Part Five · The Three Repentances · A Ladder from Shallow to Deep

The part before this walked to the end of that bridge, and we discovered one thing: from Part One through Part Four, the repentance we have been speaking of has all along been a single kind — repentance on the phenomenal face. The marks of the offense plainly there, the object clearly set, the action "speak it out, and seek its extinction."

But repentance does not come in this "phenomenal" kind alone.

The Sui master Zhiyi sorted repentance into three grades and set them up as a ladder from shallow to deep: procedural repentance, sign-contemplating repentance (which later ages also call sign-based repentance), and the repentance of non-arising. This part walks that very ladder — but only the lower two rungs, leaving the highest one at the doorway.

Two chapters. The first stands well back to survey the whole ladder: what each of the three rungs does, how they pass one to the next, and why it is called a "ladder" rather than three methods to be picked from at will. The second crouches down and looks hard at the middle rung — sign-based repentance — because it is the easiest to pass over, and yet it is the very rung at which repentance first needs "concentration," the rung where it is drawn in from outside the Saṅgha into the individual's stilled mind: the vertebra where phenomenal repentance grows into principial repentance.

Walking this ladder, one thing must be nailed down first, or the later pages will be read askew: to climb a higher rung is not to tear down the rungs below. Zhiyi fitted each of the three rungs with the one word "buttress" — procedural repentance buttresses morality, sign-contemplating repentance buttresses concentration, non-arising repentance buttresses wisdom. To buttress is to aid, to reinforce — not to replace. The higher rung contains the lower, extinguishing one more layer of offense at a greater depth, rather than declaring the lower rung void. This ladder is layer containing layer: climbing the rungs, not dismantling them.

As for the highest rung — the repentance of non-arising — and the deepest question it turns back to behold (that offense, that self who comes seeking repentance: were they ever real?), this part walks only to its doorway, points it out at the top of the ladder, and does not yet push the door. The country behind that door is kept for the deepest part of this whole book, where it will be pushed open in earnest. There is a reason in this: a ladder is climbed by treading each rung firm, one at a time; only when the two rungs underfoot stand steady, and you then lift your eyes to the highest one, do you see it true.

We step back first, and look at the shape of this whole ladder.