What a Repentance Rite Looks Like

6.1 What a Repentance Rite Looks Like

The words of a repentance liturgy were not, at the start, clauses someone sat down to draft. By the record of the Sūtra of Golden Light, they were first struck out of a golden drum, in a dream.

The Golden-Drum Dream

There was a bodhisattva named Ruci. One night he dreamed of a golden drum:

Then the bodhisattva Ruci, that very night, dreamed of a golden drum — vast and beautiful, its radiance flooding everywhere like the light of the sun; and within that light he saw the measureless, boundless Buddhas of the ten directions, seated on lapis-lazuli seats beneath jeweled trees, surrounded by measureless retinues of hundreds of thousands, teaching the Dharma. And he saw a figure like a brahmin who, striking the drum with a beater, sent forth a great sound; and that sound proclaimed verses of repentance.

The drum was vast and beautiful, its light bright as the light of the sun. And within that light he saw the measureless Buddhas of the ten directions, seated on lapis-lazuli seats beneath jeweled trees, surrounded by measureless retinues, teaching the Dharma. And in the dream there was a figure like a brahmin who, striking the drum with a beater, sent forth a great sound; and what that sound proclaimed was verse after verse of repentance.

Ruci woke from the dream and committed those verses, word by word, to memory with utmost mind. At first light he went out of Rājagṛha to the Buddha's dwelling on Vulture Peak, bowed his head, circumambulated to the right three times, and then, before the Buddha, recited from beginning to end the golden drum he had seen in the dream and the verses of repentance he had heard.

Mark the order of this provenance: the words of repentance are first a sound that is heard — struck out of a golden drum that holds the light of the sun; then they are committed to memory with utmost mind and carried before the Buddha to be recited; and only afterward, on Chinese soil, are they arranged and enlarged by generation after generation of patriarchs, growing into rites one can walk into and follow step by step.

From the sound of a golden drum in a dream to a liturgy on an altar — what this chapter looks at is exactly that process of taking shape, and the shape it established. And to see the shape clearly, it is best to go back first to the golden drum itself: what kind of verse, exactly, did it strike out?

That Golden Drum Struck Out the Whole Shape of Repentance

The long verse Ruci recited before the Buddha had, in fact, already laid out the entire shape of repentance in a single breath. Take it apart, and you find it is not a single act of "admitting guilt" but a chain of links, each hooked into the next.

It says first that the sound of this golden drum can "extinguish utterly all the sufferings of the three times" — setting up a vision of the ending of suffering.

Then it turns to disclosure. Line by line the verse counts out its own evil karma: evil done in the heedlessness of high birth, wealth, and the prime of youth; evil done in the company of bad friends, the mind thrown into disorder by the afflictions; the evils gathered by body, speech, and mind… The count runs on and gathers, at the last, into four lines — and those four lines are exactly the spine this book has been tracing since Part One —

All the evils of the past, I now repent them all; the wrongs now done, I disclose with a sincere heart; what has not yet been done, I will not dare to do; the karma already done, I dare not conceal.

"Disclose with a sincere heart." "Dare not conceal." Laying what was hidden out into the light — the plainest gesture in the Vinaya, and here in the golden-drum verse of the Sūtra of Golden Light it is still one and the same.

And after disclosure? The verse goes on to ask that "the water of great compassion wash them clean" — that the stains of these wrongs be washed away. Then it does not stop at "now I am clean" but turns outward on the spot: "in reverence I bow to the ocean of Buddhas," paying homage to the Buddhas of the ten directions; making offering to all the Buddhas of the three-thousandfold great thousand worlds; vowing to "draw out and deliver all the measureless beings of the ten directions from all their sufferings"; and at the last, all the good practiced is "dedicated entire" — dedicated to the unsurpassed Way.

Look at the road this one verse travels: ending suffering → disclosing one's own evil → asking to be washed clean → paying homage to the Buddhas → offering → delivering beings → dedication to the unsurpassed Way.

This is the full shape of a repentance liturgy. It is not a solitary "owning of a fault" but a string of links running head to tail: it opens with disclosure, washes away the old stains, and turns at once to homage, offering, the good of others, dedication. In other words, from the very start repentance was never only "the settling of my old accounts"; it carries, in the same motion, an orientation toward the Buddhas, toward beings, toward what is to come. When we reach the Chinese repentance rites we will see this string of links — repentance, entreaty, rejoicing, dedication, vow — gathered into a fixed structure called the "fivefold repentance." And its first form had already been struck out, here, in the verse of this golden drum.

(One distinction should be made clear first, between the two words chan and hui themselves — which returns to this book's opening parsing of three terms: chan is to lay one's past wrongdoing openly out, to disclose it; hui is to reform the past and turn toward the future. One looks backward, the other walks forward; only together do they make the complete turning-around. In the golden-drum verse, the line "the wrongs now done, I disclose with a sincere heart" is chan; the line "what has not yet been done, I will not dare to do" is hui — one disclosure, one guarding, the two beats both present.)

Why Make It into a Liturgy

At this point a question floats up of itself.

