Count the threes.
Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva. The Three Pure Ones. Sat, Chit, Ānanda. Dharmakāya, saṃbhogakāya, nirmāṇakāya.
Once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it, and the noticing has driven a whole genre of comparative religion for two centuries. Bodri notices it too, and he does something more specific than most: he says he knows what the three slots are for.
There are many ways to describe the process and path of spiritual enlightenment, including a popular doctrine in most religions that we haven't yet dealt with — that the realm of enlightenment can be represented as a trinity of three aspects. In essence these three are all the same thing just as steam and ice are the same basic substance of water, but merely differ due to appearances.1
Hold on to the ice, because it will turn out to be the most consequential sentence on the page.
The three slots are named from Chinese Buddhist philosophy, and this is the part of the argument that is genuinely well-founded:
In philosophy, the trinity of dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya are the called Fundamental Essence, Manifest Appearance and Great Functioning (known in Chinese as ti, xiang and yung). In other words dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya are equated with essence, appearance and function.2
Ti–xiang–yung is real, standard, and load-bearing across Chinese Buddhist and Neo-Confucian thought. It is a genuine analytical triad: what a thing is, how it shows up, what it does.
And it is a good set of slots — abstract enough to be applied widely, specific enough to make claims. Which is exactly why what happens next is worth watching carefully. A powerful analytical grid, applied fast, to five traditions in a single paragraph.
In Buddhism these three aspects of the Tao are the dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya. In Taoism they are the Three Pure Ones, which we'll discuss later. In Hinduism they are the Brahman-Shiva-Vishnu triumvirate which has other equivalencies as well. In Christianity these three aspects of the Godhead are called the Trinity of the Father, Holy Ghost and Son which Saint Augustine designated as Being, Life and Wisdom.3
Then, a paragraph later, a second Hindu triad:
Hinduism has another triumvirate of Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being, Consciousness, Bliss) which corresponds to the Father (being), the Son who knows the Father (consciousness), and the relationship or Spirit between the two (bliss). And so on it goes throughout all the world's religions.2
And the Taoist scriptural warrant, from the Dao De Jing:
Tao produced the One / The One produced the two, / The two produced the three, / And from three was produced the ten thousand [infinite] other things.2
And so on it goes. That phrase is where the argument stops being an argument and becomes a gesture.
Between the two mapping passages sits the sharpest material in the section, and it is not comparative at all — it is a polemic:
Jesus Christ always referred to the underlying true absolute nature of reality as "the Father" but people, as in popular Hinduism, always mistakenly personalize this image into a being rather than remembering the commandment not to make any image of the divine. Everywhere people are told not to make any image of God in their minds, and forbidden to worship any such images, but they always make this mistake. As Meister Eckhart said, this formation of a personal God is a terrible mistake, but that's what people of low prajna wisdom always insist upon.4
And the Eckhart passage he is leaning on:
(These) people want to see God with their own eyes as they see a cow, and they want to love God as they love a cow. You love a cow for her milk and her cheese and your own profit. That is what all those men do who love God for outward wealth or inward consolation — and they do not truly love God, they love their own profit.5
The cow is doing real work. It isn't a complaint about idolatry in the crude sense; it's a claim about the structure of the relation — that a God loved for what he yields has been placed in the position of a thing that yields, and that this is what personalisation always eventually means.
Two things about the polemic are worth separating.
The Eckhart material is genuine and it is being used correctly. Eckhart really does say this, it really is a Christian mystic attacking the personal God from inside Christianity, and it is a legitimate strand of that tradition.
The claim about Jesus is not argued at all. Jesus Christ always referred to the underlying true absolute nature of reality as "the Father" is an interpretive assertion about the intent of the Gospels, delivered in a subordinate clause, with no citation and no acknowledgement that the overwhelming majority of readers in that tradition have understood the word to name a person. It is the same species of move as the shahāda retranslation elsewhere in the book: a mystical reading available inside the tradition promoted to what the founder meant, and the tradition's plain sense demoted to an error made by people of low prajñā wisdom.
Now back to the steam and the ice, because the analogy is not innocent.
These three are all the same thing just as steam and ice are the same basic substance of water, but merely differ due to appearances.
Applied to the Buddhist three bodies, that is roughly right and uncontroversial — the three kāyas are aspects of one awakened nature, and Bodri's own text says so repeatedly.
Applied to the Christian Trinity, it is the single analogy that tradition spent its formative centuries ruling out. Three states of one substance differing in appearance is modalism — the position that Father, Son and Spirit are modes God adopts rather than distinct persons subsisting eternally. Nicaea and everything downstream of it exists in large part to say no to exactly that picture. Whether one thinks that was the right call is beside the point; the analogy does not describe the doctrine it is being used to explain, and the reader is not told.
The same flattening runs through the other mappings. Ti–xiang–yung is a triad of aspects of one thing. Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva are, in most of the traditions that use them, agents with biographies, consorts, cults and mutual relations. The Three Pure Ones are venerated beings. Father, Son and Spirit are persons in relation.
