What This Concept Is Saying
The term 選佛 is a Chan/Zen insider's word. On the surface it sounds almost secular — "electing a Buddha," as if one were running a recruitment drive. The very incongruity is the point. Chan borrowed the language of the imperial examination (科舉) and the civil service (銓選) to name something that, in its essence, has nothing to do with titles or credentials.
Stripped to its core, 選佛 names a three-sided activity that can only happen among practitioners (參學者):
1. There must be candidates — those who present themselves as having, or approaching, genuine realization (真實悟處). 2. There must be a selector with the right eye — someone capable of recognizing the real from the counterfeit. 3. There must be a method of verification — concrete encounters (機鋒, encounter-words; 逼拶, pressing questions; 本分鉗鎚, the master's proper pincers and hammer) that strip away performance and leave only the undecorated response.
To these three, the classical sources add a fourth, decisive feature: the criterion itself is invisible from the outside. One cannot "select a Buddha" by reading a résumé, hearing eloquent dharma-talk, or counting years on the cushion. What is being selected is the operative state of the practitioner's *mind-ground* (心地) — whether it is 空寂 (empty and still) down to its deepest layer, or whether there remains even "一絲頭" (a single thread) of attachment that will obstruct.
Let me unfold each of these layers using the classical texts themselves.
The Candidates: Three Types of 無事道人 (Persons of No-Affairs)
《明覺禪師語錄》(Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Mingjue) sets up the selection scenario with one short line: 「三員無事道人中，要選一人為師」 — "Among three persons of no-affairs, one is to be selected as teacher." The text does not rush to give the answer; it lays out the three so the reader must discriminate. They are not a graded ladder but structurally distinct positions, and the text's refusal to rank them is itself part of the teaching.
Type 1 — The one who can fully take in the ancestral teachings and then let them go. Such a person "信得及，把得住，不受人瞞" before the Buddha-ancestors' words and deeds — believes through, holds fast, and cannot be deceived. So thoroughly is this holding that they go further: 「高掛鉢囊，拗折拄杖」 — they hang up the alms-bowl bag and snap the walking-staff. The bowl-bag and staff are the equipment of the itinerant monk, the outward signs of being "on the path." For this candidate, the equipment is no longer needed; the path has been completed to the point where no path needs to be carried.
Type 2 — The one who can accommodate the ancestral teachings, like a dragon in water or a tiger leaning on a mountain. Such a person thrives in the teaching: 「如龍得水，似虎靠山」 — they use the words of the ancestors the way a dragon uses water, the way a tiger uses a mountain. Yet — and this is the precise distinction from Type 1 — 「仍挑鉢囊，擔拄杖」 — they still shoulder the bowl-bag, still bear the staff. Form is maintained; the outward vocation continues. The teaching has not been discarded but integrated into functioning.
Type 3 — The one who transcends both "thus" (恁麼) and "not-thus" (不恁麼), arriving at "no bearing" (沒交涉). This position cannot be placed on either side of any affirmation/negation pair. Both "yes" and "no," both "so" and "not so," are left behind. What remains is described not positively but by exclusion: 沒交涉 — there is no longer any "relevance" or "connection" to the propositions at all. It is neither a higher synthesis nor a clever neutrality; it is the cessation of the polarity itself.
《明覺禪師語錄》 refuses to tell us which of the three is "the one to be selected." This refusal is not laziness or evasion. To pick by rule — "Type 1 is highest because it abandons form" — is already to miss what selection means here. The selection is made, if at all, by the selector's eye in the actual encounter, not by a predetermined ranking.
The Selector: The 「如是眼」 (Such-an Eye) and the 「鵝王」 (Goose-King)
《宏智禪師廣錄》(Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Hongzhi) names the venue in a line everyone in Chan knows, lifting it from 龐居士 (Layman Pang)'s famous verse:
十方同聚會，箇箇學無為。 此是選佛場，心空及第歸。 *From the ten directions we gather; each one studies the unconditioned.* *This is the field for electing the Buddha — the one whose mind is empty passes and returns home.*
But 《大慧普覺禪師語錄》(Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Dahui Pujue) drives home an uncomfortable truth: the field is useless without the eye. 「選佛若無如是眼，假饒千載又奚為」 — "If in selecting the Buddha there is no such eye, what use is it even after a thousand years?"
