Most people who think about this at all think there is one job: stop believing you are a self.
Bodri's scheme says that is the first of two, and that finishing it puts you a long way up a ladder you are only halfway along.
In cultivation we try to purify this net by first purifying the sixth consciousness, next the seventh consciousness, and then finally the base of consciousness itself. First we strive to realize the selflessness of the person and see the Tao, and then we strive to cultivate the Tao and prove the selflessness of phenomena.1
Selflessness of the person — you are not a thing. Selflessness of phenomena — neither is anything else.
The second is not a repeat of the first with a wider scope. It is a different discovery about a different class of object, it comes later, it is harder, and the tradition has a mildly insulting name for people who stop after the first one.
The selflessness of the person is what seeing the Tao consists of, and Bodri is careful about what it does and does not amount to.
The fear it triggers is addressed first, because it stops people before they start:
Buddha always said that most people are actually afraid of emptiness due to lack of familiarity with the state, and so they worry that when they get rid of this illusion they'll simply disappear. Nothing could be further from the truth… All that will happen is that a troublesome set of false notions will disintegrate.1
And what you get is functional rather than blissful: you'll actually become more effective in whatever you set out to do because you'll master awareness without distraction.1
But the reach is limited by construction. On this scheme the personal selflessness is a seventh-consciousness attainment — it removes the ego-reference around which thoughts organise, and it removes nothing else. The world you are no longer at the centre of is still, as far as your experience is concerned, a world of solid separate things.
The second selflessness is defined by a specific identification, and it is the Buddha's own on Bodri's telling:
What's the emptiness or selflessness of phenomena? Buddha, upon his enlightenment, awakened to the unity or equivalence of emptiness and interdependent origination. When you understand the emptiness of co-dependent arising, that is realizing the selflessness of phenomena.1
That is a compact and unusually precise claim. Things are empty because they arise dependently — nothing has a nature of its own because everything's character is borrowed from what it depends on. Emptiness and dependent origination are not two facts that happen to co-occur; they are one fact under two descriptions.
What it delivers, when it lands, is stated at the earlier presentation and it is the largest claim in the chapter:
You have to discover, through experience rather than through words or intellectual insight, that both emptiness and conventional existence are in a state of nirvāṇa and that there is no difference in entity between subject and object. Objects, meaning phenomena, are like our imagined ego completely empty of an independent self-nature, and so they also share the same ground nature as the self.2
No difference in entity between subject and object. The first selflessness dissolves one side of that pair. The second dissolves the distinction.
The reason the second is harder is not that phenomena are more numerous. It is that the first attainment gives you nothing to work with on the second.
Realising you are not a thing is available from the inside — the ego-reference is something you can catch operating. Realising a chair is not a thing is not available the same way, because your access to the chair is the sensory apparatus that the awakening left untransformed. Bodri makes this structural point elsewhere and it is what makes the ordering non-negotiable.
What the second buys is stated through the Laṅkāvatāra:
"While most people are transformed by things, a Bodhisattva is able to transform things. A person who can transform things is the same as a Bodhisattva."2
And Bodri's gloss on the mechanism: to the enlightened individual, phenomena and the self are the same on a functional, experiential level. Because of his being able to identify with the substrate of all things, he becomes capable of modifying forms or projecting new ones.3
So the second selflessness is where the book locates the real capacities, and it locates them by a route that does not require any special faculty. If subject and object share a substrate, then operating on objects is not action at a distance. That is the argument, and whatever you make of the conclusion, the structure of it is clean.
Before either of the two, Bodri inserts a third distinction that people reliably collapse, and it is worth pulling out because it is the most practically checkable thing on the page:
Emptying the view of the body, however, is a different feat than emptying the self. To empty the view of the body you can cultivate emptiness or cultivate the body, and these both mean chi and mai cultivation. How do you empty the view of the self? You have to abandon thoughts, and if you still entertain the act of clinging to thoughts then it means that your chi mai aren't yet open.4
Two different feats, two different methods, and one of them has a physical prerequisite. He then states the purpose of the entire body apparatus in a single sentence that reframes two chapters of technique: you cultivate your body to free yourself from the view of the body, which is "emptying the body."4
The body work exists to make the body droppable. Not to perfect it, not to power it — to get it out of the way so that the thought-abandoning can proceed. Which is a much smaller and more coherent claim than the one the form schools are usually understood to be making.
You have got somewhere with the first one. There are stretches — sometimes long ones — where there is simply nobody in here objecting to things, and it is not a state you are producing. Then you notice that the room, the deadline, the other person's face are all as solid as they ever were, and that you have quietly assumed the solidity would go too. On this account it doesn't and it wasn't going to. The first selflessness is about the subject. Nothing about it touches the object, and expecting it to is the specific disappointment this distinction exists to prevent.
