The avadhūta stops mid-discourse to say how many kinds of untroubled people there are.
The answer is two.
"There are two kinds of people who are free from anxiety and are flooded with supreme bliss. There is the dumb and ignorant child and there is the person who has gone beyond the gunas."1
⚑ A small child who does not understand anything, and a man who has passed beyond the qualities that constitute the world. Nobody in between.
Work out who is not on it.
The competent. The devout who are still practising. The learned. The disciplined. The householder running the daily regimen with his cows and his oblations. Everyone doing the work is anxious, by this account, and the work is not what ends it.
⚑ Anxiety is not a moral failing here. It is a property of being in the middle — of knowing enough to have something at stake and not enough to have finished.
And here is the thing to hold onto, because it is easy to read as sentiment about innocence.
It is not. The child on the list is "dumb and ignorant" — the volume's own words, and the same phrase Yadu uses at the top of the discourse to describe the avadhūta himself: "You are like a dumb or crazy person, like a pishacha."
⚑ The two classes are placed together because they look the same from outside, not because one is a version of the other. The child has not yet acquired the problem. The realised man has disposed of it. The volume does not confuse them; it puts them in one sentence because the observable state is identical.
Once you notice, the volume's images for the perfected state are consistently degrading, and it never mitigates one of them.
The drunk — the realised man *"does not notice whether this transient body is standing, or is seated… This is like a person intoxicated with liquor not noticing whether he is wearing clothes or not."*2
The madman — "though learned, he should speak like a mad person."2
The piśāca — a ghoul, in Yadu's opening description of the avadhūta.
The dumb child — here.
⚑ Four images for the highest state: drunk, mad, ghoul, imbecile. ⚠ Not one is softened, qualified, or paired with a dignified alternative.
And that is not a stylistic observation. It is the reason the corpus needs a piece of machinery it installs elsewhere.
At 10(33) the volume states plainly that "someone who is not a lord should never act in this way, not even in his mind", and gives the operative rule: act on their words, not their deeds.
⚑ A tradition whose only vocabulary for realisation is incapacity has to forbid imitation, because the outward form of realisation and the outward form of dereliction are indistinguishable. Drunk looks like drunk. A man who does not notice whether he is dressed looks like a man who does not notice whether he is dressed.
⚠ The volume does not connect the two passages. The clause is at 10(33) and the images are in the Eleventh Skandha, and the link is this page's reading — offered because the alternative is to treat four degrading comparisons as unrelated decoration.
And the volume never issues the instruction the list seems to invite.
It does not say: be like the child. The avadhūta says "Like a child, I thus roam around this world" — a description of his own condition, arrived at from the far side — and the child is named as an anxiety-free class, not as a method.
⚑ The two classes are an observation about who is untroubled, not a menu. One of them is unreachable because you cannot un-know what you know; the other is reachable only by finishing.
⚠ Which is the difference between this and the sentimental reading. A tradition that told practitioners to recover childlike simplicity would be prescribing the first class. This one describes it, puts an adult on the same line for entirely different reasons, and gives the practitioner no route to either except the thirty chapters of instruction that follow.
You are anxious and you are told the cure is to finish, not to try harder. That is either the most useful thing anyone has said to you or the least actionable, and it is probably both.
Somebody untroubled is in front of you. Before you envy them, work out which of the two classes they are in, because the observable evidence does not distinguish them.
A state that can only be described by what its holder fails to notice cannot be checked from outside. Neither can it be faked usefully, which is the one comfort in it.
When a tradition tells you to do what the teacher says and not what the teacher does, ask what the teacher does that would be catastrophic to copy.
The volume has other options and does not take them.
It could describe realisation by capacity — the eighteen siddhis are listed in full at 11(15), and then declined twice, once as "a waste of time" and once as vanity.
It could describe it by conduct, and at 11(2) it does exactly that for devotees, grading them by how they treat other people.
It could describe it by feeling, and the bhakti physiology at 11(14) supplies the trembling, the choked voice, the hair standing up.
⚑ But when it describes the state at the top — beyond the guṇas — it reaches for absence every time. Not noticing the body. Not noticing a king. Not noticing whether you are dressed. Not knowing honour from dishonour.
⚠ Which is coherent and expensive. A doctrine of absence cannot be taught by example, cannot be verified, and cannot be distinguished from its counterfeits or from ordinary failure. The volume accepts all three costs and does not discuss them.
The strongest support is the pairing itself. Putting an ignorant child in the same sentence as the guṇa-transcendent is a deliberate act, and the volume uses the same vocabulary — dumb — for the avadhūta and for the child.
The tension, preserved. ⚑ Everyone in the middle is anxious, including every practitioner the Eleventh Skandha addresses across thirty chapters of instruction. The text never says the practice reduces anxiety en route, and never says it does not.
A second tension. The four degrading images and the volume's own grading of devotees by conduct at 11(2) do not fit together. ⚠ A man who cannot tell whether he is dressed cannot be graded on how he treats other people, and both are the volume's criteria.
Open question. The child is on the list without having done anything. Does the corpus anywhere say what happens to that child — whether the condition survives acquiring the guṇas? Not found in the range read.
Set against The Arrow-Maker Who Did Not Notice the King, the two pages are the same diagnostic from opposite ends. That one measures attainment by the size of what got past; this one names the two classes it gets past. ⚑ And both share the failure mode: absorption, obliviousness and incapacity are observationally identical.
Against What Lords May Do, this page supplies a reason for that page's clause that the volume never states. ⚑ The non-imitation rule is usually read as protecting the erotic material. The realisation-images suggest it is also protecting against people copying incapacity.
Against She Had a Bad Night at Work, Piṅgalā ends the night by sleeping well — which is the one concrete instance in the discourse of anxiety actually ending, and she is neither a child nor beyond the guṇas. ⚠ The two-class list has no slot for her, and the volume does not notice.
Against He Promised to Explain All Twenty-Four and Explained Twenty-One, the child is one of the twenty-one delivered, in a clause — and its brevity, against Piṅgalā's song, is that page's finding.
Appearing Less Intelligent Than Your Mark — deliberately presenting as slower, simpler or less capable than you are, because a target who feels superior relaxes their guard and volunteers what they would otherwise protect.
The volume's four images are that presentation without the tactic. Drunk, mad, ghoul, dumb child is precisely the posture the strategic literature recommends assuming — and here it is not assumed. It is reported as the actual state.
⚑ What neither field gives alone: the tactic depends on the appearance being false, and the doctrine depends on it being true — and nobody watching can tell. The operator playing dim and the man beyond the guṇas present identically. Which means the tradition's highest state is permanently indistinguishable from its most common manipulation, and from ordinary incapacity as well.
That is the situation the non-imitation clause exists inside. ⚠ Act on their words, not their deeds is exactly what you would tell a follower who cannot verify which of the three he is looking at. The rule does not resolve the ambiguity; it routes around it — and this volume, which sends delegated sceptics to audit implausible reports and prints the protocols, has no protocol at all for this one.
⚠ A second handshake was considered and cut. The absorption material is a genuine neighbour but is carried in full on the arrow-maker's page; a second connection here would restate it.
Sharpest implication. The volume names exactly two anxiety-free classes — the dumb and ignorant child, and the man beyond the guṇas — which leaves every practitioner it spends thirty chapters instructing on the anxious side of the line. And its four images for the higher of the two are drunk, mad, ghoul and imbecile, none of them softened. A tradition whose only vocabulary for realisation is incapacity cannot let anyone copy it, which is what the non-imitation clause is for.
Generative questions.