What is this eye? It is not connoisseurship of doctrine, nor seniority in the lineage, nor fluency in koan language. The text gives a striking negative example: the hall-master (堂頭) hears a monk cite 香林 (Xianglin / Kyŏngnim)'s remark about 「臘月火燒山」 — "In the twelfth month, set fire to the mountain," one of the classic Chan phrases. The hall-master raises it approvingly — and still 「未敢相許」 — "does not dare to confirm." Being able to repeat an awakened phrase does not constitute being awakened. The eye must see whether the speaker has been changed by what they say, not whether they can produce the right sound.
The texts give the eye three working names that each catch a different facet of it:
- 「眼光爍破四天下，主盟此道是渠儂」 — "Eyes flashing across the four quarters, the one who can lead and confederate this Way is this person." The eye discerns leadership-capacity for the Way itself. - 「要識真麒麟，只有一隻角」 — "To recognize the true qilin (麒麟, a mythical one-horned beast), [know that] it has only one horn." The true is singular, unmistakable; the counterfeit proliferates. The eye discriminates the singular from the many copies. - 「水中擇乳，須是鵝王」 — "To choose milk from water, one needs a goose-king (鵝王)." In Indian tradition, the hamsa / goose-king can separate milk from water by a sip; the eye is a faculty that distinguishes the essential from the adulterant in real time.
Crucially, 《大慧》 adds that this eye is also what allows a qualified master and a qualified student to recognize each other: 「已悟已安樂已得力者，相見時默默相契」 — "Those already awakened, already at ease, already empowered, when they meet, silently accord (默默相契)." No content is exchanged; the recognition itself is the confirmation.
The Method: Forging, Not Interviewing
The classical sources are emphatic that verification (甄驗) does not happen on paper. It happens under pressure, in real time. Three vocabulary items, all from 《明覺禪師語錄》, describe the methods:
- 「拶」 (zā) — to press, to corner, to bring someone to the wall with a question that admits no preparatory answer. - 「本分鉗鎚」 (běn fèn qián chuí) — the proper pincers and hammer of the craft. 「精金百煉」 — "fine gold must be refined a hundred times." The image is the metalsmith's forge: not a single test but a sequence of heatings and hammerings, each removing dross until only the metal remains. - 「打趁」 (dǎ chèn) — to drive away at once. When the assembly begins to calculate a clever answer ("擬議"), the master cuts them all off simultaneously, so that what remains is the uncalculated response.
A small case from the same text illustrates. When 洞山 (Dongshan) calls on 雲門 (Yunmen), Yunmen asks his provenance, his summer retreat, his day of departure — ordinary administrative questions. Then says, "I will give you three blows" (放爾三頓棒). The next day he calls him "rice-bag" (飯袋子). Dongshan thereby greatly awakened. 《明覺》 comments: 「氣宇如王，拶著便氷消瓦解」 — "His bearing was like a king's; pressed against, [Dongshan] melted like ice and crumbled like tiles." The "pressing" is what exposes whether there is anything underneath or just performance.
Another instance: 德山 (Deshan) raises 「從上諸聖什麼處去」 — "Where have all the saints of old gone?" As soon as the assembly begins to consider an answer, he 「一時打趁」 — drives them all away in one stroke. The point is not to elicit a correct formulation. The point is to see whether, in the instant of being pushed off the cliff of conventional thinking, anything still stands.
《明覺》 preserves the principle in a single image: 「精金百煉，須要本分鉗鎚」 — "Fine gold needs a hundred refinings; one must have the proper pincers and hammer." Selection is not a one-time judgment; it is a repeated forging.
The Criterion: 「心空」 (Empty Mind-Ground)
Finally, what is being selected? 《宏智禪師廣錄》 brings the criterion into focus by extending the imperial-examination metaphor: 「選佛場 ... 心空及第歸」 — "in the field for electing the Buddha, the one whose mind is empty passes the examination and returns home (及第, literally 'reaches the rank')."
The text defines 心空 with surgical precision: it is not a vague "feeling of emptiness," nor a clever philosophical position, nor an absence of thought. It is 「心地下空寂」 — the ground of mind being empty and still. If that ground is empty, one passes; if there is even 「一絲頭」 (a single thread) — a hair of attachment, a trace of "I" — one is blocked (窒礙) at every turn.
