by Tang Huyen

In order to know for sure that somebody is awakened,
one has to be able to read minds and be unable to read
his mind, because the mind of an awakened is invisible,
as he does not stop anywhere and stand anywhere.

The awakeneds spend years and decades harmonising
and streamlining their energies, have gathered
themselves together into one piece and dropped it
(that piece, their self). They consequently are together
(fully grown adults are together and know how to keep
balance and perspective, and the awakeneds go further
in togetherness by dropping their self so that they have
nothing to balance and no perspective to keep), behave
in one piece (with no self in there), and if they do
anything, they do it from a background of calm, peace,
harmlessness, coherence, harmony. They definitely are
not fragmented, divided, surely not divided against
themselves.

It doesn't mean that they know all relevant factors (the
Buddha teaches the contemplation of the unclean, and
a bunch of monks commit suicide), even less that they
are successful every time, as they are still subject to
human limitations (and this subjection to human
limitations is one of the major teachings of Buddhism),
but it does mean that they are fully grown adults (which
is difficult enough) who bring their growth to completion
and drop their self (which is vastly more difficult), and
that they behave from that background.

They can choose to behave temporarily in a manner
that is not "nicey nicey", as when the Buddha scolds
laics and clerics as "foolish person(s)", or when Chan
masters scream or hit, but they do it from a background
as described above. (The Great Vehicle is packed with
anecdotes of "skills in means" that can verge on deceit.)

Once in a while, they may lose balance (get angry or
whatever), but they instantly recognise it and recover
from it in no time. Their mindfulness is their saving
grace, if I may say so.

What I say of babyishness is of a frequent nature, it
tends to occur oftentimes and in an uncontrollable
manner. For example, some people blow up on mere
words on the screen year in year out, some people get
jumpy, edgy, frantic, impulsive, impetuous on a
frequent basis, some people lose balance and
perspective and get carried away by little details in a
recurrent and predictable manner, etc. The people who
throw temper tantrums whenever they get challenged,
especially regarding their claimed attainments, are quite
easy to show up. They get hugely angry, and for weeks,
whenever their claimed attainments are challenged.
Which confirms the challenge, all for free.

Which is why I throw little tests to test the claimants,
which usually take just a few words, and they can well
fail time and again, on the very same tests. They never
learn.

However, that testing is mostly eliminative. In order
to know for sure that somebody is awakened, one has to
be able to read minds and be unable to read his mind,
because the mind of an awakened is invisible, as he
does not stop anywhere and stand anywhere. Other than
that, it is guessing, and it may take a while to narrow
down the possibility.

It helps if people are flexible and not rigid, flowing and
not stuck, agile and not unwieldy, receptive and not
defensive, able to see through words and not realist and
literalist, aware of themselves and others and not
oblivious, cognisant of mind-games and word-games
and not easy victims of them (delusion is mind-games
and word-games that one plays on oneself), etc. But all
that flows from the background as described above.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on March 7, 2005, in reply to "dmchess" in the thread following Tang Huyen's standalone essay "The Poverty of Presumption." Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

A companion piece to "The Poverty of Presumption," this post develops the testing methodology. The first section describes the awakened as "fully grown adults who bring their growth to completion and drop their self" — a framing that grounds awakening in human developmental terms while insisting it exceeds ordinary maturity. The observation that the awakened can behave non-nicely (as the Buddha himself did when scolding monks, or as Chan masters when striking students) without losing their background of harmlessness is an important qualification against sentimentalisation. The eliminative logic of the test is carefully stated: reactive babyishness is easy to confirm as evidence of non-awakening, but positive identification of awakening is much harder — it requires confronting a mind that, precisely because it does not stop or stand anywhere, cannot be read. The closing catalogue of indicators (flexible, flowing, receptive, literate in mind-games) names positive signs while insisting they are downstream of the background, not independently achievable.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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