Taking Off the Three Pairs of Spectacles

8.1 Taking Off the Three Pairs of Spectacles

Walking down from the empty summit, the modern reader does not step into repentance with a blank sheet of a mind. He arrives wearing several pairs of tinted spectacles — pre-understandings in place before a single scripture has been read. To see these spectacles clearly is the work of this chapter.

But before the spectacles come off, there is a door to pass first — a trap that the person who has just heard "non-arising" and "transgression has no own-being" steps into most easily.

A Door to Pass First: Emptiness Is Not Annihilation

For someone who has just heard "transgression has no own-being," the readiest reading is this: if transgression has no own-being, then what is there to regret, what is there to amend?

This is to read "emptiness" as "annihilation." It must be said on the spot: that transgression has no own-being empties one grasping — the grasping at a transgression with its own being, at a really existent self that is bound — not cause and effect. Karmic cause-and-effect is not empty: conditioned arising does not fail, and the slightest deed still bears its fruit exactly as it is. Emptiness is a seeing, not an erasure; to say "originally empty" was never to issue a permit for evading responsibility.

This door — "evading responsibility by way of non-arising" — Part Seven has already answered in depth. Here it is taken only as a pass one must clear before stepping in among the three pairs of spectacles. Only once it is cleared can the spectacles come off, one pair at a time.

The First Pair: Repentance Is Not Guilt-Management

The first pair of spectacles takes repentance for emotion-management.

Under this lens, repentance becomes a technique for making a person "feel a little better": speak the remorse aloud, comb out the feelings, dissolve the knot in the chest. One performs a repentance for the sake of a lighter heart afterward.

What this lens shows cannot be called entirely wrong — repentance does have a side that sets the heart at ease, and after disclosure the heart truly does grow lighter. But it puts the terminus in the wrong place.

The hinge is the mode of closure. We said earlier that wholesome remorse is a wholesome blade: once its task is done, it sheathes itself — the disclosure received, the matter is concluded, and does not recur. It is not an emotion to be kept and stroked over the long term; it does what had to be done and then withdraws. Emotion-management is the exact reverse: it treats that unease as a standing condition requiring continual care, and so remorse becomes a self-maintenance with no terminus. The one self-terminates, the other self-perpetuates — and this is the line between the wholesome blade and the morbid blade.

A deeper layer of the distinction lies in the terminus itself. The home emotion-management returns to is "feeling good, getting on with ordinary life" — refitting a person to the life he already has; the ease is itself the destination, and it does not ask "where is this ease meant to carry the person." The home of repentance is not ease but purity and the path; the calm is a by-product that falls in along the way, not the terminus to be reached.

On the side of the repentance of non-arising, this point is pressed to its furthest depth. The repentance without marks, the repentance free of the mark of transgression, is not a higher-grade emotional technique but the seeing of "the sun of wisdom" — what it means to turn is how one sees, not how one feels. The one lowers the water-level of the unease; the other changes the eye that looks at the water. What repentance, at its deepest, means to change is that eye.

So to say "repentance is not guilt-management" is not to say emotion-management has stated anything false — its description of modern suffering is often precise — but that it demotes a fundamental turn in how one sees into a long-running maintenance of how one feels. Repentance has a side that sets the heart at ease, but it does not take ease for its terminus.

The Second Pair: To Receive Is Not to Be Absolved

The second pair of spectacles takes repentance for confession: disclose a fault to a present authority, who pronounces absolution, and the slate is wiped at a stroke.

This lens is not pulled out of thin air — repentance does include the step of disclosure, whose outward form closely resembles the confessing of guilt. But the resemblance stops there; the lifeline of the difference lies in one word: receive.

At its very outset this book cited the Vinaya. The Buddha says to the repentant King Ajātaśatru:

One who can now repent the fault within the noble Dharma thereby benefits himself. Out of pity for you, I receive your repentance.

The Buddha can "receive"; He has never "absolved."

To receive is to accept this disclosure as it is, to confirm this turning — as a mirror reflects, just as they are, whoever comes before it. To absolve is for one vested with authority, by his power, to cancel a charge of guilt and rule that it no longer exists. The two look alike but differ in substance: receiving takes up, absolving wipes out; receiving hands the fault back to its doer to bear, absolving strikes the fault off the ledger. Hence the repeated insistence earlier: what disclosure yields is a lessening, not an erasure — it lessens the force of concealment and the momentum of continuation (what was hidden loosens; the impetus of the deed slows), and it does not remove for you some really existent body of guilt.

To read "receiving" as "absolution" is a category error. The error is so stubborn because it assumes, all at once, three things that simply are not in this scene: an absolver with the power to cancel, a really existent transgression awaiting absolution, and an authority that wipes the slate at a stroke. The script of confession needs all three before it can be staged; in the scene of repentance, not one of the three is present. What the "receiving" of disclosure does is the very opposite: it returns the bearing to the one who must bear — and this is "benefiting oneself," gaining by one's own truthful facing of the fact. To bear is not to be pardoned; the one who gains is the practitioner himself, not a man released by some authority outside him.

