Greetings.
I'm curious to hear old-timer daobums take on Bill Bodri and his new view on things.
If you're familiar with the late master Nan Huai Chin, then you've probably heard of Bodri, who was one of his students. In his earlier works, Bodri focused on the "consciousness-only" approach, emphasizing emptiness meditation and anapana as the keys to success.
But in his latest books, Bodri claims that much of what he previously espoused was actually wrong, and that the true key to enlightenment is access to the illusory body, or deva body. He believes that achieving this attainment makes you enlightened and known as a Buddhist Srotapanna Arhat, Hindu jnani, Taoist Immortal, Homo Deus, or 'twice born'. According to Bodri, this attainment is the first rung of the true spiritual ladder that is kept hidden from most people, as they would be dejected about their spiritual efforts and stop cultivating altogether.
Bodri also claims that nearly 100% of spiritual practitioners, even monks and nuns, don't know how to cultivate correctly. He argues that one of the main purposes of spiritual practice is to purify and strengthen your subtle body composed of Qi, so that you can achieve the independent deva body attainment while still alive, or lay the foundation for the Sakadagamin stage and then Causal body Anagamin achievement after death.
So, what do you all think about Bodri's new perspective? Do you agree or disagree with his ideas?
Here are some excerpts from his new book that may be interesting for this discussion:
This kind of approach seems very different than the more streamlined Daoist lineages such as those taught by Longmenpai and other famous daoist schools where there's a clear line of development -- and, in a way, is much more "new age" in that Bodri basically says to "steal"/"borrow" techniques from all different kinds of lineages and combine them all in the hope of having the most success, and to do this consistently along with everything else.
In any case, I would be curious to hear people's thoughts...