Crouch Down at the Middle Rung

5.2 Crouch Down at the Middle Rung

The last chapter stood back and looked at the whole ladder. This chapter does the opposite: it crouches down and looks hard at the rung in the middle — sign-based repentance.

Why pick out the middle rung for the close look? Because it is the easiest to pass over.

Procedural repentance can be seen — it happens within the Saṅgha, with an owning-up, a procedure, a countable number of monks; anyone can recognize it as a thing of the kind "own up before others, and let an institution judge you clean." Non-arising repentance, with "emptiness" and "non-arising" in its very name, carries instead a certain air of mystery that tempts one to leap straight across to it. Wedged between them, sign-based repentance has neither the institution's visibility nor emptiness's allure, and so it is often read as "just sitting in meditation and seeing a few auspicious omens" — as though it were an upgrade of procedural repentance, or a warm-up for non-arising.

This is a misreading. What makes the middle rung the vertebra is precisely that it does one thing the rung before did not do and the rung after does not repeat: it draws repentance into the concentrated mind.

Repentance, for the First Time, on Your Own Concentrated Mind

Procedural repentance is completed in the "external setting" of the Saṅgha — it leans on the mouth, on the assembly, on the rule. Sign-based repentance turns wholly into the "stilled mind." Zhiyi says it plainly:

The practitioner, following the methods of repentance set out in the scriptures, with focused mind and applied intent, sees within a stilled mind various signs … all this is done within the concentrated mind, and so sign-contemplating repentance is mostly expounded according to the methods of cultivating concentration.

The hinge is the last clause — "all this is done within the concentrated mind." This is the first time repentance no longer leans on people outside to judge for you, but asks you first to settle your own mind, and within that concentration to see the sign and judge by the sign.

Later Tiantai's Zhili gave this rung a cleaner fixed name, in eight characters: "the concentrated mind conjures the contemplation, and takes the arising of a sign as its term." There must be a "concentrated mind"; there must be "conjuring the contemplation" (an intentional contemplating done within concentration); and "the arising of a sign" is the term, the verification.

Repentance, by here, has for the first time become a thing that takes effort, takes a stilled mind, takes waiting for the sign to arise. It is no longer an act completed in one stroke; it begins to be a process. And a process is exactly the place where phenomenal repentance grows its contemplation of principle. This is why we say the middle rung is "the vertebra where phenomenal repentance grows into principial repentance."

(One word must be added: to read this rung as "the vertebra, the pivot, between the phenomenal and the principial" is this book's synthesizing reading. Zhiyi's own "buttresses concentration" and Zhili's own "takes the arising of a sign as its term" are solid textual ground; but to read it as a "pivot," and to join it to the sequence of the six gates, is this book's organizing frame, not something Zhiyi presupposed in his day. It is enough that the reader know it for one reading.)

Where the Signs Come From, and What They Look Like

Since this rung takes "the arising of a sign" for its term, one must first ask: what sign is it? Where does it come from?

The most cited source for "seeing an auspicious sign" is a passage of the Brahmā's Net Sūtra on repenting a grave precept:

An auspicious sign means: a Buddha comes to stroke your crown; you see light, see flowers, and various extraordinary signs — and the offense is then extinguished. Without an auspicious sign, repentance, though made, brings no avail.

A Buddha strokes the crown of your head; you see light, see flowers — these "various extraordinary signs" are the auspicious sign, and once one is seen, the offense counts as extinguished. Zhiyi, for his part, gives a more structured set, "the four kinds of signs":

Signs do not exceed four kinds: first, signs seen in dream; second, while practicing, hearing a voice in the air, or seeing strange signs and various numinous omens; third, seeing in seated stillness signs of good and evil, of precept-breaking and precept-keeping; fourth, taking the inward realization of various dharma-gates and the opening-forth of the mind of the way as a sign.

Watch the ordering of these four: from dream, to the time of practice, to seated stillness, and at last to "the opening-forth of inward dharma-gates" — from outer to inner, from object-sign all the way to mind-sign. The last kind is no longer "seeing something"; it is "something in the mind has turned." The ordering itself betrays the direction of sign-based repentance: the sign need not halt at outer scenes such as "seeing a Buddha, seeing light"; its deepest kind is a turning of the mind.

As for how these signs are to be sought and contemplated, Zhiyi himself pushed the matter away:

What is the practice-method of sign-contemplating repentance? Answer: the method is set out in the various Mahāyāna Vaipulya sūtras; let the practitioner seek the sūtras for himself and act by the text.

If even he says "seek the sūtras yourself," this book oversteps still less to teach the operation. How these contemplations settle into concrete liturgies, rite after rite, is the business of the next part, on the Chinese repentance liturgies; here they are named only, not taught.

The Sign, in Fact, Cannot Be Relied On

The last section made the sign sound quite reliable: see the auspicious sign, and the offense is extinguished. Yet the true axis of sign-based repentance is exactly the reverse line — the sign cannot be relied on.

