As Many Days Hidden, So Many Days to Walk

1.2 As Many Days Hidden, So Many Days to Walk

The last chapter closed on one line: to disclose is ease; to conceal obstructs the path.

It sounds like a gentle word against covering things over. In fact the Vinaya is far harder than that. It does not merely urge you not to cover over; it puts a price on the covering. This chapter spreads that price list out to look at. Read it to the bottom and you will find: what the Vinaya proves, over and over, through its most elaborate procedure, is a principle of the plainest kind.

An Offense the Saṅgha Can Still Bring You Back From

Picture a bhikkhu who has broken one of the graver precepts. How grave? The Vinaya jurists graded the offenses. The gravest class is called pārājika: commit it, and the standing of a bhikkhu is lost forever; the Saṅgha cannot bring you back. The class below it is called saṅghādisesa — rendered in Chinese as "Saṅgha-remnant," a name that itself carries the meaning: the person, though gravely wounded, has something left, and the Saṅgha can still bring him back. Which acts count as saṅghādisesa is the specialist matter of the precepts, and this book does not list them; we look at one thing only: once it is committed, how does a person become pure again?

The road the Vinaya lays for saṅghādisesa is a ladder: first a stretch of probation (parivāsa) — dwelling apart from the pure assembly, standing lowered a step; then six nights of mānatta; and at last the Saṅgha performs the formal act of rehabilitation, declaring the person restored to purity.

From the outside, this looks all too much like sentencing. There is a term, there is a demotion, and at the end a courtroom-style pronouncement. More suspicious still, the "term" can lengthen — the longer the cover-up, the longer the probation. And yet, fix your eyes on one place, and the nature of the whole procedure turns over. That place is concealment.

That Word "At Once"

The Vinaya records a contrast that could not be cleaner. A bhikkhu had committed two saṅghādisesa offenses, and concealed neither; later he disrobed, then returned and received full ordination again, and disclosed the two offenses. The Vinaya's verdict:

A bhikkhu had committed two saṅghādisesa offenses and concealed neither; he left the order. Having left and then received full ordination again, he disclosed the two offenses — the Saṅgha should at once give him mānatta for the two offenses.

Fix on that phrase, at once. The one who never concealed enters, upon disclosure, "at once" into the six nights of mānatta — and the whole stretch of probation is waived entire.

By contrast, the road of the one who concealed is long: a stretch of probation must first be made up, and only when probation is complete does it join on to mānatta and rehabilitation. The offense on either side is equally grave; the roads walked are one long, one short. And the difference hangs on one thing alone: hidden, or not hidden.

This says outright what probation is. The probationary stage is not a price set on the offense; it is a price set on the hiding. No hiding, and the stage never starts; hide, and only then is it inserted.

One Night for One, Ten Nights for Ten

How, then, is the price of hiding reckoned? The answer is so simple it is nearly arithmetic: as many nights hidden, so many nights of probation.

The Dharmaguptaka Vinaya calls this "according to the days concealed" — according to however many days you covered it. Those words are the measuring rod. One petitioning for probation must say, before the Saṅgha:

I, the monk so-and-so, having committed a saṅghādisesa offense, now according to the days concealed ask the Saṅgha for the concealment-act. May the Saṅgha grant me the act according to the days concealed.

The Mahīśāsaka Vinaya records the worked example of one: a bhikkhu who concealed for one night asks the Saṅgha for one night's probation. The Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya records the worked example of ten: ten nights concealed, ten nights of probation requested. One for one, ten for ten; Vinaya after Vinaya, southern transmission and northern, the arithmetic is identical.

More telling still is an asymmetry within the ladder. The days of probation are live — they stretch and shrink with the days hidden; but the mānatta that follows hard upon it is fixed — six nights flat, whether you hid for one night or a hundred. The only stretch that scales is the one tied to hiding. If this procedure were pricing the gravity of the offense, the whole road should lengthen with it; it does not. Of the whole road, only the one stage built for hiding lengthens with the hiding.

Probation counts not the offense, but the hiding.

The Days of Probation: Turning the Hidden into the Disclosed

The one on probation has not been driven out of the Saṅgha. He is still within it, only lowered a step in standing: he may not take disciples, may not instruct others; his seat falls to the end of the assembly; for the time being he receives no bows. This is demotion, not banishment.

And among the rules to be kept during probation, there is one that gives the intent of the whole design away completely.

The Vinaya records: a bhikkhu on probation conceived a thought — better not join the assembly for the meal today, lest the other bhikkhus see that I am on probation and know that I once concealed. The Buddha's reply could hardly be shorter:

The one undergoing concealment-probation thought: "I will not go to the meal, for fear the other monks will know I am undergoing it." The Buddha said: It must not be so.