Bodri's grid can only receive them as aspects, because that is the only shape the grid has. So every tradition entering it is converted into a Chinese Buddhist analysis of essence, appearance and function at the door — and the resulting convergence is partly a fact about the traditions and partly a fact about the shape of the container.
The scriptural warrant offered for the Taoist side of the mapping is four lines from the Dao De Jing:
Tao produced the One / The One produced the two, / The two produced the three, / And from three was produced the ten thousand [infinite] other things.2
Read it once and it looks like confirmation: there's the three, in the oldest Taoist text, right where a trinity should be.
Read it twice and it is saying something structurally different.
This is not a triad of aspects. It is a sequence of production — one thing generating the next in a chain, and the chain does not stop at three. Three is a stage, and its role in the verse is to be the point from which multiplicity begins. The ten thousand things are the destination; three is a waypoint on a ladder that continues past it.
Compare what the passage needs it to mean. Ti–xiang–yung is three simultaneous aspects of one thing, none prior to the others, none producing the others, and nothing further downstream. The verse describes emanation; the grid describes composition. They are different shapes of three.
Worth being fair about what this does and does not show. It does not show that Taoism has no triadic doctrine — the Three Pure Ones are a real triad and Bodri names them, though he defers discussing them to a later chapter.3 What it shows is that the citation offered here does not support the claim it is attached to, and that a reader who does not already know the verse will take it as confirmation because it contains the right number.
And that is the smallest possible instance of this section's whole problem. A numeral is not a structure. Every one of the mapped traditions supplies three of something; the question the paragraph never asks is whether any two of them are three of the same kind of thing.
You're reading a comparative book — this one, or any of the hundreds like it — and it lays two traditions side by side and the fit is uncanny. Three there, three here, and the slots line up.
The feeling that arrives is recognition, and it's pleasurable, and it is the thing to be careful with.
Try one question before you accept it: what shape is the grid? Not are the two things similar — of course they are, you've just been shown a similarity. Ask what the comparison's own vocabulary is, and whether one of the two traditions supplied it.
Here it did. The slots are ti, xiang and yung, and one of the five traditions being compared is the tradition those words come from. Which means the Buddhist case is not a data point in the comparison; it is the ruler.
Then a second question, which is harder and more useful: what would a member of the other tradition say? Not to defer to them — to find out what the mapping had to remove. If a Christian would say those aren't modes, they're persons, the mapping cost something specific, and you now know what.
Do that twice and something changes in how you read this whole genre. You stop asking whether the correspondences are true and start asking what each one was purchased with. Most of the time the answer is: the other tradition's own account of what it is talking about.
The single word to press on is in the roll call: "the Brahman-Shiva-Vishnu triumvirate."
The standard Hindu triad — the trimūrti — is Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva: creator, preserver, destroyer. Brahman, without the long final vowel, is something else entirely: the impersonal absolute, the ground of being, the term Advaita Vedānta uses for what everything ultimately is.
The two are not variants of one word in any sense that matters. Brahmā is a god with four heads and a cult so minor he has almost no temples. Brahman is what the Upaniṣads say you are.
So which did Bodri mean? Two readings, and the text supports both.
Reading one: it is an error, of a kind extremely common in Western comparative writing, where the two words are routinely confused. The word triumvirate points this way — a triumvirate is three rulers, which is the trimūrti and not the absolute.
Reading two: it is deliberate. His grid puts essence in the first slot, and Brahman is the essence in a way Brahmā is not. Substituting Brahman for Brahmā makes the mapping work far better — dharmakāya to Brahman is a real correspondence, dharmakāya to a four-headed creator god is not.
And here is where it gets interesting rather than merely pedantic. If reading two is right, the mapping was achieved by editing the source tradition's triad. One member has been quietly swapped for a term from a different level of the system, because the original member did not fit the slot. That is not comparison; it is repair.
There's corroborating evidence for the repair reading, and it comes from the second Hindu triad. Bodri also maps Sat-Chit-Ānanda onto Father, Son and Spirit.2 Since Father, Son and Spirit are mapped onto the three bodies, the two mappings compose:
Śiva as consciousness and Viṣṇu as bliss is a result no Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava would accept, and Bodri never states it — but it follows from two mappings he does state, two paragraphs apart. (The composition is this page's own derivation, not the source's claim.) One tradition has been mapped twice onto the same three slots by two different routes, and the routes disagree.
Handling: the Brahman reading is flagged, both interpretations recorded, and neither adopted. [CONTESTED] What can be said at full strength is that the paragraph maps Hinduism onto the trinity twice, incompatibly, inside two hundred words.