Once that ground is empty, the consequences are concrete, not abstract:
- 「善惡如尖檐兩頭脫」 — "Good and evil are like the two ends of a pointed eave, both slipped off." Neither pole retains any grip. - 「身心廣大如法界，究竟等虛空」 — "Body and mind vast as the dharma-realm, ultimately equal to empty space." - 「靈靈而知，歷歷而照」 — "Vividly knowing, clearly illuminating." Awareness is alive, not absent. - 「跨步應世，在諸法頭上行」 — "Stepping forth to respond to the world, walking on the heads of all dharmas." Function without obstruction. - 「山河不隔越，處處是光明」 — "Mountains and rivers do not obstruct; everywhere is light." - 「心地下不著一箇字腳」 — "Not a single character-foot placed in the ground of mind." No concept lodges there.
And — importantly — 山仍是山，水仍是水 — "The mountain is still a mountain, the water is still water." After passing, ordinary things do not become mystical; they are seen as they are. The classic Chan saying returns here in functional form.
A last twist appears in 《宏智》's verse: 「選佛到空覺覺空」 — "Selecting-the-Buddha reaches emptiness; emptiness awakens to emptiness." The activity of selection itself, when followed through, loops back: even the discriminating eye cannot remain as a fixed "eye that knows." Empty and awake co-arise and pass through each other. The text then continues: 「為人除藥病病藥」 — "For others, removing medicine-illness, illness-medicine." The whole apparatus of "selection" — including "empty" and "awake" — is itself a relative teaching (對待之機) that must itself be passed through, not clung to as final.
The Responsibility That Rests in Me
《明覺》 opens its treatment with the line that ties the whole activity back to the practitioner: 「選佛選官應在我，難兄難弟不唯他」 — "Selecting the Buddha and selecting the official both rest in me; companions of difficulty are not only in him." Whoever you are being measured against, the measurement that matters is your own.
Pulling the three records together, 選佛 names an activity with four clearly distinguished components:
1. The candidates are not generic "Buddhas-to-be" but specific postures toward the ancestral teaching — full release, functional integration, or transcendence of both affirmation and negation. 2. The selector must possess 如是眼 — a discriminating capacity that is not credentialist, not rhetorical, not time-served, but operative in the moment of encounter. 3. The methods are not interviews but forging: pressing (拶), hammering (鉗鎚), driving away (打趁), in repeated real-time encounters. 4. The criterion is invisible from outside: 心空 — the deepest ground of mind being empty of even a single thread of attachment, with the consequent ability to function in the world with unobstructed clarity.
This is what 選佛 actually says — to itself, and to us.
Life Walk-through: Where 選佛 Actually Happens Today
The classical sources speak of monastic halls, dharma-rooms, koan encounters, and lineage transmission. But the structure of 選佛 — candidates, a selector with the right eye, a method of pressing under real conditions, and a criterion of "empty mind-ground" — is not bound to those forms. It is recognizable anywhere a community takes the question of genuine realization seriously. Let me walk it through a few contemporary scenes.
Scene 1 — The Online Sangha and the Question of "Who Speaks with Authority?"
Imagine a meditation community with a popular online discussion space. People post reflections on practice. Some have read widely and quote classical sources fluently. Some have been on silent retreats for years and have begun to share what "happened" to them. Some are simply articulate and emotionally resonant. The community begins, informally, to distinguish who "really has it" from who is performing.
Here the Chan principle of 選佛 is precisely applicable, though the context is secular:
The candidates correspond to the three types of 無事道人. The fluent quoter might look like Type 2 (如龍得水 — like a dragon in water, thriving in the ancestral teaching) but still 「挑鉢囊擔拄杖」 — still needs the form, still needs to be recognized as "the one who knows." The person who says "I don't really have any view about it any more, the words don't grip me" might look like Type 1 (高掛鉢囊拗折拄杖 — the bowl-bag hung up, the staff broken). And there are those who refuse both the "I have it" and the "I don't have it" frame entirely — Type 3 (沒交涉).
The selector's eye (如是眼) is the question: can the community tell the difference between someone who has been changed by their experience and someone who has learned to describe it? 《大慧》's warning is exactly this: the hall-master hears 香林's line and still 「未敢相許」. Reciting the awakened words is not being awakened. The eye has to feel for the change in the speaker, not for the elegance of the citation. To extend 識真麒麟: a room that has only ever seen one false qilin will mistake the first real one for a fake.
