Remove It Directly, Do Not Perturb the Mind

7.2 Remove It Directly, Do Not Perturb the Mind

In the city of Vaiśālī, the layman Vimalakīrti has shown himself sick. One by one the Buddha asks His disciples to go and inquire after the illness; one by one the disciples decline—each says: I am not equal to it. When the turn comes to Upāli, he declines too, and tells the Buddha the reason—a thing that happened once.

Upāli again. In Part Three it was he who recited the whole Vinaya canon at the council; in Part Four it was he who asked about the bodhisattva precepts in the early morning—foremost in the Vinaya. That day, two monks came looking for him:

There were two monks who had transgressed against the rules of the discipline, and being ashamed dared not ask the Buddha. They came and asked me: "Upāli! We have transgressed the discipline; truly we are ashamed and dare not ask the Buddha. We beg you to dispel our doubt and remorse, that we may be freed from this fault."

Two men who had broken the precept, ashamed to the point of not daring to go and see the Buddha. Listen closely to what they ask—not "tell us which article we have broken and what the penalty should be," but "dispel our doubt and remorse": the doubt and the remorse in their hearts wound so tight they could hardly breathe.

What did Upāli do? "I then expounded it to them according to the Dharma." The man foremost in the Vinaya was, of course, according to the Dharma: look up the articles, determine the mark of the offense, show the method of repentance—everything by the procedure of the Vinaya canon.

And while he was speaking, Vimalakīrti arrived. The first sentence out of his mouth was addressed to Upāli:

Upāli! Do not add further to the offense of these two monks! Remove it directly, do not perturb their minds.

Three Verbs

These dozen words are the deepest sentence in the Buddhist learning of repentance. Three verbs; take them one at a time.

Do not add further—stop adding weight to these two monks' offense. The charge sounds unjust: Upāli was plainly expounding according to the Dharma; how did that become adding to the offense? Kumārajīva's disciple Sengzhao annotates it through and through: Upāli was discriminating the marks of the offense, hoping thereby to remove the defilement—but "the offense being originally without mark, to falsely generate a mark of the offense only adds" to the defilement. Count the marks of the offense out, article by article, and that "offense" grows more solid in the two monks' minds with every count, heavier with every stroke of the description—the procedure for removing the defilement is engraving the defilement deeper. Kumārajīva himself annotates: "The offense is originally without mark, yet one perversely generates a mark for it—this is deluded thought … the fault does not lie in the principle." The error is not in the Vinaya—the Vinaya is without fault; the error is in grasping at marks.

Remove it directly—read these words exactly; they are the vital point of this chapter. Vimalakīrti did not say "the offense need not be removed," or "the repentance can be waived." What he said was: it must be removed—the offense is to be extinguished! Only the removal is to be direct. Huiyuan of the Sui drew the crooked and the direct apart most clearly: first to set up the mark of the offense and then to treat it layer by layer is called crooked removal; to go straight to the offense's substance as originally empty and break free of its mark is called direct removal. Crooked or direct, both are removals of the offense—what Vimalakīrti changed was the path, not the goal.

Do not perturb their minds—when the two men came, what they asked for was precisely to have their "doubt and remorse dispelled"; if the lawful procedure only feeds wood to their doubt and remorse, then it is perturbing their minds. A method for extinguishing the offense must not extinguish the person's heart.

The Nature of the Offense Lies Neither Inside, Nor Outside, Nor in Between

The path once changed, Vimalakīrti goes on to speak the passage that has stood for a thousand years:

The nature of the offense lies neither inside, nor outside, nor in between; as the Buddha has said, because the mind is defiled, beings are defiled; because the mind is pure, beings are pure. The mind, too, lies neither inside, nor outside, nor in between. As the mind is, so is the defilement of the offense, and so are all dharmas: none of them departs from suchness.

Go and look for that "offense"—is it inside the body? Outside it? Somewhere between inside and outside? Search for it, and it cannot be found. So with the nature of the offense; so too with the nature of the mind—the mind likewise lies neither inside, nor outside, nor in between. Offense and mind are built the same way, and all dharmas too: none of them "departs from suchness."

