Can directional grain be specified at the level of individual capacity cells, or...

The Capacity Ledger makes a genuinely useful advance over the minimum-self thesis. By splitting 'does this path need a self?' into five separable loads, the model creates a real instrument for cross-tradition comparison. The conservation rule gives it predictive power: if a tradition lowers one column, look for where the load went. This generates specific, falsifiable expectations about safeguard profiles, failure modes, and cross-domain parallels that the binary effort-versus-gift frame cannot produce. The five-field decomposition also disciplines informal comparisons. Saying 'Pure Land lowers agency but raises receiving' is more precise than saying 'Pure Land is easier.' The Proponent deserves credit for anticipating the Pure Land and Dzogchen objections in the critique section, and for flagging the risk that receiving capacity may smuggle self-power into traditions designed to expose self-power as futile. But the ledger rests on a hidden structural assumption: directional neutrality. It treats its five columns as directionless quantities, as if 'reflexivity' meant the same thing in every tradition, varying only in magnitude and locus. This assumption is what makes the scoring grid and the conservation rule work. And this assumption is where the model breaks. Consider reflexivity, the column where the ledger's blindness to direction is most visible. The ledger scores both Theravada and Advaita as requiring high reflexivity before insight. In the ledger's framing, these traditions agree on this column and differ on others. But Theravada's reflexivity is self-observation aimed at impermanence, suffering, and non-ownership. The Anattalakkhana Sutta (SN 22.59) trains the practitioner to ask of each aggregate: 'Is this mine? Is this my self? Is this what I am?' The attention runs toward what is arising, changing, and not possessed. Shankara's Vivekachudamani (vv. 17-30) trains a structurally different reflexivity: discrimination between sat and asat, the real and the unreal. Viveka does not ask 'is this mine?' It asks 'is this real?' The attention runs not toward impermanence but toward what never changes. Both require high reflexivity. But the reflexivity carries a different direction, and the direction, not the magnitude, determines what the practice produces. This directional pre-shaping is not an incidental feature of each tradition's style. It runs from prerequisite to dissolution in a single movement. What MN 10 builds as 'ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful' observation is observation already aimed at non-possessive awareness of arising and passing. What the Vivekachudamani builds as viveka is discrimination already aimed at recognizing the changeless witness. The preparation does not neutrally develop 'reflexivity' that the tradition later points at its target. The target is built into the preparation from the first instruction. The capacity and the dissolution are directionally continuous: what you build carries the signature of what will be dissolved. Jonardon Ganeri's analysis in Attention, Not Self (2017) shows that this directional specificity is not visible only from the comparative standpoint. Within early Buddhism itself, attention is already a directional concept. Yoniso manasikara (appropriate attention) is attention that runs toward impermanence, suffering, and non-self. Ayoniso manasikara (inappropriate attention) runs toward permanence, pleasure, and self. The distinction is not between more and less attention but between attention aimed in different directions. If attention within Buddhism is already a directional concept, then treating reflexivity as a single directionless quantity across traditions is not merely an oversimplification for the sake of comparison. It is already inaccurate within the ledger's primary tradition. The conservation rule becomes misleading when direction is ignored. When the ledger says a tradition 'raises reflexivity to compensate for lowered agency,' it implies a quantitati...