The methods of forging correspond, in a soft modern form, to the moments when someone is actually pressed — asked a question they did not prepare for, asked how they responded to a recent difficulty, asked what they do when no one is watching. 拶 — pressing. Does the answer come from an already-formulated position, or from somewhere less constructed?
The criterion of 心空 maps surprisingly well here. Not "no thoughts" but: when the person speaks, is there a subtle self-positioning — "I am the one who understands this"? That is the 一絲頭 — the single thread — that 《宏智》 says blocks everything. 心空 is not blankness; it is the absence of that self-positioning even while speaking fluently and with feeling.
A common contemporary mis-mapping to flag: many people assume that the "emptiest" sounding person is the most awakened. But 心空 is not verbal flatness. It is the unobstructed functioning that comes after the ground of mind is empty — 靈靈而知，歷歷而照, vividly knowing and clearly illuminating. A person who has "emptied themselves" into a flat affect is not the picture; a person who can respond with full clarity precisely because nothing is being protected is the picture.
Scene 2 — The Workplace Mentor and the Question of "Who Can Be Trusted with the Hard Call?"
Consider a senior practitioner in a demanding profession — medicine, therapy, law, software architecture — who also has a meditation practice and is asked to mentor junior colleagues. The classical 選佛 scene plays out, almost identically, in the question of who can be trusted to carry weight when things go wrong.
The candidates are the mentees. Some have read every book on the craft and can recite the frameworks. Some have been doing the work for years and are reliable in routine situations. Some have a quality that is harder to name — neither especially bookish nor especially long-tenured, but something in the way they respond to the unexpected is different.
The selector's eye is not credentials. It is the gut sense (and 《大慧》 would say, the trained sense) of whether this person, under the press of the actual case, will still respond from the situation rather than from a formula. The eye notices who, in the real encounter, can be 拶著便氷消瓦解 — pressed against, melts like ice and crumbles — meaning: drops their constructed position and responds fresh.
The method of forging is precisely the difficult case, the after-hours call, the unanswerable patient, the client in crisis. 精金百煉 — fine gold needs a hundred refinings. One good performance under easy conditions does not select a Buddha. It is in the repeated, varied, real-time pressures that the metal shows.
The criterion corresponds to 心空: not the mentee who has the most impressive answers, but the mentee whose response is unobstructed by the need to be impressive. 心地下不著一箇字腳 — not a single character-foot placed in the ground of mind. No formula stuck to the situation; no ego-position protecting itself.
This is why the classical sources emphasize that the selector's eye is also the difficulty. A mentor who selects by résumé, by affiliation, by the mentee's eloquence — that mentor has no 如是眼, and the selection fails. The eye has to be developed before the field can be useful. To extend 水中擇乳，須是鵝王: the goose-king's capacity cannot be hired out; it is the mentor's own practice that has refined it.
Scene 3 — Friendship, Partnership, and 「默默相契」 (Silent Mutual Accord)
《大慧》's phrase 「已悟已安樂已得力者，相見時默默相契」 — those already awakened, at ease, empowered, meet in silent mutual accord — names something that is not exclusive to formal Zen. People who have done serious inner work, in any tradition, often recognize each other quickly, without performance, without needing to explain what they know. The recognition is quiet. It is not the same as agreeing; two such people may disagree sharply about methods. But the recognition is unmistakable to both.
In contemporary life, this is the experience of meeting someone for the first time and feeling, without any credentials exchange, that this person has "been somewhere." Not the same place, necessarily. Just somewhere real. The 如是眼 operating in the wild.
The three types of 無事道人 also show up here, in friendships and partnerships. Some friends you can tell anything to precisely because they do not need to be told — Type 1, the bowl-bag hung up. Some friends you can tell anything to because they hold the conversation like a dragon holds water — Type 2, the bowl-bag still carried but light. And some friends you cannot even locate on the map of "supportive" or "challenging" — they have left the polarity entirely, Type 3, 沒交涉. None of these is the "best" friend; they are different relationships to the same question.
Where People Most Often Map This Wrong (Preview of Misreadings)
Three contemporary mis-mappings to name in passing before turning to why this matters and what its misreadings are:
1. Mistaking eloquence for awakening. 香林's line can be cited without having been changed. The hall-master's 未敢相許 is precisely this caution. The Chan tradition is unusually suspicious of fluency about awakening; contemporary spiritual culture is unusually impressed by it.
