Somewhere, a body of people meets. Files are read. Testimony is weighed. Procedures are followed, carefully, by serious people. At the end of it a name is added to a list, and from that day the person on the list is a saint.
The reaction to this is one word, unsoftened:
It's laughable that some one individual or council of individuals can claim they elect someone into being a saint, for having attained the dhyana and samadhi is the only determinant for this status and you cannot elect someone into having achieved these absorptions.1
None of this is about the committee's competence or its motives. It is about category. Sainthood, on his account, names a fact — a person either reached certain states or did not, in the same way a person either can or cannot swim. Facts of that kind are not the sort of thing a vote can settle. You can vote on whether to recognise one, and recognition can be right or wrong, but the voting does not make it so.
And once you see it in that form, the objection is not anti-clerical. It is the same objection you would make to a committee electing someone into having a doctorate.
The positive claim is stated much earlier and it is the one that makes the demolition possible.
The various religions of the world always identify certain individuals as saints and sages or prophets within their tradition, but people fail to recognize the crucial fact that these individuals earned these titles because they undertook the task of personal cultivation and succeeded in achieving one or another various stages of samadhi attainment.2
Earned. And earned by one specific thing — not by martyrdom, not by office, not by the good they did.
He then applies it across the board: the saints of Christianity, the prophets of Judaism, the sages of Taoism and Confucianism, the arhats and bodhisattvas of Buddhism.2 One qualification, many local words for the person who has it. And the corollary, which is the harsh half: without the attainment they were no different than ordinary men, and not saints or sages at all.2
Then the sentence that turns the general claim into a specific and quite startling reading of a Christian doctrine:
The "communion of saints" in Christianity is simply a collection of those individuals, within the Christian tradition, whom the Catholic Church deems as having achieved samadhi attainments.2
Notice the two things happening at once. He is being generous — the Church, on this reading, is not making things up; it is identifying real contemplative attainment, in its own vocabulary, and mostly getting it right. And he is being reductive, because the communion of saints as the tradition holds it is not a register of meditative achievement, and describing it as one deletes almost everything the doctrine is about. This is the book's characteristic move in miniature: the practice survives the translation, the meaning does not. Whether that is decoding or flattening is the live question, and it is worth noting that a Catholic reader would recognise almost nothing of the doctrine in the sentence.
It would be easy to read this as an objection to grading people spiritually at all. It is the opposite, and the context makes that unmistakable. The election passage sits at the head of a section summarising the nine samādhi, introduced as yet another way to measure your stage of spiritual achievement.1 He is not demolishing the ruler. He is handing you one — a nine-point scale, offered alongside the bodhisattva bhūmis he has just finished enumerating with a named characteristic for each level.
So the complaint is narrow and it is about authority, not about measurement. Grading is legitimate; there are several schemes for it; they can be cross-referenced. What no committee can do is assign a position on one. That leaves an awkward position sitting open, and it stays open.
He supplies a detailed instrument for locating people on a scale. He denies any institution the standing to use it on anyone. He denies the practitioner reliable standing to use it on themselves — self-assessment is exactly what the book warns about at length. And elsewhere in the same volume he uses it on named historical figures, at a distance of centuries, on the basis of written reports.
Which is the same evidence base a canonisation tribunal works from, applied by one person without an adversary. The objection to election isn't that the evidence is thin — the evidence here is thinner. It is that a vote cannot make a fact obtain. That distinction holds. But it does not license the ranking he does elsewhere, and the passage reads as though he thinks it does.
Separate the argument into its parts, because they fail differently and the second is worse.
The competence problem. A committee is being asked whether a person, often long dead, reached an interior state. There is no direct evidence of interior states. There is testimony, documented conduct, and reported phenomena — and the last is the one the procedure has historically leaned on hardest, precisely because it is the only part that produces records.
The category problem. Even a committee with perfect evidence would only be recognising. Election is not the kind of act that can make the fact obtain. The phrasing is careful — elect someone into having achieved these absorptions — and the absurdity is in the grammar rather than in the institution.
The category problem is the deeper one, and it is also the more interesting, because it applies to every certifying body in every field where the underlying quality is not directly observable. The committee's real function is not to determine the fact. It is to produce a public answer where the fact is unavailable — and a public answer is genuinely useful, which is why such bodies exist and why they do not go away when someone points this out.
Then, having built sainthood on samādhi, he immediately deflates samādhi — in the same paragraph, without a pause:
Even if you can attain all the samadhi concentrations, you can't call that Tao either! The ability to cultivate samadhi is just being able to play with different stations of consciousness.1
And the authority for it is the same figure the tradition would use to establish the states in the first place. The Buddha to Ānanda, in the Śūraṅgama material: "Even if you achieve all nine samadhi at this very moment, you still will not end defilements or achieve the fruits of the Arhats."1 All nine. Still not an arhat.
