The Sun of Wisdom Shines Once, and the Frost and Dew Are Gone

7.1 The Sun of Wisdom Shines Once, and the Frost and Dew Are Gone

Return to the very beginning.

This volume opened with the most concrete, most palpable scene in the whole Vinaya: a monk, before a witness, disclosing his offense word by word, daring not conceal it. "I, so-and-so, committed such-and-such an offense."

From that moment on, a question already lay hidden beneath that sentence — who is the "I" who says this? What is the "offense" that is said?

What the first six parts answered, all along, was the phenomenal face of repentance: how disclosure cleanses, how concealment compounds into grave fault, how a liturgy grows a single act into a whole assembly. Those answers were all true, all necessary. But they treated "the self that erred" and "the transgression I committed" as two given poles, attending only to the traffic of purity and defilement that runs between them; they never turned the blade of the question around, against the poles themselves.

This chapter answers that question head-on.

The answer is this: 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. This is the repentance of non-arising — the emptiness of the Heart Sūtra appearing face-to-face in the gate of repentance, the one and only subtraction in the Six Practice Gates.

The Summit of the Three Repentances: Supporting Wisdom

To climb to this summit, first recognize its place on Master Zhiyi's ladder.

When the three repentances were set out earlier, we said: procedural repentance supports the precepts, sign-based repentance supports concentration, the repentance of non-arising supports wisdom. Master Zhiyi's own words:

Repentance by contemplating non-arising — this supports wisdom, and thereby clarifies repentance.

At that time the ladder was laid only as far as sign-based repentance (supporting concentration), and "the repentance of non-arising" was marked at the top — named, its substance held in reserve. To stand on this summit now is to redeem that promise. The rank Master Zhiyi gives this summit is the highest among all repentances:

Know, then, that the deep contemplation of non-arising is named the great repentance, the most honored and most sublime among all repentances. In every Mahāyāna sūtra that clarifies the method of repentance, all take this contemplation as their master. Apart from this contemplation, none can be named the great Vaipulya repentance.

"Most honored and most sublime," "all take this contemplation as their master" — he gathers the whole of Mahāyāna repentance under this one contemplative gate, "contemplating non-arising," treating it as the pivot by which Mahāyāna repentance is Mahāyāna repentance at all. (One thing must be said: this verdict of "most honored and most sublime" is Tiantai's retrospective integration of the repentance methods, Master Zhiyi's doctrinal-classification stance, not the self-statement of any single sūtra. Wherever the unified name "the repentance of non-arising" is used below, remember that it is the fruit of a Tiantai synthesis.)

And the word of guarding must be said once more: to climb to the summit of the repentance of non-arising does not abolish procedural repentance or sign-based repentance, still less turn back and fold the phenomenal repentance of the first six parts wholesale into emptiness, as a superseded lower rung. The root sense of "support" is just that — to uphold, to lend strength. Phenomenal repentance and principial repentance each have their own face, and phenomenal repentance has its own real, cleansing power; the summiting of principial repentance lends support to it — it does not depose it.

Sit Upright and Contemplate the Real Mark; the Host of Transgressions Are Like Frost and Dew

The mechanism of the repentance of non-arising finds its most condensed statement in a verse of the Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra:

The whole sea of karmic obstruction is born from deluded thought. If you would repent, sit upright and contemplate the real mark. The host of transgressions are like frost and dew; the sun of wisdom can dissolve them. Therefore, with a wholehearted mind, repent the six faculties of feeling.

The verse presses the entire mechanism into eight lines.

All karmic obstruction has its source in "deluded thought." And since the source is deluded thought, the road of remedy is not to seek outward for some absolver to wipe the obstruction away, but to "sit upright and contemplate the real mark" — to see the real mark. Once the real mark appears, the host of transgressions are like the frost of morning, the dew of night: once the sun of wisdom rises, they melt of themselves.

Look closely at the figure. Frost and dew vanish not because someone wipes them away by hand, but because, where the sunlight reaches, they never had a body in which to abide. This is the full weight of the words "the sun of wisdom": the dissolution of transgression is a seeing, not an absolution; a turn of cognition, not an easing of feeling.