2. Mistaking flatness for emptiness. 心空 is not affectlessness. It is unobstructed functioning. The image from 《宏智》 is vivid: 靈靈而知，歷歷而照. A flat affect is a frozen state, not an empty one.
3. Mistaking selection for exclusion. 選佛 is not a purity test or a status gate. The three types of 無事道人 are not ranked, and 《明覺》 refuses to name the winner. The selection is for the role of teacher, not for belonging. Most people reading this will not be "selected as teacher" and need not be; the eye, the criterion, and the methods are useful to every practitioner regardless of role.
Why Contemporaries Need 選佛
Contemporary culture is saturated with people claiming spiritual authority, and saturated with people seeking it. Both conditions are intensified by the architecture of the internet, where a quiet, sincere practitioner in a back room is algorithmically indistinguishable from a charismatic performer with a production team. The Chan principle of 選佛 addresses this situation with tools that are still, after a thousand years, sharper than most of what is on offer.
First, it re-locates the responsibility. 「選佛選官應在我」 — "Selecting the Buddha and selecting the official both rest in me." In a culture that externalizes discernment to certifications, ratings, follower counts, brand affiliation, the Chan insistence that the responsibility is one's own is bracing. You cannot outsource the question of who really knows. The eye has to be developed in yourself.
Second, it provides a non-credentialist criterion. 心空 — empty mind-ground — is something that, in principle, anyone can verify in themselves and detect in others through sustained contact. It does not require degrees, transmissions, or institutional affiliation. This is democratizing in the literal sense: it puts the criterion where the criterion belongs.
Third, it provides real methods of testing. 拶, 鉗鎚, 打趁 — pressing, forging, driving. These are not hostile. They are the methods by which a craft tradition protects its practitioners from following someone who only looks awakened. In a culture where spiritual teachers are sometimes exposed, years later, as having been performing all along, the Chan insistence on real-time, real-condition, repeated verification looks less archaic and more practically protective than it might have seemed a generation ago.
Fourth, it protects against the two poles of spiritual inflation and spiritual nihilism. 心空 is not inflation (I am special, I have attained) and it is not nihilism (nothing matters, nothing is real). It is 山仍是山，水仍是水 — mountain still mountain, water still water — together with 靈靈而知，歷歷而照 — vividly knowing, clearly illuminating. This combination is hard to fake and hard to dismiss.
Fifth, the 選佛 frame dignifies ordinary competence while keeping the question open. The candidates are not geniuses or saints; they are 無事道人 — persons of no-affairs. The selector does not need to be a celebrity master; they only need the eye. The methods are not esoteric rituals; they are pressing encounters in real time. This makes the principle portable into any domain — workplace, family, community — where the question of "who can carry this responsibly" has to be answered.
A small honest caveat, since we are talking about discerning the real from the counterfeit: like any rigorous principle, 選佛 can be misused. A community that claims the eye without having developed it will use 選佛 as a purity test, excluding sincere practitioners who simply do not perform in the preferred idiom. The classical sources are aware of this. 《大慧》's insistence that the criterion is unobstructed functioning, not visible performance, is the safeguard. If "selection" begins to look like conformity to a house style rather than discernment of 心空, the eye has gone blind. This is a known failure mode of any rigorous tradition, and it is worth holding in mind.
Common Misreadings and Clarifications
Misreading 1: "選佛 means the teacher chooses who can be a teacher."
The grammar of the term allows this reading, but the sources go out of their way to refuse it. The first line of 《明覺》 is 「選佛選官應在我」 — the responsibility is mine, not the teacher's alone. 《大慧》 locates the decisive instrument in the 如是眼, which is a faculty, not a role. 《宏智》 frames the whole assembly as the 選佛場 — the *field* — meaning everyone is implicated. Selection is an activity of the community, centered on a criterion, not a unilateral act of an authority.
Misreading 2: "心空 means no thoughts, no feelings, no preferences."
This is the most common contemporary collapse of the term. 心空 is 心地下空寂 — the ground of mind being empty and still. It is not the absence of content. The texts repeatedly couple it with vivid functioning: 靈靈而知，歷歷而照; 山河不隔越，處處是光明. The image from 《宏智》 is not blankness but unobstructedness. A blocked mind is one with 一絲頭 of self-positioning; an empty mind is one in which no such thread obstructs. Thoughts and feelings still arise; they simply do not lodge.
