How to Determine Whether a Person Has Attained Enlightenment in the Cultivation and Realization of the Buddha-Dharma

In worldly affairs, to serve as a judge, one must thoroughly understand the matter being judged—that is, one must be knowledgeable in the field. For example, to evaluate the teaching quality of a university professor, one's own level of learning must be higher than, or at least equal to, that professor's; to evaluate the quality of a university student's thesis, one must be a university teacher. In the cultivation and realization of the Buddha-dharma, to judge whether someone has awakened or has seen their nature, one must first be a person who has seen the true mind and perceived one's nature. Only by having walked that path and become familiar with it can one know whether the path others are walking is correct, and also know what stage they have reached. For making judgments about the Buddha-dharma, the minimum requirement is to have the dharma-selecting eye; better still is to have no more than few doubts about the main teachings of the Buddha-dharma; best of all is to have realized that dharma—only then can one make a relatively accurate judgment. Those who have cultivated to such a level are very few. To judge whether others have attained realization of the fruits, one must first attain the fruits oneself. Only by attaining the first fruit can one eliminate doubts—no longer doubting whether one has attained the fruit oneself, no longer doubting whether one's teacher has attained the fruit, and no longer doubting whether the dharma can enable sentient beings to eliminate self-view (ātma-dṛṣṭi) and self-grasping. Otherwise, one cannot judge others. When one does not yet have one's own scale markings, it is impossible to measure other things.