Strongest support: the analytical slots are genuine and well-chosen. Ti–xiang–yung is a real, standard, load-bearing triad in Chinese thought, and essence/appearance/function is a defensible way to analyse any account of how an absolute becomes available.2
Second: the Eckhart material is real and correctly deployed. A Christian mystic attacking the personal God from inside Christianity is exactly the witness the argument needs, and it is cited.5
Tension: the grid belongs to one of the traditions being compared. The Buddhist case supplies the vocabulary, so it cannot also serve as independent confirmation that the vocabulary fits.
Tension: the unifying analogy is one the largest mapped tradition explicitly rejects. Steam and ice is modalism, and no note is made.1
Error or edit, unresolved: Brahman for Brahmā.3 [CONTESTED]
Open question. Is there any tradition with a well-developed account of the absolute that cannot be read as a triad of essence, appearance and function? If not, the convergence is a property of the analytical scheme rather than a finding about religions — and the way to test it is to look for a two-term or four-term system and see what the grid does to it. Not attempted in the range read (pp 521–526).
This page sits directly on the fault line that Method Accepted, Result Rejected names. The method's claim is that other traditions are not being refuted but rendered into a common vocabulary. Here you can watch the rendering happen at speed — five traditions in one paragraph — and you can see precisely what it costs: persons become aspects, gods become slots, and one tradition's triad gets a substitution to make it fit.
Set beside Identical Metaphor, Different Attainment, the tension is sharp and the book does not notice it. That page is Bodri's own demolition charge under naive correspondence: the same image, in two traditions, can mark two completely different attainments, so surface matching proves nothing. He built the tool that disqualifies this paragraph, and he built it earlier in the same book. A triad is a surface feature far weaker than a shared metaphor, and the argument here rests entirely on triads matching.
Against Awakening Is One Third of the Task, the relationship is straightforwardly supportive: that page needs the three bodies to be a genuine composition claim rather than three names for one thing, and ti–xiang–yung is what supplies the composition. Which means the analytical grid works well on the tradition it came from and gets progressively weaker the further it travels — a pattern this book displays elsewhere, and its own comparative project cannot afford to state.
The mindset-metaphor finding is that the images a person reaches for are not decoration — they leak the model underneath. Someone who describes a negotiation as a war has told you what they think the other party is, before they say anything about the other party.6
Apply that to steam and ice.
Bodri needed an image for three-in-one and reached for phases of a substance. That image says: one stuff, three appearances, the differences superficial and reversible, no relations between the three, and nothing lost when you move between them. It is a material model of unity.
He could have reached for others. Three musicians in a trio — one music, three real agents, the relations constitutive. A person as parent, employee and friend — one being, three genuine relations, none reducible. Body, speech and mind. Each of those would have carried a different commitment about whether the three are agents or aspects.
The insight the pairing produces: the analogy was doing the argument's work before the argument started. By the time the roll call arrives, three-as-appearances-of-one-substance has already been installed as the shape of the answer, and every tradition entering the paragraph gets fitted to it. The Christian objection — these are persons, not phases — cannot even be raised, because the vocabulary that would raise it was excluded by an image about water two paragraphs earlier. A comparative method's real commitments live in its illustrations, and they are much harder to notice there than in its claims.
Koe's account of creative work is that originality was never the job: you research what others have said, run it through your own worldview, and render it in your voice. Nothing in the source is yours, and the originality lives in the filter, not in the source.7
That is an unusually honest description of what this paragraph of Bodri's actually is, and reading the two together defuses a bad objection while sharpening a better one.
The bad objection: he is just repackaging other people's traditions. The translator frame answers it — that is what synthesis is, and there is nothing illegitimate about rendering five accounts into one vocabulary. The value is in the filter.
The better objection follows immediately from the same frame. If the originality lives in the filter, then the filter is the claim, and it has to be visible as such. A translator who presents their rendering as the original has not done a different job badly; they have done a different job. Bodri's paragraph presents a filtered result — in Hinduism they are, in Christianity these are — in the grammar of report rather than of rendering. The one place the filter surfaces is "which Saint Augustine designated as," and even there the designation is Bodri's selection from Augustine.
What the pairing produces is a practical standard the comparative genre almost never meets: state the grid before the roll call. I am going to read five traditions through essence, appearance and function, which is a Chinese Buddhist scheme, and here is what each one looks like under it. Same content, same insight, no false independence — and the convergence claim would then be correctly sized as a claim about the grid's reach rather than about the traditions' agreement.
Sharpest implication. The convergence is real and it is smaller than it looks, because one of the five traditions supplied the ruler. Any comparative finding has to be discounted by the amount of the comparison that came from inside one of the things being compared — and that discount is almost never computed, in this book or in the genre it belongs to.
Generative questions.
Is essence, appearance, function a discovery about how absolutes work, or a very good general-purpose sieve that any sufficiently developed system will pass? The way to find out is to run it on a tradition that resists it — and the fact that this book never does is itself informative.
And: what happens to a comparative project whose author has already published the argument against naive correspondence? Bodri's identical metaphor, different attainment is a sharper tool than anything in this paragraph. Why does it get switched off exactly where it would bite?