Now the second one, and the honest version of what practising it looks like. You cannot get at the emptiness of the chair by staring at the chair. What Bodri points to instead is the dependency — the chair's hardness is a fact about your hand, its shape a fact about a body that sits, its being-a-chair a fact about a culture that sits in chairs. Follow any property to what it borrows from and it goes. This is the same return test as the discarding practice, run outward instead of inward.
And the check that keeps it from becoming a mood. If the second selflessness were landing, the mark would not be a feeling of oneness — the book is explicit that the oneness experience is a form-skandha event and belongs much lower down. The mark is functional: things stop transforming you before you transform them. That is a slow, unspectacular, externally visible criterion, and it is the only one offered.
The sharpest consequence of the two-selflessness scheme is a piece of comparative ranking that Bodri states without hedging, and it is worth laying out exactly.
The Arhats, he says, have emptied the view of the self, which is a very high stage of spiritual liberation we should all hope for — but because their nirvāṇa has a remainder in that it's only seeing the emptiness of the ego without extending to the emptiness of phenomena, the Zen school calls them "one-sided and half-baked."4
Then:
The Arhats receive this derogatory term, despite their extremely high stage of attainment, because they only see one-half of the total picture of cultivation… It's only the stage which Christianity terms "true selflessness" or "becoming one with God," which Islam calls "seeing God's face," and which Hasidism calls "dissolving the separate ego in nothingness." Thus only when you can empty the views of both self and phenomena can you achieve full Buddhahood, and the Arhats are called Arhats, rather than Bodhisattvas, because they stop at this halfway point.5
Read what that sentence does. Union with God, seeing God's face, and the Hasidic dissolution of the ego in nothingness — the terminal attainments of three traditions, the thing their entire literatures are organised toward — are all placed at the first of two selflessnesses, and given a Zen epithet meaning half-baked.
Three things are worth separating here.
The mapping is doing real work, not rhetorical work. Bodri is not asserting that Abrahamic mysticism is inferior by fiat. He is applying a two-term criterion and observing that the Abrahamic formulations he quotes describe the dissolution of the ego and do not describe the dissolution of phenomena. That is a checkable claim about the vocabulary, and on the vocabulary he cites, it holds.
And it is exactly the move the book elsewhere forbids. The comparative method Bodri sets out earlier requires that a tradition's terms be read as that tradition uses them, and warns that identical metaphors can name different attainments. Here he reads union with God through a Buddhist partition, decides which half of the partition it occupies, and grades it — using a criterion no Abrahamic source accepts as a criterion.
The demotion also lands on the Arhats, which is the tell. He is not singling out other religions; he applies the same epithet to the highest attainment of a Buddhist school. That consistency is a point in his favour and it is also what makes the ranking so severe: there is no tradition in his comparison whose own summit he accepts as a summit.
The page is called the two selflessnesses. The book prints a third, twice, in two different places, and never integrates it.
At p 49, at the end of his own sequence:
First comes experiential realization of the emptiness of the self, next the experiential realization or mastery of the emptiness of phenomena (dharmas), and finally the realization of the ultimate emptiness of emptiness and your total mastery of this through endless compassionate actions.3
At p 454–455, inside the Forman passage he quotes to establish the two:
The first of these cognitive insights involves learning to see one's own person as without "self" (pudgala-nairātmya); the second extends this insight to the absence of enduring substantive existence even in the events, mental and physical, which seem to comprise one's person (dharmanairātmya); and the third involves learning to see all existents as without "self," without anything that definitively and eternally marks them off from other things.6
Note that these are not the same third. Bodri's third is emptiness of emptiness. Forman's third is the extension of dharma-selflessness from the constituents of a person to all existents — which means Forman's second is narrower than Bodri's second, and the quoted passage does not actually support the two-term scheme it is cited to establish.
So the source Bodri quotes to define the two selflessnesses divides the territory into three, along a different cut, and he prints it whole without comment. And his own earlier sequence had three as well, along yet another cut.
Three passages, three partitions, one label. The doctrine of the two selflessnesses is stated as settled and is not settled in the book's own quotations of it.
Strongest support. The identification of emptiness with dependent origination is the sturdiest element and it is doing real explanatory work rather than asserting a state.1 It says why phenomena are empty — nothing has a nature of its own because every property is borrowed — and that argument can be examined on its own terms without any commitment to the attainment it is supposed to produce.
The tension the source does not close. The scheme is called two and the book prints three twice, along two different cuts, one of them inside the very quotation used to establish the two.3 6 Unremarked in both places.
A second tension. The comparative demotion of the Abrahamic summits to the first selflessness5 applies a Buddhist partition as a neutral ruler, which is the operation the book's own comparative method warns against. The consistency of also demoting the Arhats mitigates the charge of partiality but not the charge of circularity.