Then Vimalakīrti asked Upāli a question: when one attains liberation through the mark of the mind, is there any defilement then? Upāli answered: "There is not." Vimalakīrti said: the mind-marks of all beings are, in just this way, without defilement. And the true address of the defilement he laid bare in a single line:

Deluded thought is defilement, freedom from deluded thought is purity; inversion is defilement, freedom from inversion is purity; grasping at a self is defilement, not grasping at a self is purity.

The defilement does not live in the ledger of deeds; it lives in that one thought that grasps at marks, that grasps at a self. The first chapter said "toward the evil of breakage, neither loathing nor seizing"—this is the same blade: hold the offense clutched tight as a solid thing, and the clutching itself is the defilement.

And Vimalakīrti's closing word does not abolish the Vinaya; it redefines what upholding the Vinaya is:

One who knows this—this is what is meant by upholding the Vinaya; one who knows this—this is what is meant by understanding well.

Only one who knows the nature of the offense to be originally empty is a true upholder of the Vinaya. The first chapter's ruling of "the genuine and the counterfeit" returns here unchanged: one who works the procedure grasping the mark of the offense—counterfeit upholding; one who knows the nature empty and removes directly—genuine upholding of the Vinaya.

Doubt and Remorse, Then and There Removed

The ending of this story should be read in the original:

At that the two monks' doubt and remorse were then and there removed; they gave rise to the mind of unsurpassed perfect awakening.

The doubt and remorse—removed. What they came begging for, "dispel our doubt and remorse," they received—and more: both gave rise to the unsurpassed mind of awakening. On the spot the two monks exclaimed in praise: "What supreme wisdom! This is beyond Upāli's reach—the highest in upholding the Vinaya, and he could not say it." And Upāli himself yielded: apart from the Tathāgata, there is no śrāvaka or bodhisattva who could rein in that eloquence.

Look at what this ending is saying: Vimalakīrti's words were a cure, not a dispensation. The offense extinguished, the heart set at ease, the mind of the Way arisen—"remove it directly," honored word for word. Read "the nature of the offense is originally empty" as "transgression doesn't matter," and this ending becomes inexplicable: if nothing was the matter, what was extinguished? What was removed?

Principial Repentance Is the Depth of Phenomenal Repentance

Later, Zhiyi, the great master of Tiantai, ordered the learning of repentance into three layers: repentance-by-procedure—by the karman procedures of the Vinaya canon, extinguishing the offense of violation; this is the gate of the Vinaya. Repentance-by-contemplating-marks—contemplating the Buddha coming to lay a hand on one's crown, seeing lights, seeing flowers; this relies on the gate of concentration. Repentance-by-contemplating-non-arising—rightly contemplating that the nature of the offense is originally empty, "eradicating the offense of deluded thought"; this relies on the gate of wisdom. What Vimalakīrti taught the two monks is exactly the third layer, the deepest—principial repentance.

And Zhiyi took care to add a word of measure: the dull-faculty person is heavy of mind in committing the offense and light of mind in repenting it, and "a light mind cannot remove the offense of a heavy mind"—he must repent honestly, by procedure and by marks, and generate a grave conscience-and-shame; only the sharp-faculty person, rightly contemplating the nature of mind, earns the name of direct removal. Principial repentance does not replace phenomenal repentance; principial repentance is the depth of phenomenal repentance. A man repents to the depths, and repenting, repenting, he sees the nature of the offense to be originally empty—that is not a way around repentance; it is repentance repented all the way through.

This road of repentance, shallow and deep in one unbroken line, this book has in fact already walked at its shallow stretch. Part Six's "regaining purity upon hearing the name," in the Bhaiṣajyaguru teaching—Lingyao judged it rooted in one's own precept-goodness; what Yijing's translation adds is "confession with utmost sincerity"—and confession is phenomenal repentance. From the phenomenal repentance of confession to the principial repentance of direct removal is two stretches of one same road. One verse of the Samantabhadra Contemplation Sūtra tells the whole journey: "The host of offenses is like frost and dew; the sun of wisdom can dispel them." The frost and dew are real—and when the sun of wisdom comes out, they really do melt away.

The nature of the offense unobtainable—the axis of breaking, emptied. But the three wheels are not yet gathered in: what of the "I" that keeps the precept? The beings protected? The precept-dharma itself?

In the next chapter, all three wheels are set down together.