Misreading 3: "The three types of 無事道人 are a hierarchy, with Type 1 highest."
《明覺》 lays out the three and refuses to say which is to be selected as teacher. This refusal is the teaching. To rank them is to revert to a content-based evaluation, exactly what 選佛 is asking us to move beyond. The three are structural positions in relation to form, teaching, and conceptual polarity. The selector's eye must see in the actual encounter which is appropriate, not apply a rule. Even within Chan history, different masters have favored different postures; the choice of teacher depends on the needs of the students and the moment, not on a fixed ladder.
Misreading 4: "選佛 is about judging others, so it is a tool for arrogance."
If the activity is held as "I judge who is and who isn't a real practitioner," the eye is already corrupted. 《大慧》's framing of 默默相契 and 《明覺》's of 「選佛選官應在我」 both push the same point: the work of selection is first of all on oneself. The eye is developed by being turned on one's own mind-ground; in the encounter with others, the eye functions almost as a side-effect. Where 選佛 becomes a tool of exclusion rather than a discipline of self-clarification, it has been turned against itself.
Misreading 5: "The forging methods (鉗鎚, 打趁) are abusive; real teachers do not press students."
This conflates historical Chan methods with later abuses. The texts present 拶 and 打趁 as designed to expose the unconstructed response, not to humiliate. The image is the metalsmith, not the bully. The criterion is whether the candidate can, under pressure, respond freshly — which serves the candidate's own realization, not the master's ego. When the same methods are used to enforce conformity, to break spirit, or to sustain a power dynamic, the methods have been separated from the criterion they serve (心空) and have become something else. 選佛, properly understood, is itself the safeguard against this misuse: the eye must be looking for unobstructed functioning, and unobstructed functioning cannot be produced by intimidation.
Misreading 6: "If the criterion is invisible, no one can ever be selected, so the whole idea is anti-rational mysticism."
The criterion is invisible to those without the eye. It is fully visible to one who has the eye — 《大慧》 is explicit that the eye can be developed, that the recognition is reliable, that 默默相契 happens. This is no more "anti-rational" than the expert chess-player's recognition of a strong position, which is invisible to a beginner but entirely visible to another master. The Chan tradition simply insists that this particular expertise cannot be transferred as content — 「禪道佛法可以傳授」 — "no Zen, Dao, or Buddha-dharma can be transmitted as a thing" — and must be developed through practice.
Misreading 7: "Because 《宏智》 ends with 「選佛到空覺覺空」, the whole activity is just a verbal play with no real content."
The recursive phrase is not a dismissal of selection; it is the completion of it. Selection reaches emptiness; emptiness then awakens to emptiness (the awakening is no longer separate from the emptiness, and the emptiness is no longer separate from the awakening). 「為人除藥病病藥」 — "For others, removing medicine-illness, illness-medicine" — follows immediately: the whole apparatus of selection, including "empty" and "awake," is a teaching device that must itself be passed through. This is the Chan habit of refusing to let any phrase become a stopping point. It is not nihilism; it is the insistence that the metal must be put back in the fire one more time, lest the form become the new 一絲頭.
A Final Image
Across the three records, the most economical single phrase for the whole of 選佛 is the one from 龐居士, taken up by 《宏智禪師廣錄》:
十方同聚會，箇箇學無為。 此是選佛場，心空及第歸。
"From the ten directions we gather; each one studies the unconditioned. This is the field for electing the Buddha — the one whose mind is empty passes and returns home."
Note that the last line is not "the one whose mind is empty wins" or "is honored." It is 及第歸 — passes and returns home. The whole activity of selection, from the candidate's side, is not toward elevation but toward going home. And from the selector's side, what they are selecting for is not status but the unobstructed functioning that allows their students to do the same.
The 選佛場 is, in the end, every room where serious practitioners meet with the intention to find out what is real. The eye is the same eye whether it wears a Chan robe, a therapist's card, or a manager's title. The criterion is the same criterion: is the ground of this mind empty of the obstructing thread? And the methods are the same methods: real conditions, real encounters, real response, in real time.
That is what 選佛 has to say — to its own tradition, and to us.