Six Gates, One Sun of Wisdom

7.3 Six Gates, One Sun of Wisdom

The last chapter watched "transgression has no own-being" delivered as a head-on rebuke in the setting of the Vinaya. This chapter lands the same "emptiness" in a place as concrete as can be — the six sense-gates of this body of ours.

Repentance is forced onto a steep claim: if "transgression has no own-being," how do owning a fault and emptiness fail to cancel one another? To own a fault presupposes that the transgression exists, that I made it, that it is to be reckoned to my account; emptiness says transgression has no own-being, transgression and merit have no owner. Strike these two ends flat against each other, and repentance comes out either hollow (if all is originally empty, why own anything?) or fallen back into bookkeeping (if there is something to own, where does emptiness come in?).

This tension is no study-room abstraction. Any practitioner who both believes in cause and effect and has heard "transgression has no own-being" may, on some night, be snagged by it: am I owning a really-existent transgression, or owning a dream that was never there to begin with?

The six-faculty repentance of the Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra gives an answer that lands.

Six Gates, Each with Its Layer of Frost

Earlier in this part, the verse said "the host of transgressions are like frost and dew; the sun of wisdom can dissolve them." But the "frost and dew" is not one hazy mass of "transgressions." In this sūtra, the frost and dew are the frost gathered, each at its own gate, on the six sense faculties — eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind.

The eye craves form, the ear chases sound, the nose clings to scent, the tongue makes verbal karma, the body does killing, stealing, and lust, the mind grasps on like a monkey that will not rest: each of the six faculties is a gate, and within each gate a layer of transgression-frost has gathered. What the six-faculty repentance does is precisely this: it takes "transgression has no own-being" — a claim that looks as though it could stand only in abstract thought — and sets it, one by one, into the body's six sense-gates.

Its pattern is highly uniform. The repentance of every faculty walks the same two beats: first disclose, in concrete detail, the karma that faculty has made (the phenomenal face — owning the fault, disclosing, not concealing), then, in "full prostration, rightly mindful of the Great Vehicle," turn back to contemplate the real mark of all dharmas (the principial face — seeing that this transgression has no own-being). The phenomenal first, the principial after; owning first, seeing-empty after. Take the eye as the template, and see how it closes the movement:

Said three times, full prostration, rightly mindful of the Great Vehicle, the mind not abandoning it; this is named the method of repenting the eye-faculty's transgressions.

The closing line — "this is named the method of repenting the eye-faculty's transgressions" — sets the standard shape: disclosure first, being rightly mindful of the Great Vehicle (contemplating the real mark) after. Ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind thereafter each run once through this same mould. Bow the head to own the karma it has made, then lift the eyes to see through that karma's lack of own-being — the bowing and the lifting are the down-stroke and up-stroke of one and the same prostration.

The ear-faculty passage gives the finest image for the entanglement between faculty and object:

From many kalpas down to this present body, my ear-faculty, by conditions, in hearing sounds has clung to them, like glue stuck to grass… only now awakened, I disclose and repent before the world-honored ones.

The four words "like glue stuck to grass" are crucial. The ear's chasing of sound is not a matter of the organ having done wrong; it is a stickiness arisen between faculty and object, glue stuck to grass, that no pulling will pry loose. This stickiness cannot be unstuck by covering the ear — the glue on the grass will not fall off because you have shut your eyes. The trouble lies not in the sense-organ but in that layer of stickiness; and to undo the stickiness takes not the closing of a gate, but something else.

Take the tongue as the example, and see how concretely, how mercilessly, the phenomenal face is written:

This tongue-faculty stirs the marks of evil karma — false speech, frivolous speech, harsh speech, divisive speech, slander, lying, praising wrong views, speaking what is of no profit… the thorns of evil karma issue from the tongue; the breaking of the wheel of the true Dharma begins from this tongue.