Not permitted. You may not take even the fact "I am on probation" and hide that too. The one on probation must declare his standing, unprompted, to every bhikkhu he meets; on the day of the recitation he declares it; at the year-end assembly he declares it; his seat is set in the last row, where everyone can see.

See the fineness of this design. The original disease arose from hiding — tucking the fault away into the dark; the medicine now is daily declaration, known to all — being invited back under the open sky. Probation, it turns out, is not solitary confinement; probation is the antidote to concealment, and the active ingredient of the antidote is concealment's exact opposite. As many days as you hid, so many days you stand in the light, until the habit of hiding is worn clean away.

The Clock Resets to Zero

There is one more device in this procedure, called reset to day one — literally, "sent back to the first day."

Let the Saṅgha perform for that monk the formal reset-to-day-one act.

If during probation the old ways return and an offense of the same class is committed, the answer is not a few days added to the term: the days already walked are struck out at a stroke, and the count begins again from day one. The Vinaya of the southern transmission further lists three "night-breaks" — three circumstances under which that night does not count — and one of them is failure to declare: the day you stop declaring to the assembly, that day's probation does not count.

Set the two devices side by side: how long you hid fixes how far back this road begins; stopping the laying-bare severs, at any moment, the road already walked. Head and tail, they watch one and the same thing — whether you are continuously, truly, laying yourself out in the light. This procedure honors no account of "days endured"; what it wants is a habit worn away, not a calendar crossed off.

Coming Back Takes Twenty Witnesses

Probation walked, the six nights of mānatta fulfilled, one last step remains: rehabilitation — literally, to draw the person out, to call him back.

The weight of this step the Vinaya marks with a number. Saṅgha business is conducted, by the gravity of the matter, in four grades of quorum:

There are four kinds of Saṅgha: of four, of five, of ten, of twenty. … the Saṅgha of twenty may perform all acts — how much more, a Saṅgha beyond twenty!

For a person to receive full ordination — to become a bhikkhu in form — a Saṅgha of ten suffices as witness. But rehabilitation — re-attesting as pure a person who has walked the whole road — the Vinaya rules in plain words must have a full twenty; one short, and the offense is not removed. It is the only act in the entire Vinaya for which nothing less than twenty will do.

Ten to enter; twenty to come back. Why should the return be more solemn than the entry? Because what rehabilitation attests is a matter of the utmost gravity: a person who once fell, once concealed, and then walked back step by step is, from this day on, returned to his former place. With its largest-scale witness, the Saṅgha gravely receives him back into the ranks of the pure.

And at the act of rehabilitation, the person must recount aloud, before all, the whole road walked: what offense was committed, how many days hidden, how many days of probation, whether the count went back to zero, the six nights of mānatta now fulfilled, and the present petition to the Saṅgha for rehabilitation. The entire road is spoken out loud, heard by everyone. Disclosure as method is carried through to the very last moment.

The Words of One Seeking Healing, Not One Being Sentenced

Step back from the ladder, and one detail runs through it from end to end, worth singling out.

Probation, the reset to day one, mānatta, rehabilitation — not one stage is handed down as a sentence by the Saṅgha; every stage is petitioned for by the person himself, kneeling: the robe bared over one shoulder, bowing to the feet of the assembled monks, kneeling with palms joined, saying the same set of words three times —

I now ask the Saṅgha for the rehabilitation-act. May the Saṅgha grant me rehabilitation, out of compassion.

Hear those last words — out of compassion. I ask to walk this road; may the assembly, out of compassion, take me up and see me through it. — These are the words of one seeking healing, not the words of one being sentenced. Punishment is laid on from above; here, from first to last, it is the person himself who asks for the road, and at the road's end he is called back. So this procedure is, in its bones, not punishment but restoration to purity: it presses no one for a debt; it acknowledges one thing only — whether the person has come back.

Walking On

This chapter can be gathered into one tight phrase: the hidden obstructs, the disclosed is restored.

The one who covers blocks his own road; for the one who lays bare, the road opens again. What the Vinaya proves over and over, through its most elaborate procedure — the day-by-day pricing, the reset device, the twenty witnesses — is exactly this plain principle: what obstructs a person's path is often not the fault itself but the covering of the fault; and the starting point of purity is always to lay what was hidden back into the light.

But this procedure treats the one who has already hidden — the disease present, then the medicine given. The Saṅgha has another hand: can hiding be made hard to happen in the first place?

In the next chapter we go to see that other hand. Its first demonstrator is the Buddha Himself.