Transition ④ · From the Death-and-Rebirth Bridge to the Three Repentances

Part Four has crossed the bridge, and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

By now the first four parts have looked at repentance from every direction. They have looked at its act and its institutions (disclosure, probation, the invitation, the uposatha); at its psychological engine and its limit (the double-edged remorse; it can lessen and redirect, it cannot erase); at its climb to the summit of worship (the seven limbs, Samantabhadra's vow); and at its place on the whole road, carrying on what came before and opening what comes after (giving brings the death of the self, repentance clears the old karma after that death, the precepts welcome the new birth).

Yet look back over these four parts, and you find that the repentance they speak of has been, all along, one and the same kind.

Whether the disclosure in the Saṅgha's hall, or the sevenfold worship before the Buddhas of the ten directions, or that repentance on the bridge before the "and then, the precepts" — the skeleton is the same: a transgression vividly there, a person seeking to repent, the transgression spoken out toward someone (the Saṅgha, or the Buddhas), and its removal asked. The mark of transgression vivid, the one addressed distinct, and the act: speak it out, ask for its removal.

This is what the first four parts have all along called phenomenal repentance — repentance carried out on the plane of phenomena, by speech and by rite.

It comes in many shapes: disclosed to one person, settled before the Saṅgha by formal act, bowed before a Buddha-image, contemplated before the Buddhas of the ten directions. The shapes vary without end; in the bone, all of them are repentance on the plane of the phenomenal.

Is repentance, then, of this phenomenal kind only?

It is not.

When the patriarchs came to sort the methods of repentance, they divided it into three kinds, and set the three as a ladder rising from shallow to deep.

The first is called procedural repentance — repenting by the Saṅgha's formal procedure, by fixed liturgical steps. This is exactly the set met earlier: the Vinaya's disclosure, probation, rehabilitation — by the rule, through the procedure, seeking restoration to purity. It is the most concrete kind, the most operable.

The second is called sign-based repentance — the passage on "seeing an auspicious sign" in the previous part was speaking of it. Not only the procedure: one bows in earnest, contemplates, and repents on until an auspicious sign is seen (a Buddha coming to stroke the crown, the sight of light, of flowers), taking this as the verification that the karma is purified. It goes a layer deeper than procedural repentance: what it asks is not merely that the procedure be completed, but that the repentance be carried until a token of purity appears upon the mind.

The third is called the repentance of non-arising — and what it would see into is another matter altogether. The first two repentances, however deep, always face a "transgression vividly there" and an "I seeking to repent"; this third turns back to ask precisely whether that transgression, that I, were ever themselves real.

The first two remain on the phenomenal; the third enters the principial.

What Part Five walks is this ladder of the three repentances — first setting the two phenomenal kinds, procedural and sign-based, each in its own place and seeing them clearly: what offense each repents, to what depth each reaches, how the one joins onto the other.

As for the third — the repentance of non-arising — and the deepest question it turns back to ask: this part walks only to its door, points to it at the ladder's highest rung, and does not yet push the door open. The world behind that door is kept for the deepest part of this whole book, where it will be opened in earnest.

There is a reason in this. A ladder is climbed by setting each rung firm underfoot. Stand steady first on these two phenomenal rungs, see their goods and their limits clearly — and only then, lifting the eyes to the highest rung, does one see it truly, and see it not in vain. And one thing must be said plainly first: though the ladder divides into three rungs, climbing to a higher one does not abolish the lower. Even if one should one day climb to the rung of the repentance of non-arising, the two phenomenal rungs — procedural and sign-based — are not thereby annulled: when it is time to bow, one still bows; when it is time to disclose, one still discloses. Reaching the summit never abolishes the ladder. This, the whole of Part Five must keep in mind.

We turn this page, and begin with the most concrete of the three — procedural repentance.