Transition ⑥ · From the Chinese Liturgies to the Repentance of Non-Arising

Part Six has closed. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath — and this one runs deeper than any before it. For once this page turns, we push open the door outside which we have all along kept watch.

First, look back at the road walked.

From Part One to Part Six, we have seen the whole landscape of repentance on the phenomenal plane. Its plainest act — disclosure, speaking out what was hidden. The institutions that receive it — probation, rehabilitation, the invitation, the uposatha. Its psychological engine — the double-edged remorse. Its limit — on the heaviest of karma, it can lessen and redirect, it cannot erase. Its climb to the summit of worship — the seven limbs, Samantabhadra's inexhaustible vow. Its place on the whole road — the bridge where giving brings the death of the self, repentance clears the old karma after that death, and the precepts welcome the new birth. The map the patriarchs drew for it — the ladder of the three repentances: procedural, sign-based, non-arising. And how that map came to ground — the Lotus Samādhi Repentance turning inward, the Liang Emperor's Jeweled Repentance turning outward: the two poles of the Chinese repentance liturgies.

The road has been one clean rising line: repentance grows from an act into an institution, rises into a worship, is laid into a bridge, raised into a ladder, and brought to ground as rite after rite one can walk into.

And yet, however high or deep it has gone, every repentance on this road still stops at the same place: what it faces is always a transgression vividly there, and an "I" seeking to repent. Even the loss of self on the death-and-rebirth bridge lost only the "I that repents" (a loosening of grasping); the transgressions repented, one by one, remained really existent, to be disclosed exactly as they were.

And at crossing after crossing we have planted the same signpost, its arrow pointing toward a door not yet pushed open.

At King Ajātaśatru we planted one: the salt still steeped in the water, the Dharma-eye that could not be refunded on that very seat — can the root of transgressive karma be ultimately purified? The Āgama halts there, and plants its signpost.

At the top of the ladder of the three repentances we planted one: the highest rung — the repentance of non-arising — would turn back and see into precisely this: whether that transgression, that I, were ever themselves real. We walked only to the door, and did not push it.

Before the tenth stage of the Lotus Samādhi Repentance we planted one: Zhiyi says with his own mouth that to enter that deepest contemplation one "must then discard the foregoing practice" — the whole scaffold of phenomenal method, at this point, comes down. Behind the door is the real mark, seen in the correct contemplation of seated meditation.

Every one of these signposts points its arrow at the same door.

Now we stand before it.

What is behind the door? The highest of the three repentances, the one Zhiyi calls "most honored and most sublime" — the repentance of non-arising.

It is unlike every repentance that has come before.

The repentances before it, however deep the phenomenal mark, however elaborate the rite, all ask one and the same question: how is this transgression to be cleared? They grant that the transgression is vividly there, really existent — and then set about clearing it, lessening it, redirecting it.

The repentance of non-arising no longer asks this. It turns around and asks a question more fundamental, and more startling: that transgression, that "I" who erred — were they ever themselves real?

This question is an about-face. Through six parts, repentance has stood on the phenomenal — laboring upon a really existent transgression. With the repentance of non-arising, repentance turns to the principial — what it would see into is the own-being of transgression: is transgression, finally, a really existent thing, lodged there, waiting to be cleared?

This is a leap in kind. If transgression is not, at root, a really existent thing, then the whole business of "clearing it" must be understood anew.

And this is exactly the most particular place this gate of repentance holds within the whole of the Six Practice Gates. It was said earlier: repentance is the one subtractive gate among the six, answering to the Heart Sūtra's word "emptiness." For six parts we have held that word down, unspoken — because the time had not come. With the repentance of non-arising, the word "emptiness" at last takes the stage.

But one thing must be said in advance, lest it be taken wrong.

To see that the nature of transgression is empty is never to say "the transgression is empty anyway, so there is no need to repent" — that is to read the repentance of non-arising as a pass of acquittal, and it is the most dangerous of wrong turns. The very opposite: the repentance of non-arising is the highest and hardest rung of the three; it does not abolish the two rungs below it — it stands upon them. One who has not yet repented, solidly and in the phenomenal, has no standing to say "transgression is empty at root." The whole long road of the six parts before this was walked exactly so that a person might have the standing to stand before this door.

And this principial face of repentance has never once been absent. All along it has lain as a silent foundation beneath every phenomenal repentance before it — only the six parts, deliberately, did not turn it up and speak it. Now enough road is laid, the steps are steady underfoot, and the time has come.

Part Seven is the deepest part of this book, and the hardest to say. What it climbs is the highest rung of this ladder from the phenomenal into the principial.

We turn this page, and push open the door — to face the deepest question: was transgression itself ever real?