Nine limbs of devotion. Everybody quotes them. Almost nobody says how long each one takes.
One document in the Hanumanic Strategy corpus assigns minutes: two, two, two, one, one, one, half, half — and ongoing for the ninth.1
The eight clocked limbs sum to exactly ten. The ninth was deliberately kept outside the arithmetic.
And then the list sorts itself, into three classes nobody named.
Things that take time because time buys quantity. Hearing, singing, remembering — two minutes each, and four minutes would buy more.
Things that take a minute because that is what one instance costs. Dedication, offering, prostration — a second minute would buy a repetition, not a better one.
Things that cannot be clocked at all. Servitude, friendship, surrender. Thirty seconds is the cost of taking one up; holding it is free and unbounded, which is why the ninth broke the budget.
The tradition ranks these nine. It has never, as far as this build has found, weighted them.
Here is the spark, and it is one line: the taxonomy fell out of the clock. Nobody had to be clever.
Attach durations to any list of practices and watch what refuses an allocation. The refusals are the items that were never acts. They are also, reliably, the ones the tradition puts at the top.
⭐ A time budget is a taxonomy in disguise.
The vault is full of unclocked lists.
The eight aṣṭavarga powers. The seven qualities of the nyāsa rotation. The six limbs of śaraṇāgati. The five yamas. The nine practices of vaidhī bhakti in their traditional treatment. The ten niyamas. Every one of them is presented as a set of things to do, in a fixed order, with no indication of relative weight.
Take one. Assign minutes to a ten-minute session. See which item will not take a number.
That item is doing something different from its neighbours, and the list has been hiding the difference behind a shared numeral for a very long time.
⚠ [SPECULATIVE] — the three-class taxonomy is derived from one document's allocations, [n=1]. The claim that it generalises to other practice lists is untested and is exactly what the exercise above would test.
⚠ And a caution that is part of the spark rather than an objection to it: the corpus's own author warns, four lines above his own stopwatch, that the nine must not become "mechanical religious exercises." He is right, and he does it anyway, and both things are necessary. The clock is an analytical instrument here, not a devotional one — you run it once to find out what kind of list you have, and then you can put it away.