The first unreliability: the sign can be false. As said before, māra too can make light and auspicious flowers; "the false and the true are hard to tell apart," and a good teacher must discern them face to face.

The second unreliability: the sign can also be the mind deceiving itself. One sūtra sets up a check against self-deception — if a person has already seen and heard all manner of excellent things before the pure sign has been sought, that is no auspicious sign; it is hollow, it is one's own defiled mind rushing ahead to fabricate for itself a counterfeit "I am already pure." One gate guards against the māra outside; one guards against the self-deceit inside — together they are a double gate.

But the single most crucial line of sign-based repentance is not "how to tell true from false"; it is a line that pulls the firewood out from under the pot: even a true sign must not be grasped. Zhiyi says:

What is meant by contemplating signs is only this: apply the mind and practice; when the effort succeeds and the sign appears, take it for the judgment, and one knows whether the offense is extinguished or not. It does not mean that, while practicing, one keeps the sign in mind and gives rise to grasping. If one applies the mind so, the work of māra will surely come in abundance.

The sign appears, and you "take it for the judgment" — you use it to judge whether the offense has been extinguished; the sign is a criterion. But it is by no means a call to halt the mind on the sign and hold it fast. If you truly glue the mind to the sign, "the work of māra will surely come in abundance."

This is the axis of sign-based repentance, and the paradox of a thing whose very name says "take the sign" yet which teaches you "do not take the sign": the sign is for verifying (whether the offense is extinguished), not for abiding in (it is not the home your practice returns to). It teaches you to use the sign without being used by it. Once the sign is taken for a goal, an attainment, an experience to be savored over and over, it turns from verification into attachment, from helper into the doorway of māra's work.

It is worth pausing on one layer: why is this injunction, "do not grasp," set precisely at the rung named for "taking the sign"? Procedural repentance has no such problem — you own up before the Saṅgha, and there is no "sign" there for you to grasp at. Nor has non-arising repentance at the other end — by the time you arrive there, the sign has already been seen through into emptiness, and there is no sign to take. Only the middle rung is the one at which signs really do arise, do appear, do grow vivid enough to make one want to seize them — and so only here does "must not grasp" become a gate that cannot be left unset.

To put it another way: sign-based repentance is the only one of the three that hands you "something worth grasping at," and then teaches you, on the spot, not to grasp it. This is exactly where its weight as a pivot lies: it does not preach letting go where there is no temptation; it teaches letting go just where the temptation is most concrete.

And it is exactly this inner momentum — "the sign arises, yet one does not abide in the sign" — that points sign-based repentance toward the next rung. To see the sign and not take the sign — to make the sign a measure, and not a home — this turn is already a turning of the body toward the contemplation of principle. The sign is still there (this end joined to the phenomenal); the mind no longer abides in the sign (that end opening onto the principial). The body within the sign and the mind unstuck from the sign — that is the very instant at which the words "from the phenomenal into the principial" actually happen.

Neither End Can Be Spared

If sign-based repentance were only "sitting in meditation and seeing auspicious omens," then it could indeed be skipped: either go back to procedural repentance and own up properly, or run straight for non-arising repentance and contemplate emptiness. The reason it cannot be skipped is that what it does, neither rung before nor after can do in its place.

Downward, it breaks an offense that procedural repentance cannot reach.

Of the three grades of offense Zhiyi sorts, procedural repentance breaks the "instituted offense" — an offense that exists only because the Buddha instituted a precept and you violated the institution; only once the precept is laid down does it exist. Sign-based repentance breaks the "offense of intrinsic nature" — killing, stealing, acts evil in themselves, which wait on no instituted precept; to commit them is already to do harm. He cites a very hard line:

If a monk breaks the precept against killing, then though he repents and the precept-substance is made pure and the path-obstructing offense extinguished, yet the karmic retribution for the killing is not extinguished.

A monk has broken the precept against killing; repenting according to the rule, he can have "the precept-substance made pure and the path-obstructing offense extinguished" — the layer procedural repentance can repair (the precept-substance restored, the path no longer obstructed) comes back; but "the karmic retribution for the killing is not extinguished" — the karmic fruit the killing carries in cause and effect, procedural repentance cannot touch. What can go a step further and touch this layer, "the offense of intrinsic nature," is sign-based repentance, because "the effort it takes is great." (This line — "the path-obstructing offense extinguished, yet the retribution for the killing not extinguished" — speaks in the same voice as the salt-simile of the earlier part on karmic fruit: the fruit cannot be cancelled in one stroke.)

Upward, it still does not reach the ultimate — the offense of intrinsic nature broken, the deepest root offense of ignorance remains, and that is the business of the highest rung. So sign-based repentance is wedged in the middle: deeper than procedural repentance, shallower than non-arising. What it breaks is a different grade of offense — not procedural repentance done over again, but the next layer dug down after it.