There is not a breath of the rarefied here — only a naked inventory of verbal karma. To read this passage set before "transgression and merit have no owner" matters greatly — it proves that the six-faculty repentance never once skips the owning of fault. The "seeing-empty" of principial repentance is spoken only while standing upon an inventory of karma so concrete it is uncomfortable — not by going around it.

The Six Faculties Are Not Six Transgressions, but Six Gates of One Deluded Thought

Each of the six gates has its own dust; yet once each gate is opened, the light that shines in is one and the same.

The nose-faculty passage breaks this axis open. After the disclosure of the nose's evil karma of clinging to scent, a pivotal sentence appears in the sūtra:

You should now contemplate the cause of the Great Vehicle. The cause of the Great Vehicle is the real mark of all dharmas. Having heard these words, he prostrated himself and repented once more.

The direction toward which every faculty's repentance turns is one and the same: contemplating the real mark of all dharmas. So with the nose; so, without exception, with eye, ear, tongue, body, and mind. What "rightly mindful of the Great Vehicle" comes to, brought down to the concrete, is contemplating the real mark of all dharmas. Worth noting: this pivotal utterance is not something the practitioner generates from within — the sūtra continues with "having heard these words," after which the practitioner prostrates and repents once more. The practitioner is taught, pointed, awakened from without, and only then turns back toward the real mark. Contemplating the real mark is no state the practitioner forces into being, but the native condition that shows of itself once the subject's grasping is set down.

And when it reaches body and mind, the sūtra no longer treats each faculty separately; it gathers the six into one with the image of a tree:

The body: killing, stealing, lust; the mind: thinking the unwholesome, making the ten evil deeds and the five heinous acts, like a monkey… pervading all six sense faculties. The karma of these six faculties — its branches, flowers, and leaves — fills the three realms.

The body does killing, stealing, and lust; the mind thinks every kind of unwholesomeness, grasping without pause "like a monkey" — and this grasping mind "pervades all six sense faculties." It is not a sixth item set alongside the first five, but the grasping force that runs through the five and makes them transgression at all. That the eye can crave form, that the ear can chase sound — behind both is this monkey that will not be still. The karma of the six faculties is like a tree, its branches, flowers, and leaves filling the three realms: the root is one, yet the karma branches without end.

This brings out the central judgment of this chapter. The verse's full text is:

These six dharmas are named the six sense faculties. The sea of all 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 all your heart, repent the six sense faculties.

"The sea of all karmic obstruction is born from deluded thought" — transgression is like a sea; but this sea is "born from deluded thought." The reason transgression can be dissolved by "contemplating the real mark" is that transgression was knit from deluded thought to begin with; to contemplate the real mark is to cut off the root from which it is born.

The cravings of the six faculties were never six different things; they are one and the same deluded thought, congealed into a layer of frost at each of the six gates.

So the line "sit upright and contemplate the real mark; the host of transgressions are like frost and dew; the sun of wisdom can dissolve them" is not a "seventh method" standing alongside the six faculties, to be picked out and practiced on its own; it is the all-at-once gathering that follows the walking of the six sense faculties, one by one. Through the six gates before it, gate after gate disclosed, gate after gate contemplated for the real mark — and by this verse the sun of wisdom no longer needs to shine gate by gate: it shines once, and the frost and dew on all six gates melt together, because those six layers of frost were knit by one and the same deluded thought.

The branches are six; the root is only one. "Sit upright and contemplate the real mark" can gather "all at once" precisely because what it counters is, at bottom, one.

Death-and-Rebirth, Walked Within a Single Faculty

The deepest beat of the six-faculty repentance lies in none of the six faculties severally, but in what is seen once the light has shone in. There is a passage in the sūtra that drives "contemplating the real mark" to its summit — the repentance of non-arising internal to this sūtra:

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… One who contemplates thus — this is named the great repentance, the adorned repentance, the repentance free of the mark of transgression.

