Ask what may be claimed

A tradition's relationship to the question of who may appropriate practice functions is not captured by a single variable. It requires three dimensions. First, support locus: for each necessary function (receiving, agency, memory, reflexivity, integration), where is the support held? Possible holders include the practitioner, teacher, vow, text, community, present act, awareness itself, or later integration. Second, forbidden claimant: where the tradition explicitly names an owner who must not claim a given function. This cell is filled only for traditions that operate within a regulatory grammar of agency, issuing permissions and prohibitions to identifiable agents about specifiable functions. Third, claimability stance: the tradition's prior orientation toward the claiming framework itself. At least three stances appear. Regulatory traditions (Shinran's Other Power, SN 45.8's right effort, the Gita's nishkama karma) operate within the permission-prohibition framework, assigning and withholding agency. The forbidden-claimant column does its sharpest work here. Dissolutive traditions (Dogen's practice-realization, Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka, aspects of Chan and Zen teaching) refuse the subject-object split that makes claiming possible. They retain practice supports (posture, teacher, precepts, communal sitting) but undermine the temporal and acquisitive structure that would make appropriation intelligible. Coding their move as prohibition changes the content of the teaching. Ontological traditions (Dzogchen's primordial purity, Shankara's praptasya praptih) deny that the decisive reality was produced, acquired, or missing. There is no produced object to claim. Practice removes obstruction but does not create what was always present. A fourth, mixed-by-stage stance accommodates traditions like Chinul's sudden awakening and gradual cultivation, where the claimability logic shifts across stages of the path. The rubric therefore does not force all traditions into a single grammar. It asks how each path supports necessary functions while handling appropriation, and it lets the answer be: prohibition, dissolution, ontological denial, or a stage-dependent combination. Each stance predicts different failure modes: regulatory traditions risk wrong-claimant failures (spiritual pride in effort paths, passivity in gift paths, strategic detachment in split-credit paths); dissolutive traditions risk formalism (practice-realization becoming routine) or reification (treating the dissolution itself as an attainment); ontological traditions risk premature claims of realization (using 'nothing was ever missing' to bypass genuine work). Each tradition's safeguards should be calibrated to its own stance-specific danger.

The Forbidden Claimant Rubric's contribution was the two-part code of support locus plus forbidden claimant, which prevented reducing gift traditions to hidden self-power and effort traditions to naive agency. The Credit Distribution model's contribution was a five-type cross-tradition typology (practitioner-centered, source-centered, split, activity-centered, ground-centered) with failure-mode predictions. Neither contained the three-stance claimability variable as a prior dimension. The Proponent universalized prohibition; the Challenger had five distribution types but did not formalize the tradition's relationship to the claiming framework as a separate analytical layer. The synthesis emerged from the dialectical pressure of Nagarjuna's Chapter 8 against the rubric's agent-function-claimant structure. The specific contribution is: traditions do not merely distribute credit differently; they stand in different relationships to the very possibility of credit attribution. That relationship is a separable variable that sits before both the support-locus analysis and the credit-distribution typology, and it determines whether the forbidden-claimant column, the credit-distribution type, or neither is the right analytical tool for a given tradition.

Four objections carry weight. First, the mixed-by-stage category risks becoming a residual bin that absorbs counterexamples without analytical cost. Chinul, Zen post-satori practice, Sufi stage-dependent attribution, and Advaita's preparatory-to-recognition sequence can all be coded as 'mixed,' potentially making the taxonomy unfalsifiable at the points where it should be most diagnostic. The model needs stated limiting cases: what would a tradition look like that the mixed category cannot accommodate? Second, predictive sharpness declines for non-regulatory traditions. The original rubric generated specific predictions about wrong-claimant failure patterns. For dissolutive and ontological traditions, the predicted failure modes (formalism, reification, premature realization claims) are less tightly derived from the model's structure and overlap with dangers that most contemplative traditions recognize regardless of their claimability stance. Third, the claimability meta-category may still impose an outsider's frame. A Madhyamaka teacher might say that emptiness analysis does not 'take a stance toward claimability'; it shows that claimability, like all designations, is dependently arisen. Calling that a 'dissolutive stance' is more respectful than calling it a 'forbidden claimant,' but it is still an analyst's grid applied to a tradition's self-understanding. Fourth, the model has not been tested against primary manuals or practitioners. The teacher test proposed by both agents is essential: without it, the three-stance taxonomy remains a philosophical construction with unverified cross-traditional validity.