If the deepest, most ultimate face of repentance is that single inward thought of seeing (the repentance of non-arising that Part Seven, ahead, will treat), then why make it into a whole apparatus — an altar to bind, homage to pay, offerings to make, a liturgy to be walked again and again through the six periods of day and night? Is this not winding a direct inner transformation into a heap of ceremonial fuss?

And the story of the golden drum itself seems to press the same question: what Ruci heard was, at the origin, a sound, a verse; yet those who came after insisted on spreading it out into a whole program of altar, seats, invitation, and homage. Why?

Zhiyi answered that question.

He concedes: the deepest kind of repentance — the principial repentance that binds attention to the real mark — is "the first repentance," the highest; on this he is in no way evasive. But he points at once to a real difficulty: this highest repentance is "subtle and hidden in the mind-principle," with layer upon layer of "the covering of dark evil" blocking the way, and so "hard to open all at once" — an ordinary person cannot do it in a single stroke; that one thought is too fine, too hard, beyond climbing to.

So what then? "One again mobilizes body and speech to aid the mental act" — the body and the mouth are marshaled too, and the visible, doable acts of body and speech — bowing, circling, calling the name, chanting — are set to "aiding" that subtle, hard-to-arouse thought, so that it may accord the sooner.

This is the reason the liturgy exists. The repentance liturgy is not repentance degenerated into form; quite the opposite: it is built for that subtle, hard-to-arouse inner transformation — a scaffold of flesh and blood that a real person can actually set foot on and climb. A beginner may not yet manage the single thought of "contemplating the real mark," but he can first put the ritual arena in order; he can first bow to the Buddhas, prostration by prostration; he can first chant aloud a verse of repentance like the golden drum's. These phenomenal acts of body and speech lay a walkable path for the one who cannot yet reach the contemplation of principle.

The elaborateness of the liturgy is not display; it is the compassion of operability — it turns the highest Dharma into something an ordinary person can also reach. Ruci carrying the dream's verse before the Buddha and reciting it was already the first form of this step: what was heard in the mind, turned into what the mouth recites and the body enacts.

And Zhiyi kept the line between "phenomenon" and "principle" here extremely clean. He composed, on the basis of the Sūtra of Golden Light, a Golden Light repentance rite, and in editing it wrote down a plain eight-character rule: "the procedure is recorded directly; the contemplative wisdom is set out separately." The phenomena — how the arena is adorned, how the seats are placed, how the order of invitation proceeds — are recorded as they stand; the contemplative wisdom — that inner layer of contemplation — is handled apart, not mixed into the phenomena. The liturgy carries the "phenomenal" face to its utmost, yet never pretends that this "phenomenon" is identical to that deepest "principle."

Two Faces

The shape set up, these repentances must be sorted into two faces.

One may be called the "contemplative repentance rite" — however many its phenomena, all of them gather at the last into contemplation; the terminus of the whole liturgy is that single inward thought of contemplative regard. The phenomena serve the contemplation of principle. The Lotus Samādhi Repentance Rite, composed by Zhiyi on the basis of the Lotus Sūtra, is the fullest specimen of this type; the next chapter is given to it.

The other may be called the "ceremonial repentance rite" — its center of gravity lies in homage, in calling the name, in drawing the suffering dead up and across to liberation; it has no terminus that gathers into inner contemplation. The most famous is the Liang Emperor's Jeweled Repentance; the third chapter of this part is given to it.

So a contrast appears: one side gathers into the contemplation of principle; the other is weighted toward phenomenal homage and toward drawing others up out of suffering.

But the moment this contrast is offered, a qualification must be added at once: it is a heuristic that aids understanding, not a sharp chasm, and still less a category the patriarchs set up themselves. In fact most rites carry both faces — and the golden-drum verse of the Sūtra of Golden Light is the best example: it has the inward, purifying face of "disclose with a sincere heart" and "wash them clean with the water of great compassion," and the outward, other-serving face of "making offering to the Buddhas of the three-thousandfold great thousand worlds" and "delivering all the beings of the ten directions." In one rite, the two faces commonly stand together. So the contemplative rite and the ceremonial rite are two ends of a single spectrum, not two separate boxes.

One more word, to forestall misunderstanding. In these rites there is often an object who is bowed to, invited, and called the "lord." This object is one revered and taken refuge in, not an official who pronounces a pardon. In the Chinese repentance liturgies, the extinguishing of offense rests on the mind's own truthful disclosure in accord with the Dharma, together with the sustaining power of the Buddhas — like the golden-drum verse's plea that "the water of great compassion wash them clean": that is the sustaining grace of the Buddhas' great compassion, not the declaration of some holder of power — "your offense is absolved." This line the book has held from the limits of grave offenses all the way to here: to receive is not to be absolved.

Walking On

The shape of the genre now stands: it begins from a verse of repentance, running head to tail, struck out of a golden drum; its elaborateness is the expedient of compassion, there to aid that subtle, hard-to-arouse thought; it divides into two ends — the inward contemplative rite and the outward ceremonial rite — and the two ends commonly coexist in a single rite.

In the next chapter we walk into the first ritual arena — the Lotus Samādhi Repentance Rite, composed by Zhiyi on the basis of the Lotus Sūtra — to see how an "inward" contemplative rite uses phenomenal acts, layer upon layer, to lead a person up to the deepest door.