On the side of the repentance of non-arising, this line is lifted a whole tier higher: "to receive is not to be absolved" rises into "emptiness is not absolution." Emptiness is the seeing that all dharmas have no own-being, not the remission of deeds already done; there is no absolution in the repentance of non-arising because no one was ever bound. This step pulls the firewood out from under the pot: the whole script of confession — first presuppose a bondage, then seek release, finally be absolved — has even its stage withdrawn here. If there is no real rope binding anyone, where would an absolution that unties it come from?

This of course does not mean that faults need not be owned, or that karmic fruit may be disregarded — karmic fruit is not empty; the deed still bears its fruit exactly as it is. It means that the way of owning simply does not run the road of "petitioning some authority for remission"; it runs the road of "seeing that there was never a binding." To seek absolution is to reach outward for a writ of pardon; to see is to look within and find no chain in the hand at all.

The Third Pair: Clarity Is Not Self-Flagellation

The third pair of spectacles takes repentance for shame: to own a fault is to admit "I, this person, am bad," and so to collapse inward into self-debasement, cutting at oneself in the heart again and again, sinking deeper the further one cuts.

This lens is the subtlest, because it so often wears the dress of "sincere contrition" — as if the harder one berates oneself, the more devout one is.

Earlier, when speaking of phenomenal repentance, we borrowed psychology to part shame from guilt: shame fixes on the self — "I am a bad person" — and drives a person to withdraw and to hide; guilt fixes on the act — "I did a bad thing" — and drives a person to repair and to amend. Shame makes one retreat; guilt makes one change. What repentance wants is the latter's force, the one that drives a person to amend, not the former's self-negation, the one that nails a person where he stands. To read repentance as shame is to take an engine meant to push a person forward and wire it backward into a machine that grinds inward.

And yet repentance's final answer does not take a side between "blame the act" and "blame the self."

For the two, opposed on the surface, share one fulcrum at the bone — that "I." The one says "I did a bad thing," the other says "I am a bad person"; whichever is said, it has already presupposed, standing behind the words, a solid, definable "I." The very dispute — "is the act to blame, or the self?" — is built on the ground of "there is a real self to blame."

What the repentance of non-arising does is not to pick a side in this dispute but to pull out the ground both sides stand on: that transgression has no own-being empties precisely the grasping at "a really existent bad self" — while karmic fruit remains un-empty; the fault must still be owned as it is and amended as it is, conditions bearing their fruit without the slightest failure. What is emptied is the "bad self," that object flogged over and over; what is not emptied is the fact that "this deed was once done, and this conduct should now be changed."

And so repentance need neither nail itself dead into "I am a bad person" (the withdrawal of shame), nor stall in the self-defense of "I only did one thing wrong" — it steps outside the ground the two jointly stand on, and sees clearly that even that "I" is dependently arisen, without own-being.

A line spoken in the chapter that gathered in the Vinaya's final sense fits best here: to own a fault as it is, and to fix the fault into a real thing enthroned in the heart to be cut at again and again, are two different things. The former is clarity: having seen, one owns; having owned, one amends; having amended, one sets it down. The latter is self-flagellation: having seen, one will not let go, and instead enshrines the fault like a thing in a shrine, lighting incense to it daily, flogging it daily, supposing that the harder the flogging, the more sincere it is. But that is not remorse; that is another grasping — a grasping at the self-image of "I am a bad person who deserves to be punished," rooted in the same soil as shame.

Clarity is not self-flagellation. What repentance wants is the wholesome blade that amends the moment a fault is owned, not the morbid blade that cuts deeper the more it cuts.

One Thing to See Clearly Here

These three pairs of spectacles — emotion-management, the seeking of absolution, shame — have one common root: their lenses are all ground from the same pane of glass, the "I." Emotion-management clings to "my feelings"; the seeking of absolution clings to "my guilt"; shame clings to "this person I am."

And the road the first seven parts of this book have walked is precisely the breaking-through of that pane of glass, cut by cut. The repentance of non-arising has seen through the "real self," and so: no one is bound — and then no one needs to be healed, to be absolved, or to debase himself.

But one sentence of the first importance must be added here: to see through the "real self" is by no means to declare the phenomenal repentance that came before superfluous. Taking off the spectacles loosens the pre-understandings of a road that has already summited; it does not turn back to dismantle the stairs by which the road climbed. Phenomenal repentance must still disclose, must still be received, must still amend as the facts require; non-arising only keeps all of this from sticking to a fictional self-of-guilt. The map tells you where the summit lies; it does not tell you to burn the stone steps along the way.

Walking On

The three pairs of spectacles are off. Repentance shows its original face: not a technique for managing guilt, not a rite for procuring absolution, not an execution-ground for self-debasement.

What, then, is it? With the spectacles off, how does repentance land in the life of one day after another?

That is for the last chapter — the final chapter of this book — to answer.