrote it.
Take question two into this week, as an observation rather than a standard. Waking or sleeping, in any circumstance, regardless of sights or sounds. You'll fail it by ten on Tuesday morning over something trivial — a message, a queue, somebody's tone. That failure is the useful output. You now know something specific about where the continuity breaks, instead of carrying a vague sense of not having arrived.
Keep question nine for ordinary life, and run it on compliments rather than insults, because insults are easy to notice. Watch what praise does to you. Not whether you take it gracefully, but whether anything downstream in the next hour is different because of it — whether you work slightly harder, or slightly less, or find yourself telling somebody else.
Don't score yourself. Scoring is precisely the operation that can't be trusted here, and a person who tallies eight out of ten has learned nothing except that they're the kind of person who tallies. Use the list the other way round: go down it until you reach the first question you can't honestly answer yes to, and stop there. That question is your working edge, and it's the only thing a self-administered exam can actually give you.
Read question three as a check on fear rather than on knowledge. You don't need to have mastered a canon to notice whether the highest teachings frighten you, and the fear is answerable tonight.
If somebody in front of you is claiming attainment, question four is the only one you can put to them — and discount fluency heavily when you do, because fluency is what long study buys. And when the lights come, or the sounds, or whatever arrives that looks like confirmation, you already know what to say to it. The list runs one direction only. It disqualifies reliably and it certifies nobody.
[POPULAR SOURCE] and 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE throughout. Range read for this page: pp 411–413. Everything here arrives through a four-link chain — Yen-shou → Nan Huai-Chin's Working Toward Enlightenment → the English edition → this volume. Cite as Bodri citing Nan's rendering of Yen-shou, never as the Source Mirror directly.2 [LOW CONFIDENCE] on where the state definition came from, which is printed without visible attribution at that point.4
The ten are the strongest thing in the cluster: a primary criterion from a named tenth-century source whose internal structure — continuity, imperturbability, comprehension, and no experiential items at all — corroborates the central argument from a document written a thousand years earlier.2 The tension the source doesn't close is about availability. A definitive criterion exists in a book that isn't translated;1 a decisive physical sign exists and won't be revealed;3 and the criteria that are published are, by the withholding argument's own logic, equally gameable. The reader is repeatedly told the answer exists and shown a version the same reasoning says is compromised. A second tension sits inside the list, between question four's reward for eloquent performance and question nine's description of someone unmoved by challenge.
Scope limit: these are criteria for whether somebody is enlightened in the first place, and the staged ladder they sit inside is called conventional by the source's own footnote 518.5 Open questions. Has anyone ever answered yes to all ten, and would the tradition record it if they had? And if a criterion's value depends on nobody optimising for it, does any test of attainment survive publication?
Two ways of using this list produce different practitioners, and the material supports both. Read the ten as a standard and they're crushing — without the slightest lapse, waking or sleeping, the whole canon without fear — and nobody alive answers yes, which makes the honest response either despair or quiet dishonesty. Read them as a diagnostic and they're mild: you walk down the list, find the first no, and now have one specific thing to work on instead of a general sense of insufficiency.
What decides which you get isn't the list. It's whether you're scoring or locating. And the surrounding material leans hard toward locating, because everything around the questions is about refusing to be flattered — the mocked student, the shouted-away lights, the treasure not worth a penny.6 A test written by someone who thought the highest truth was absolutely ordinary is unlikely to have been meant as a scoreboard.
Behavioral mechanics — Signal Mimicry as an Arms Race. That page's territory is the escalating exchange where a legitimate signal gets copied by imitators, forcing the honest signaller to find a costlier or less copyable marker, which then gets copied in turn. The withholding argument is a move in exactly that game, stated in the open — the physical sign can't be revealed because people would use even this information to cheat others.3 What the pairing exposes is a problem the spiritual case has and the commercial case doesn't. In a market the honest party can usually escalate: spend more, build something harder to fake, make the signal expensive in a way only real capacity can afford. Here the honest party can't escalate, because the available signals are either interior and unobservable or exterior and imitable, and there's no costly-to-fake middle. So the options collapse to two — publish a criterion that will be optimised for, or withhold one that therefore verifies nobody. And the insight neither side gives alone is that where the underlying quality has no expensive external correlate, this arms race has no stable resting point at all. Secrecy isn't a winning move, it's a forfeit, because a secret criterion and a broken one are operationally identical to everyone who needed the test. Which is why Yen-shou's decision to publish anyway looks less like carelessness and more like the only available choice.
Sharpest implication. Not one of the ten asks what you've experienced. They ask what hasn't lapsed, what can't move you, and what you can meet without fear. The tradition's own oldest criterion for enlightenment treats the entire catalogue of spiritual experience — the lights, the sounds, the visions, the whole of what a practitioner watches for — as irrelevant to the question. Which is the same verdict the man in the temple reached on his own, at speed, by shouting at it.
Generative questions.