So the structure of the page is a double demolition, and the second charge goes off under the first. The committee cannot certify the attainment — and the attainment it cannot certify would not be enlightenment even if certified. Without seeing your self-nature, he says, you are just playing with mental gong-fu.1
Which raises the obvious question and he does not answer it. If samādhi is the only determinant of sainthood, and samādhi is not the Tao, then sainthood is a rank in an intermediate ladder rather than a description of arrival. The word carries a finality that the criterion behind it does not support — and that is true in his system, not only in the ones he is criticising.
You meet someone whose group treats them as realised. The instruction isn't to disbelieve. It's to ask where the recognition came from. If the answer is an appointment, a lineage position, a title conferred by a body, you have learned something about the institution and nothing yet about the person. If the answer is a capability people can point at, you have something to look at.
Then run the check on the pointing. What are they pointing at — a state the person reports, or something observable? The whole argument turns on attainment being a fact rather than a status, and facts have symptoms. Ask what changed that someone other than the person could have noticed.
Now the version that costs you something. You have had experiences in practice that you would describe as deep, and somewhere in you they have been quietly converted into a claim about what kind of person you are. Watch that conversion. It is exactly the move the committee makes, run privately, with a sample size of one and no devil's advocate. The counter is the Śūraṅgama line, which is unusually well aimed for this: all nine, and still not an arhat.
And the last one, which is where the page stops being polemic. When you find yourself dismissing someone's tradition because the certification is procedural, remember there's a real problem underneath the procedure — people need to know who to learn from, and there is no direct test. The committee can't do it, and nothing is offered in its place. That gap isn't small.
The strongest evidence here comes from inside the institution being criticised, and it's quoted rather than argued. In the eighteenth century the Roman Catholic Church investigated what would now be called parapsychological phenomena. The work was done by Prospero Lambertini, later Pope Benedict XIV, in the role of devil's advocate — the office whose duty was to bring forward every piece of evidence against the case for canonising the person under investigation.3
His conclusion, quoted here through Boyce Bennett:
Not only saints, but "fools, idiots, melancholy persons, and brute beasts" can have experiences that bring them knowledge of events past, present and future, things distant in space, and things known only to one person. In other words, extrasensory knowledge is not intrinsically related to sanctity or to an evil life or, for that matter, to sanity or to insanity.3
Sit with what that is. The man charged by the Church with stress-testing sainthood claims concluded that the class of evidence most commonly offered — knowledge that could not have been obtained ordinarily — does not discriminate. It shows up in the holy, the wicked, the sane and the mad alike. Three things follow, and they don't all point the same way.
It is the best possible witness. This is not an outsider's critique. It is the institution's own adversarial process reaching the conclusion, and reaching it in the eighteenth century rather than under modern pressure. Whatever else is true, the Church was not naïve about this and had a formal role designed to catch it.
It supports the position and undercuts the method. The finding is that psychic phenomena tell you nothing about spiritual standing — which is said forcefully all through the book. But he also treats gong-fu — demonstrable, observable results — as the currency in which traditions should be compared. Lambertini's conclusion is that at least one large class of demonstrable result is worthless as evidence of attainment, which narrows the currency considerably and Bodri does not say by how much.
And it cuts against the page's own framing. If the Church's own procedure contained an office dedicated to exactly this scepticism, then laughable is not the right word for the procedure. What the case actually shows is a certifying body that knew its evidence was weak, built an adversarial role to say so, and canonised people anyway — which is a more interesting failure than credulity, and a much more familiar one.
The last move in the passage is the one that stops the whole thing being merely destructive, and it arrives without warning.
Having said the grades of attainment are the only real determinant of sainthood, the chapter turns around and says the grades do not exist:
From the standpoint of the original nature they don't exist at all because they are merely empty names and labels without any true reality (as is everything else).1
And then, because he can hear how that sounds, the qualification:
That doesn't mean they don't exist on a conventional level as do trees, sunshine or even chocolate.1
Chocolate is not an idle choice there. It is a deliberately unspiritual example, and it makes the two-truths point in a way that no amount of technical vocabulary would: the labels are empty in exactly the way everything is empty, which means the emptiness is not a special defect of spiritual rankings. Trees have the same status. So does chocolate. So does the person reading.