Another passage of the same sūtra says this "seeing" still more transparently:

Contemplate the mind as no-mind: it arises from inverted thought… Such dharma-marks neither arise nor cease. What is transgression? What is merit? My own mind is empty; transgression and merit have no owner… Repentance such as this — contemplating the mind as no-mind, dharma not abiding in dharma, all dharmas released, the truth of cessation at peace — is named the repentance free of the mark of transgression.

Turn back and contemplate the very mind that committed the transgression, and you find "the mind as no-mind" — what is called the mind arises from inverted thought, and there is no substantial mind to be apprehended. And since the mind is itself empty, the transgression and the merit posited upon the mind have no owner to which they could be fastened: "My own mind is empty; transgression and merit have no owner." And the sūtra gives this seeing a name of the utmost precision — "the repentance free of the mark of transgression."

One word must be held fast here. What is negated is the "mark of transgression," not the "transgression." It does not say "there is no transgression" — the disclosed inventories of the first six parts all stand. It says: repentance carried to the point of seeing that transgression "has no really-existent own-mark." To admit that one has made karma, and to congeal that karma into a leaden real mark that lodges in the heart, are two different things. What the repentance free of the mark of transgression dissolves is the latter.

Transgression: Neither Within, Nor Without, Nor in Between

The real-mark repentance verse says transgression is "born from deluded thought"; the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sūtra pushes this "having no own-being" to its limit.

That scene will be told in detail in the next chapter; here we take only its most central sentence. Vimalakīrti says:

The nature of that transgression is neither within, nor without, nor in between. As the Buddha has said: because the mind is defiled, beings are defiled; because the mind is pure, beings are pure… As the mind is, so is the defilement of transgression, so are all dharmas — none departing from suchness.

To search everywhere for where transgression lies and find it nowhere — this is precisely what shows that transgression has no own-being. It is not within the mind (if it were, it would have to be there even before an object was met and a thought arose — but it is not); not in the outer object (the object is itself without awareness; what has it to do with me?); and with neither inner nor outer established, there is no further independent "between" in which to lodge it. Unfindable in all three places, the conclusion follows: transgression has no "real nature" subsisting apart from the concourse of conditions. It is an event-mark arisen from the meeting of body, speech, mind, object, and condition — present-seeming when conditions gather, vanished without trace when they disperse.

Three lines converge on this one point — transgression has no own-being: Vimalakīrti's "neither within, without, nor in between"; the Samantabhadra Contemplation Sūtra's "my own mind is empty; transgression and merit have no owner"; and Master Zhiyi's —

Neither apprehending transgression nor non-transgression; contemplating that transgression is non-arising shatters all transgression — for all transgressions are rooted in emptiness, and are ever pure.

(One word must be added: these three passages come from three different textual traditions, whose original contexts and aims were never the same — one is a Prajñā-school teaching pitched to the occasion, one a liturgy of contemplative repentance, one a Tiantai doctrinal-classification discourse. What gathers them into the single unified category "the repentance of non-arising" is the integrative labor of Tiantai — not three scriptures that were ever one set.)

Repentance Is the Heart Sūtra's "Emptiness"

Now the great matter this volume has held in reserve all along can be uncovered.

The Heart Sūtra has one line that is the literal landing-place of "the repentance of non-arising":

All dharmas are marked with emptiness: neither arising nor ceasing, neither defiled nor pure, neither increasing nor decreasing.

"Neither arising nor ceasing" is "non-arising." The "non-arising" of the repentance of non-arising is not some separate hidden meaning; it is exactly this line of the Heart Sūtra, appearing within the gate of repentance.

Set this line into the whole of the Six Practice Gates, and its design shows itself. The six gates — mindfulness, giving, precepts, concentration, vow, repentance — each answer to one item of the Heart Sūtra: mindfulness to "seeing" (Avalokiteśvara's contemplating), giving to "crossing" (crossing beyond all suffering and distress), precepts to "no" (that string of negations — neither defiled nor pure), concentration to "the ultimate" (ultimate nirvāṇa), vow to "attainment" (attaining anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi). These five gates each carry a verb, and all are additive: to see, to cross over, to negate-and-uphold, to bring to the ultimate, to realize — every one of them is to do a thing.

Repentance alone answers to no verb, but to "emptiness" — form itself is emptiness, all dharmas marked with emptiness.

