Part Seven · The Repentance of Non-Arising: Transgression Has No Own-Being · Was the Self That Erred Ever Real

We have come to the deepest part of the whole book.

In the six parts before this, we have seen the whole landscape of repentance — its acts, its institutions, its psychological engine, its limits, the summit of worship, the death-and-rebirth bridge, the ladder of the three repentances, the two poles of the Chinese repentance liturgies. Yet however high the road climbed, every repentance along the way asked one and the same question: "how is this transgression to be cleared?" It granted that the transgression was apparently there, really existent, and then sought ways to clear it, lessen it, turn it.

This part asks that no longer. It turns back and asks a more fundamental, and more startling, question: that transgression, that "I" who erred — were they themselves ever real?

At several crossroads along the way we set up signposts — King Ajātaśatru's Dharma-eye, won on the very seat, from which there is no going back; the highest rung of the ladder of the three repentances, "the repentance of non-arising," named at the top; Master Zhiyi's word before the tenth stage of the Lotus Samādhi Repentance that there "one must then set aside what was practiced before" — all pointing at one and the same door. Now we push it open. Behind it is the repentance of non-arising, the one that answers to that one word of the Heart Sūtra: "emptiness." Through the first six parts we have kept that word pressed down, unspoken; here, the time has come.

Four chapters. The first uncovers the great matter head-on: at repentance's deepest point, what happens is not the erasing of a really-existent transgression, but the seeing that "the self that erred" and "the transgression I committed" cannot, from the first, be apprehended — the repentance of non-arising, the emptiness of the Heart Sūtra appearing in the gate of repentance. The second walks into the fullest scene of this teaching — Vimalakīrti rebukes Upāli — to watch the paradox that "the true keeper of the Vinaya is precisely the one who knows that transgression has no own-being." The third sets this "emptiness," one by one, into the six sense-gates of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind, to watch it land as a principial repentance of the body. The fourth lays the whole volume across the two hundred and some characters of the Heart Sūtra, phrase by phrase.

Three boundary-stones must first be set firm at the door. First: to see that transgression has no own-being is by no means to say "transgression is a fiction, so one may do as one pleases" — what emptiness negates is transgression's own-being, not karma's fruit; transgression's nature is empty, karmic fruit is not empty; emptiness is a seeing, not annihilation. Second: what is "emptied" here is the grasping that takes transgression as really existent and reproaches it over and over, together with the "I" who repents — not the fact that karma was once made; "free of the mark of transgression" is not "free of transgression." Third: to climb this highest rung does not dismantle the stairs below — the repentance of non-arising stands upon the two beneath it and lends them support, it does not replace them; one who has not yet repented concretely, in the phenomenal, has no standing to say "transgression is originally empty."

One more word on method: "repentance answers to the Heart Sūtra's emptiness," "the Six Practice Gates answer to the Heart Sūtra's five verbs and one emptiness" — this is this book's own reading, not the sūtra's explicit wording, and not the consensus of the historical commentaries. It is laid open for inspection, not a claim that the sūtra wrote it so all along.

The boundary-stones are set. We push open the door, to look at the deepest question of all: was transgression itself ever real?