He carries it to the conclusion the doctrine requires: when you achieve the Tao, the first Bodhisattva bhūmi is the same as the seventh, or the fifth is the same as the third.1 The ladder is real from where you are standing on it and vanishes from the top. Which puts the committee in a slightly different light than laughable. If the ranks are conventional designations, then a conventional body issuing conventional recognitions of them is not making a category error at all — it is operating at exactly the level where the categories live. The two-truths move partly rescues the practice the chapter opened by mocking, and that never gets said.
Strongest support. The Lambertini case, because it is the target institution's own adversarial finding, arrived at independently and centuries before this argument.3 Everything else on the page is an inference; that is a document.
The tension the source does not close. Sainthood is defined by samādhi attainment, and samādhi attainment is declared not to be the Tao, in consecutive sentences.1 Either the word saint names an intermediate rank — which no tradition using it intends — or the definition is wrong. He does not choose.
A second tension, and it is with the page's own opening. Election is called laughable because attainment is a fact and facts cannot be voted on. Two paragraphs later the attainments are empty names and labels with no inherent reality, conventionally real like trees and chocolate.1 Conventional designations are precisely the kind of thing communities settle by procedure. The mockery and the metaphysics pull against each other.
A third, on the Christian reading. Describing the communion of saints as a register of samādhi attainments is a substantive theological claim presented as an observation.2 No Christian source is cited for it, and the doctrine's actual content — a bond between the living and the dead in one body — is not addressed. [SINGLE SOURCE]
And the standing scope limit. Footnote 518 applies with unusual force here, since this page is about certifying stages: the stages are, by the author's own description, false stages — rest stops, verifications, motivational assists.4 A committee certifying passage through them would be certifying progress along a ladder the author says nobody is required to climb.
Open questions. If neither election nor phenomena can establish attainment, what could — and does any tradition have a test that survives Lambertini's objection? And if the ranks are conventional designations, on what grounds is a conventional body the wrong authority to assign them?
Against Grace and Chosenness as Institutional Excuses, this page is the same argument aimed at the other end of the institution's apparatus. That one says the doctrine of bestowal excuses the leadership from having capabilities; this one says the certification procedure lets an institution assign standing it cannot verify. Both leave the institution able to talk authoritatively about attainment without anyone in it having to demonstrate any — which is the single most consistent charge in this stretch of the book.
The convergence with What a Guru Is Actually For runs deeper than it first looks. That page says the teacher's only real function is fast error-detection, and that the student cannot verify the teacher's dharma eye because verification requires the faculty they lack. This page says a committee cannot verify it either. So neither the individual nor the institution can identify attainment — which leaves the whole question of who to learn from without any answer at all, and Bodri never supplies one.
Read with Samādhi: Concentration and Absorption, the deflation here is the sharpest in the hub. The nine samādhi are the apparatus's most technically developed material, and the Śūraṅgama line says all nine still leave the defilements intact.1 A tradition that built a precise nine-stage instrument and then preserved a scripture saying the instrument does not reach the goal is doing something more self-aware than the ladder alone suggests. Where the vault's material resists is The Hierarchy of Tantric Practice: Pūjā to Samādhi and the devotional corpus generally, and the objection is the same one every time: recognition of a realised person in those traditions is not a certification problem to be solved but a relational fact inside a community, and treating it as a failed measurement misses what the recognition is doing.
The committee answered an easier question than the one it was asked — The Question You Actually Answered. That page starts with someone buying a used car who cannot evaluate an engine: the question is this a good car requires expertise they do not have, so without noticing it they answer a different one — do I trust this seller — and experience the substitute answer as if it were the original. A canonisation tribunal is in that position with the volume turned up. Did this person reach the states is unanswerable; is the documentary record impressive, is the testimony consistent, are there attested phenomena is answerable, and the procedure quietly runs on the second while reporting on the first. What the pairing gives that neither side gives alone: the substitution is invisible precisely where the institution is most careful, because rigour is applied to the substitute question — files checked, witnesses cross-examined, a devil's advocate appointed — and thoroughness on the answerable question reads, from inside and outside, as thoroughness on the unanswerable one. Which explains the Lambertini result rather neatly: the office designed to be sceptical found that the evidence class did not discriminate, and the procedure continued, because the procedure was never actually running on that evidence in the way it appeared to be.
One handshake, and stopping there. The obvious second — proxy measurement displacing the unmeasurable target — is already carried in this cluster by the discipline page's rail-metrics connection, and a version here would restate it rather than add to it.
Sharpest implication. The Church appointed someone to argue the other side, that person concluded the evidence class does not discriminate between saints, fools and brute beasts, and the canonisations continued — which means the failure is not credulity but a procedure running on a question it can answer while reporting on one it cannot.
Generative questions.