The Śūraṅgama Sūtra lists ten ways a practitioner can go wrong at the very last stage, one step from the end. Read them as a list of errors and they are unremarkable. Read what each one ends with and something else is happening:
…and become an adherent of the Kapila doctrine. …and become adherents of the deva Maheśvara. …and become adherents of Īśvaradeva, the divine creator of all things. …and become adherents of the doctrine of Vasiṣṭha and Sani. …and become followers of the doctrine of Kāśyapa and the Brahmins. …and become adherents of the dhyāna of thoughtlessness. …and become adherents of the immortality seekers. …and become adherents of the heavenly demons. …arrested at the śrāvaka stage. …arrested at the pratyekabuddha stage, adherents of selfish enlightenment.
Eight of the standing philosophical schools of a continent, and then two grades of one's own tradition.
[RESONANCE] Not one of them is refuted. Each gets a clause of description and a verdict, and the verdict is always the same: this is where somebody stopped.
Sāṃkhya is not a rival account of where things come from. It is arrest number one. The fire-worshipping Brahmins are not wrong about fire; they are practitioners who harmonised the six senses, went looking for the source of creation in the transformation, and worshipped the nearest element. You cannot disagree with a position that has been filed as a stage of your own path, and nobody in the passage tries to.
Set against Christian Heresies and Their Buddhist Parallels, which records the claim that early Christianity kept generating Buddhist-shaped doctrines from inside and kept expelling them — Pelagius, Origen, the Docetists, condemned for things that look distinctly like Buddhism.
The two moves are opposites and they cost the same thing.
Expulsion admits the rival idea is genuinely foreign. It goes over the wall with a name attached, which leaves it free to be true somewhere else, and the tradition has to keep policing a border.
Annexation keeps the map universal. Nothing is foreign, every school is on the chart, and there is no border to police. The price is that no rival argument ever has to be met on its own ground, because it has already been located.
And the annexing tradition cannot tell the difference between a school it has understood and a school it has merely placed.
Against The Ten Consciousness Arrests and this corpus's entire comparative project — five measuring schemes offered as a ruler for every tradition on earth, which is the same move at book length.
The nondenominational claim and the doxography are one gesture. Every genuine path describes the same territory and every rival school is a place one of our practitioners stopped are the same sentence facing two different audiences. The first sounds generous. The second is what it costs.
The sharpest form: a framework that can locate all its competitors inside its own developmental sequence has bought universality by giving up the ability to be wrong about any of them. That is a testable property of comparative systems and it is not specific to religion — the same shape is available to any theory that explains rival theories as incomplete versions of itself.
Promotion criterion: find a second comparative framework in the vault that annexes rather than expels, in an unrelated domain, and check whether it has the same immunity. Developmental-stage psychology, Marxist accounts of ideology, and integral models are the obvious candidates. Two instances make it a candidate pattern; one is an observation about a sūtra.
Test the annexation/expulsion pair against one non-religious framework before writing anything longer. If it holds, the collision is cross-domain and belongs with behavioral-mechanics; if it does not, the observation stays where it is, on the consciousness-arrests page, at [n=1 OBSERVED].