"My own mind is empty; transgression and merit have no owner" — even the "my mind" that could make transgression, receive its retribution, and adjudicate "this is my transgression" is itself empty; transgression and merit therefore have no owner to whom they might be assigned. The sūtra gives this seeing a name of the utmost precision: "the repentance free of the mark of transgression." What is negated is the "mark" of transgression, not transgression itself — what it dissolves is the taking of transgression to be a bounded, accruable thing, not the fact that karma was once made. This echoes the previous chapter's gloss: "fixing the mark of transgression makes transgression increase" — the act of "fixing" is itself a grasping, the forcible installing of an own-being where there is none.

The six-faculty repentance is for this reason a singular place in this volume: it is the one place in the whole volume where, within a single gate of practice, phenomenal and principial repentance are brought to completion together.

Elsewhere, the phenomenal and the principial tend to belong to different chapters, different liturgies, different stages — first the procedural disclosure, then the contemplation of signs and the seeing of an auspicious sign, then the contemplation of non-arising. The six-faculty repentance presses the two faces into one act: disclose this faculty's particular karma (the phenomenal) → contemplate the real mark this faculty meets and dissolve it (the principial). The two are not successive stages but the two beats of one act, replayed six times across the six faculties.

This is exactly the "death-and-rebirth" bridge spoken of earlier, footnoted at the level of the senses. Each faculty's "death" (disclosure, owning the fault, not concealing) and "rebirth" (seeing its original emptiness, the transgression-frost melting away) are completed within one faculty, in one breath. Other chapters spread "death-and-rebirth" out as a passage through time — first the death of disclosure, then the birth of receiving the precepts; the six-faculty repentance presses this one death and one rebirth into the same single prostration at each faculty. The six gates are the same one bridge crossed six times; and what is walked six times is the same one road from death to life.

One Thing to See Clearly Here

Two points must be nailed down.

First: "transgression and merit have no owner" is not "breaking the precepts doesn't matter." The sentence "my own mind is empty; transgression and merit have no owner" is all too easily lifted out of context and made to slide into "since transgression and merit have no owner, keeping or breaking the precepts is all the same." But the sūtra itself sets the guard: "transgression and merit have no owner" is said only right after each faculty's "disclose the black evil, repent with a sincere heart" — principial repentance never rescinds phenomenal repentance. The tongue's naked inventory of verbal karma above and this "no owner" are two successive beats on one and the same road, not two options to choose between. Emptiness is not annihilation.

Second: for anyone who finds faculty-by-faculty disclosure too tedious and would seize "transgression has no own-being" in a single line and be done, the very form of this sūtra is a rebuttal: it insists on setting "emptiness" into six concrete gates; it insists that you first say what form the eye craved and what verbal karma the tongue made, before it will let you say "transgression and merit have no owner."

Emptiness is not for skipping the phenomenal; emptiness is what the phenomenal looks like once it has been shone through.

Walking On

The six-faculty repentance closes on "hearing the teaching of ultimate-truth emptiness, straightaway entering the bodhisattva's correct position." The sūtra says:

The practitioner, hearing the teaching of ultimate-truth emptiness, his mind unafraid, straightaway enters the bodhisattva's correct position. … One who practices thus is named one who repents; this repentance is the repentance-method of all the buddhas and great bodhisattvas of the ten directions.

Its end is not the settling of the private affair "my transgression is cleared," but arousing the mind, entering the position, turning toward the vow that benefits others — the dissolving of one person's transgression-frost becoming a common method, "the repentance-method of all the buddhas and great bodhisattvas of the ten directions."

Where the transgression-frost dissolves, in the sky it clears, a vow turned toward beings rises once again. This direction from "emptiness" toward "vow" showed through once already with the two monks of the second chapter; here it shows through again. It is held down for now.

And the doctrine of this whole volume has, by this point, in fact reached its highest place. What remains, in one last chapter, is to lay the whole volume open — across a sūtra of barely two hundred characters — and see that the road of repentance, from beginning to end, was that sūtra's own movement all along.

That sūtra is the Heart Sūtra.