The reason repentance has no verb of its own in the Heart Sūtra is not that it is a gap; it is precisely that it is emptiness: emptiness is not an act, and so no verb can be matched to it.

And so the Six Practice Gates are "five additions and one subtraction": five gates build additively; the one gate of repentance empties subtractively. What the repentance of non-arising empties is exactly the grasping of the other five gates — it empties that bit of clinging to substantiality in "the I who is mindful and the Buddha who is recollected," "the I who gives and the thing that is given," "the I who keeps and the precept that is kept." It is the one subtractive gate in the whole sequence. This is also why repentance must stand within the sequence and not outside it: only with one subtractive gate, emptying away one by one the graspings the others have built up, does the whole road avoid quietly congealing upon that subtle grasping at self in "I am practicing."

And it is exactly here that the line running through the whole volume — "to receive is not to be absolved" — is raised to "emptiness is not absolution." From the very beginning, the "receiving" of disclosure was never a being-pardoned by anyone — it was one's own bearing of the burden, with no absolving officer present. Walking all this way, that line summits here: at the repentance of non-arising, even the "really-existent transgression that could be absolved" is seen to be unapprehendable from the first — and if there is no real transgression, where would an absolver come from? Emptiness is a seeing, not a remission. There is no absolution in the repentance of non-arising, because no one was ever bound.

One Thing to See Clearly Here

The moment "transgression has no own-being" is written, the most dangerous slope lies underfoot: it is all too easy to slide from "transgression cannot be apprehended" into "transgression is a fiction, causation is of no account, do as you please."

The worry is no idle one — history holds real precedents: those who misread justification by faith as a license to sin; those who took "originally not one thing" as a pretext for abandoning practice. The fear that "if transgression is empty, then anything goes" has its reasons, and must not be made light of.

But the antidote to the worry lies in the very same passage of Vimalakīrti's rebuke of Upāli:

Deluded thought is defilement, no deluded thought is purity; distortion is defilement, no distortion is purity; grasping a self is defilement, not grasping a self is purity… One who knows this is called a keeper of the Vinaya; one who knows this is called one who truly understands.

"One who knows this is called a keeper of the Vinaya" — the one who knows that transgression has no own-being is the true keeper of the Vinaya.

This sentence turns the whole worry inside out. To see that transgression has no own-being is not to be issued a license to abolish the Vinaya; it is the highest fulfillment of keeping it. Why? Because to grasp transgression as a really-existent substance — one that accrues, that waits to be paid off — this grasping is itself "deluded thought," is itself "defilement"; the truly clean keeping of the Vinaya is the keeping that has seen through even this grasping. One who grasps transgression as real is, conversely, bound by transgression's "sense of being real," and so falls into fear, or into calculation, or into advancing and retreating within the bookkeeping of repayment; only the one who knows that transgression's nature is empty moves, in all his conduct, unpulled by the mark of transgression — and this is the true cleanness.

Between "emptiness" and "license," then, lies the whole of the Middle Way. "Neither apprehending transgression nor non-transgression" is a double negation — neither grasping transgression as really existent, nor falling into the annihilationist view of "no transgression at all." What it negates is transgression's "own-being," not karma's "fruit." Transgression's nature is empty; karmic fruit is not empty: the dependently-arisen law that one reaps what one sows is not moved by a hair. Carrying forward the earlier salt-parable — even an ideal phenomenal repentance can only dilute and redirect the trajectory of the fruit, never erase already-made karma out of thin air — at the summit of principial repentance this line is not loosened but drawn tighter still.

Each time "transgression cannot be apprehended" is said, ask one question: does this sentence imply that karmic fruit is being swept away? If it does, it has already slipped off the Middle Way. Emptiness is the seeing that transgression has no own-being, not the annihilation of cause and effect — this is the highest point this part has to guard.

Walking On

The sun of wisdom shines once, and the frost and dew are gone of themselves. It is not that someone absolved your transgression. It is that you have, at last, seen: the self that erred, and the transgression it committed, were from the very first non-arising.

The fullest, most dramatic scene of this truth — that transgression has no own-being — is the story of one who broke a precept. No: of two monks who broke a precept, and of one venerable elder, foremost in upholding the Vinaya, who took the rebuke full in the face.

In the next chapter, we walk into that scene.