Then between it and procedural repentance — which, in the end, supersedes which? The Vinaya master Yuanzhao spoke a piece of reasoning that can be borrowed to settle this dead. He says: if one relies only on the contemplation of principle to behold the offense's nature, yet does not repent according to the Vinaya, the result is "though one gains an auspicious sign, one does not enter the pure saṅgha" — you may indeed have seen an auspicious sign in concentration, but the institutional face of the Saṅgha is not clean, and you cannot enter the ranks of the pure Saṅgha. The other way around: if one relies only on the Vinaya repentance, without the wisdom of contemplation, the result is "the violation of institution is extinguished, yet the karmic nature stands firm" — the institutional face is clean, but the offense at the layer of karmic nature most certainly remains.

These two phrases together overturn the question "which supersedes which" altogether: the instituted offense and the offense of intrinsic nature are two different offenses, and lacking either face leaves a gap that cannot be closed. The higher rung cannot fill the lower rung's place, nor the lower the higher's.

Tiantai's Zhili gave the cleanest one-line summary of the whole: "Though the methods are three, they are performed in one and the same time. Better to lack in the earlier than to fall short in the later. Non-arising is most essential; sign-taking is still lenient." The three repentances are not a matter of finishing one before changing to the next; they run in one and the same time, layer pervading layer — and the higher one goes, the less it may be lacked. But mark this: he speaks of weight, not of supersession. The weights differ, and yet all three rungs remain, layer upon layer. The higher grade does not abolish the lower — this is exactly the boundary-stone the last chapter set, here made firm in Zhili's own words.

And sign-based repentance itself has not yet broken free of the "phenomenal." Zhili, judging the Suvarṇaprabhāsa repentance rite, says of it:

Sign-based repentance — as in the Vaipulya rite's seeking the twelve dream-kings, the bodhisattva-precept rite's seeing flowers and light and the stroking of the crown, the Ākāśagarbha rite's voice-proclaiming and arm-sealing — the sign arises and the offense is extinguished. Though it does not directly set forth a formal procedure, it also obtains phenomenal function.

The four words "also obtains phenomenal function" matter greatly: though it does not, like procedural repentance, walk the Saṅgha's rule out in the open, it is still a phenomenal repentance that carries the "sign" for its token; it has not yet been purified into principial repentance. Which proves, once more, exactly this: it stands between the phenomenal and the principial — one foot still in the phenomenal sign (a sign must be seen; the sign arises and the offense is extinguished), one foot already stepping toward the contemplation of principle (the sign arises, yet one does not abide in the sign). Treading on both ends; neither end can be spared.

One Thing to See Clearly Here

Having looked at the middle rung this closely, a few things must be nailed down.

First, sign-based repentance is not a method for seeking visions. It takes "seeing an auspicious sign" for its token, but its whole design — the guard against māra's work, the sorting of false from true, the injunction "must not grasp" — is precisely what dismantles the road of "pursuing visions, collecting mystical experiences." To take it for "sitting in meditation to see light and flowers" is to mistake the verification for the goal — the very bypath of which Zhiyi says "the work of māra will surely come in abundance."

Second, it does not supersede procedural repentance. Yuanzhao's two phrases — "does not enter the pure saṅgha" and "the karmic nature stands firm" — have already proved it: the instituted offense and the offense of intrinsic nature are two offenses, and lacking either face leaves a gap. Climbing the rungs is not dismantling them; Zhili's "performed in one and the same time — better to lack in the earlier than to fall short in the later" speaks of weight, not of replacement.

Third, the highest rung is named only, and we keep outside the door. The summit of the three repentances — non-arising repentance — these two chapters have, from first to last, only named, never entered. What it contemplates, how it ultimately removes the very source of the deepest grade of offense — all of that is kept for the far end of this volume. The middle rung's turn, "the sign arises, yet one does not abide in the sign," is a turning of the body toward that door; but the country behind the door, this part does not open.

Walking On

Sign-based repentance has now been looked at closely: it takes "the arising of a sign" for its token, yet teaches one "not to take the sign" — and it is precisely in this one taking and one releasing that repentance turns from the rule outside, in the Saṅgha, into the individual's concentrated mind; and from that one thought within concentration, "not abiding in the sign," points on toward the deeper contemplation of principle.

The shape of the three repentances, by here, stands set.

But these contemplations that "take the arising of a sign, and extinguish offense by the sign" — landed in practice, how are they actually cultivated, rite by rite? Zhiyi said "let the practitioner seek the sūtras for himself," and taught no operation. What repentance rites, then, did the patriarchs of the Chinese land compile out of these contemplations — rites one can actually take up and follow? The Liang Emperor's Jeweled Repentance, the Lotus samādhi, the Water Repentance — these names we know so well: where did they come from?

That is the business of the next part.