A third, on the Forman dependency. Three consecutive footnotes on pp 454–455 — the two-selflessness passage, the Kabbalist something from nothing, and the movement/non-movement line — are all Robert K. C. Forman's The Problem of Pure Consciousness.6 This is a heavy instance of the standing Forman dependency the build records at [n≥3]: a large share of the book's non-Asian mystical citations arrive through one 1990 anthology.
A fourth, and it is a conversion hazard rather than a tension. The p 576 passage is inside the build's flagged interleaving zone. A Socrates attribution on that page is split across a page break — the sentence body appears before the orphaned marker "As Socrates also" — and the Padmasambhava quotation adjacent to it is footnoted separately.4 Attribution on that page must be taken from the footnote numbers, not from proximity.
And the standing scope limit. Both selflessnesses are attainments within an apparatus footnote 518 calls false stages, with three real jobs named — rest stops, verifications, motivational assists.7 Which bears on the comparative ranking directly: a partition internal to a conventional scheme is being used to grade the terminal claims of three other traditions.
Open questions. If Forman's third insight extends dharma-selflessness from the constituents of a person to all existents, is Bodri's "selflessness of phenomena" the narrower or the wider one — and does the difference change where the Arhats sit? And the second selflessness is said to deliver the capacity to transform things: is there any account of that capacity being exercised that is not also an account of a power the book elsewhere disqualifies as evidence?
Read with Cause Side and Effect Side, the two pages give the same division in two vocabularies and the fit is exact. Personal selflessness is a causal-ground attainment — sixth and seventh, cheap, private. Phenomenal selflessness requires the ālaya, which encompasses the whole material world, and is therefore effect-side. The two selflessnesses are the cause–effect split named by what each one empties, and neither page says so.
Against The Oneness Experience Is a Form-Skandha Event, this page supplies the contrast that makes that demotion intelligible. Oneness is a form-skandha event near the bottom of the ladder; the genuine article — no difference in entity between subject and object — is at the far end of the second selflessness. Same-sounding report, opposite ends of the scheme, which is exactly the identical-metaphor problem the book warns about, here operating inside the book's own material.
With Cessation Tops Out at the First Dhyāna, the two pages describe the same species of ceiling by different measurements. There, a technique reaches its limit and no amount of it goes further. Here, a task is completed and a second one is never started. Both produce a practitioner who is genuinely finished and genuinely halfway, which is why the Zen epithet for the Arhats is one-sided rather than incomplete — incompleteness implies more of the same was available, and on both pages it wasn't.
Against Method Accepted, Result Rejected, the Abrahamic demotion is that method at its most exposed. That page's finding is that Bodri decodes rival vocabularies into his own scheme and the practice always survives the decoding while the mystique does not. Here the practice survives — union with God is a real attainment, he says so — and what does not survive is its rank. Translation without refutation still relocates, and relocation to the halfway point of someone else's partition is not a neutral operation, however carefully the refutation is avoided.
The projection has to come home before the world can be seen — Projection and Withdrawal of the Self. Kalsched's account, via Edinger, is that the Self — the numinous organising centre — is first projected onto an external object, typically the analyst or a teacher or a beloved, and is only recovered when that relationship ruptures and the projection floods back to be met within. The crucial structural detail is the ordering: you cannot see the object accurately while it is carrying your centre, because what you are looking at is your own numinosity wearing someone else's face. Set that beside the two selflessnesses and the ordering constraint turns out to be the same one, running in the opposite direction. Bodri's sequence says you must empty the self before you can empty phenomena. The depth-psychological sequence says you must withdraw the projection from phenomena before you can locate the self. Two fields, one dependency, described from opposite ends — and the disagreement about direction is what makes the pairing worth having. What resolves it is a distinction neither source draws: Bodri is emptying the subject pole, and Edinger is emptying the object pole, and both are describing the collapse of the same bifurcation from whichever side their tradition happens to stand on. Bodri names the target explicitly — the two-fold hindrance of consciousness bifurcating into subject and object — and the depth-psychological account is a report of the same bifurcation being dismantled from the object end, one idealisation at a time. Which yields something practically useful and available in neither field alone: the two operations should be substitutable, and they should show the same characteristic failure. Stop halfway on the subject side and you get the Arhat — self dissolved, world still solid, one-sided and half-baked. Stop halfway on the object side and you get the analysand who has withdrawn the projection from the analyst and reinstalled it on the next person, having emptied one object and left the mechanism intact. In both cases the diagnostic is the same: the pole you worked on looks finished and the other pole looks untouched, and the person will report completion because the half they can see is genuinely done.
One handshake. A second — that a tradition's summit can be another's midpoint — is the comparative-grid page's argument in this same hub and would be restatement here.
Sharpest implication. Emptying the subject and emptying the object are the same operation approached from opposite poles, which means the terminal attainment of any tradition that only works one pole will be, by construction, half of something — and the practitioner will report completion honestly, because the half they had access to is genuinely finished.
Generative questions.