From Zero to the Desire-Realm Dhyana
The chapter
The official collection’s complete from-zero roadmap, in four sections — the chapter that says what the practitioner does before any dhyana exists. Section 01 sets the metaphysics of the road: karma is debt, the creditors are real, and the sentence aimed at the talkers of emptiness is the chapter’s keynote — 很抱歉，一切都是真的 (I am sorry — everything is real). Section 02 gives the first three tasks (no fighting, no killing, no meat) with the escalation chain and the dream test that measures the meat precept from inside sleep. Section 03 is the lust chapter — the wave model of how craving leaves in bursts, and the teacher’s two self-reported episodes, the knife-thoughts story chief among them. Section 04 is the body chapter — the full posture sequence, the one-hour rule, the food list, and the meridian route that ends in the three-qi-returning event, the archive’s own name for the first sitting milestone.
Three layers, kept apart
The practitioner layer — what is reported. The dream test is the chapter’s most concrete instrument: three stages of dreaming about meat, each a diagnostic. The lust waves are reported as a repeating pattern with shrinking amplitudes (30 points, then 20, then 15 — a month of torment, then three weeks, then less). The posture sequence is practical and specific: pad the rear third, half-open eyes, tongue lightly on the palate, thirty minutes plus five a week. None of this requires the doctrine to be usable; the site’s posture question extracts exactly this layer.
The traditional framework — recorded, not adopted. The karma-as-debt cosmology, the invisible creditors, King Yama’s installment plan, the seven-year time frame, the claim that wandering thoughts are countable and karma auditable, the Hinayana-Mahayana history with its transformed-meat account, the succubus-like ghosts, and the meridian map (heat between the kidneys climbing the spine to the crown and down to the perineum) — all belong to the teacher’s own system and are recorded here as his system, the same discipline as the EXP-031 posture doctrine and the EXP-029 physiology. The health claims inside it (the dairy ban’s kidney rationale, the heart-arrhythmia warning about breath-pausing) are not medical counsel; the site’s illness question states the boundary.
The alternative layer — the site’s own readings. The chapter’s anti-emptiness declaration is the archive’s sharpest collision with the philosophical tradition it borrows from: the teacher’s everything is real stands against the Zhuangzi’s dissolving language, and the site keeps both on record without adjudicating — the same two-voice discipline as the faith question. The wave model of craving resembles nothing in modern research on meditation effects, and no such model is cited as support anywhere on this site. The one point where the layers visibly converge: the chapter’s closing sentence — before this stage the mind-method hardly matters, because pain occupies all attention; the first step is to open the channels, by any method — is the archive’s own version of the site’s progress rule: what is measured is the process, not the stage.
The two episodes the teacher tells on himself
- The knife-thoughts. During his 800-recitations-a-day Great Compassion mantra period — reciting even in dreams — he woke one day with a mind full of knife-stabbing fantasies, believed himself a murderous maniac reborn, ate with a spoon for fear of using chopsticks on anyone, and shut himself in his room reciting. A movie scene of a throat-stabbing, he says, ended it. The chapter’s lesson drawn from it is the archive’s most serious warning: whoever has never had such an outpouring should not rush into sitting.
- The last point of lust. At the final stage he could already enter absorption and observe his surroundings; three succubus-like ghosts attached themselves to him, he says, to drain essence, and it took a vow to return and liberate them, plus the Buddhas’ protection, to get through.
Both episodes sit in the same file as the EXP-016 honesty record — the teacher’s own repeated statement that he narrates from experience, not from finished attainment — and both are cross-linked to the site’s safety research pages as the tradition’s own first-person account of difficult sitting experiences, not as evidence for the framework that interprets them.