A king rides past with his retinue — horses, escort, noise. Afterwards someone asks a man at the roadside whether he saw it.
He did not. He was making an arrow.
That is one of the twenty-four teachers. See The Arrow-Maker and the King.
[RESONANCE] Because the state being praised has no religious content whatsoever.
The man is not meditating. He is not devotional. He is not even doing anything the tradition would call practice. He is at work, and the work has taken all of him, and that is offered without qualification as the thing to aim at.
⚑ The volume spends eleven Skandhas building an apparatus and then points at a craftsman who has never heard of it.
⚑ The twenty-four preceptors are almost all cases of not doing something — the python that does not forage, the osprey that drops the meat, the bee that does not hoard.
⚠ The arrow-maker is the exception. He is the only one held up for what he is actively doing.
And the criterion is negative and behavioural: the evidence of his attainment is not a report of bliss but a failure to register an interruption. ⚑ You cannot fake it and you cannot self-assess it — the test is what you missed, and by definition you do not know you missed it.
Which puts it in a small set with the volume's other externally-checkable attainment markers: Parīkṣit reporting capacity rather than understanding and Mārkaṇḍeya not noticing two gods.
⚑ [n≥3 PATTERN] — this volume's tests for attainment are consistently things the person did not do, not things they felt.
Against the whole of The Eighteen Siddhis, Listed and Declined — the volume enumerates eighteen attainments in detail and then declines them twice. ⚠ And its actual working criterion is a man who did not look up.
Promotion criterion: ⚑ the not-noticing test would have to appear a fourth time, ideally in a context that is not a set-piece anecdote. ⚠ Three instances is where it sits and three is what it is stated at.
⚑ The obvious external check is whether the vault already has a page on absorption-in-work as a psychological state — if it does, the arrow-maker is a handshake waiting to be written and this stops being a spark. ⚠ Not searched yet; the generative-tail constraint holds sessions to two domains and this one has used eastern-spirituality and behavioral-mechanics.