Returning to Daily Use

I. Introduction — From the Summit Back to Daily Use

The previous paper ended by handing one sentence to this one: the three misreadings are a map delivered to the modern reader — telling him what repentance is not, so that he can see what it is; and the exhaustive daily use is left to the paper that follows.

So we return to daily use.

By the point the volume has reached, repentance has already been carried to a summit. The seventh part of this volume, on the repentance of non-arising, pressed repentance to the furthest reach of the direct contemplation of emptiness — contemplating the empty nature of transgression, knowing that transgression has no defining mark of its own, no substance to be grasped. That is the highest place repentance can reach in doctrine. But a summit is not a terminus. A natural question surfaces here: having climbed the empty summit, where does repentance go? Having already seen that the nature of transgression is originally empty, has repentance now done its work and retired, with nothing left to do?

This paper's answer is: repentance does not halt at the empty summit — it returns to daily use.

That answer directly addresses the first misreading the previous paper diagnosed. The modern reader most readily conscripts repentance into the vocabulary of emotion-processing: he takes it for a release after wrongdoing, a self-soothing in a moment of crisis, finished once the episode has passed. This is to read repentance as an event — a point with a beginning and an end, zeroed out once handled. But the shape repentance takes in the scriptures is not a point but a line: it is the rhythm of practice that runs through the six periods of day and night, thought after thought continuous — to be performed each day, performed each fortnight, performed to the end of time. To gather repentance from a point back into a line is precisely the work of this paper, and of the volume's close.

This gathering does not demote repentance into a piece of mechanical routine. A daily office treated as a chore to be clocked in and out of, and a rhythm of practice that runs continuous to the end of time, may look alike from the outside but are inwardly worlds apart: the former grows more burdensome the more it is done, the latter grows more unforced the longer it is walked. Their difference lies not in frequency but in where the line is headed and what carries it forward — which is just what the chapters that follow will set out one by one. To read repentance as a line rather than a point is therefore not to make it more cumbersome, but to set it back into the time that was always its own: a time nested layer upon layer — by the day, by the fortnight, by the year — and continuous with the path.

One honest disclosure must come first. "Daily use" is not a rubric the scriptures expressly establish; the Buddhist canon contains no heading called "modern daily use." What this paper means by "daily use" is an integrative reading, offered by this series, of repentance's lived dimension, resting on three scriptural pillars: at the personal level, the six-period repentance; at the communal level, the fortnightly uposatha and the yearly pavāraṇā; and running through them, "thought after thought continuous, without weariness." This paper raises these three pillars in turn, then devotes a closing chapter to handing this continuous phenomenal repentance off in two directions, to wisdom and to vow, and so seals the volume. Alongside the three pillars, three mirrors serve as structural foils (Hadot, the Liturgy of the Hours, Aristotle), each held under one discipline: first concede the structural resemblance, then sharpen the line that divides their orientations — the stronger the correspondence, the sharper the line must be drawn.

II. The Six-Period Repentance — The Spine of the Daily Office

Repentance as a daily office has an ancient and explicit scriptural basis.

Nāgārjuna's Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā (the Treatise on the Ten Stages), fascicle six, discussing the bodhisattva's practice, first speaks of being mindful of the buddhas, calling their names, and paying them homage, and then states plainly: this is not yet enough — "not merely being mindful, naming, and paying homage; one should further, before all the buddhas, repent, entreat, rejoice, and dedicate."¹ It then sets these four acts (repentance, entreaty, rejoicing, dedication) into an explicit time-structure:

How are repentance, entreaty, rejoicing, and dedication to be performed? How many times within day and night? Answer: … three by day, three by night … day and night together make six periods, single-mindedly mindful of the buddhas, as if present before one.¹

This is one of the classical sources of what later tradition calls the "six-period repentance": three periods by day, three by night, six in all, six times a day standing before the buddhas in repentance. What deserves a pause is what this structure itself is saying. It asks not "does one repent only when one has transgressed?" but "how many times within day and night" — rewriting repentance from a conditional clause ("arising upon a fault") into a timetable ("performed on schedule"). Repentance here is not an occasional event awaiting a transgression, but a timed act woven into the daily office: even on a day with no great fault to disclose, the six-period office is still to be kept, because what it addresses is not only the faults already formed but, more deeply, the habit-tendencies and obstructions that grow quietly day after day without waiting on any great event. To bind repentance to the hour rather than to the act of transgressing is the decisive step that turns it from a point into a line.

The Awakening of Faith, in its section on cultivating faith, states the same structure more densely still:

One should, vigorously and diligently, at the six periods day and night pay homage to the buddhas, sincerely repent, entreat, rejoice, and dedicate toward bodhi, never ceasing — thereby freed of obstructions and growing the roots of good.²

Two points deserve notice. The first is the wording itself: the Awakening of Faith here reads "never ceasing" (chang bu xiu fei 常不休廢), meaning unbroken, not let to lapse — not "rest." This single character bears directly on the lifeline of this paper, for "never ceasing" is precisely continuity, the very thing that makes this line a line and not a point.² The second is the structure itself: in both Nāgārjuna and the Awakening of Faith, repentance is never an isolated item but stands listed alongside repentance, entreaty, rejoicing, and dedication — and the phrase "dedicate toward bodhi" has already bound repentance to vow within the breath of a single daily office. This must be marked from the outset: within the six periods, repentance and dedication are the out-breath and in-breath of one breathing — where there is something to regret, there is something to turn toward; having disclosed the past, one dedicates toward the future. The "hand-off to vow" of this paper's fifth chapter is in fact already foreshadowed in this scriptural text, not conjured up at the seal out of nothing.

This image may be set against a Western mirror. Pierre Hadot, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, recovered a classical conception the modern academy had forgotten: philosophy is not merely a body of propositional doctrine but a kind of "spiritual exercise" (exercices spirituels) — a discipline of repeated practice (askēsis), day after day, that transforms one's very mode of being. The ancient philosopher did not merely "assert" some truth; he had, each morning and each evening, by examination, meditation, and self-dialogue, to live that truth back into himself again and again. On this point the six-period repentance does share a structural kinship: it too is a repeated exercise, and the continuity of the six periods is a daily askēsis — relying not on one sudden event of awakening but on a daily return; aiming to change not a passing thought but a long-cultivated mode of being.

⚠️ But the stronger the correspondence, the sharper the line must be drawn. The exercise of classical philosophy under Hadot's pen aims, for the most part, at Stoic self-mastery, at an untroubled and tranquil mind (ataraxia); the six-period repentance aims at purity and the path — toward the direct contemplation of emptiness of the repentance of non-arising, toward freedom from obstructions, the growth of the roots of good, and finally dedication toward bodhi. The fulfillment of the former lies in the settling and self-sufficiency of the "I"; the ultimate point of the latter lies in seeing through even the very "I" that was to be settled. More important still is the source of continuity's strength: that the six-period repentance can go on never ceasing rests not on the bitter endurance of the will but on another support (a sense developed in the fourth chapter, carried from this volume's paper on Samantabhadra's contemplative practice). To read the six-period repentance as a "daily exercise of self-cultivation" is to fall one level short — and this is the first line to be drawn.

III. Institutional Rhythm — The Fortnightly Uposatha, the Yearly Pavāraṇā

The six-period repentance is the daily office at the personal level; but the continuous rhythm of repentance does not stop at the personal. Pull the lens back to the saṅgha, and continuity is institutionalized into two larger cycles.

The first is the fortnightly uposatha (poṣadha). Every half-month the assembly gathers to recite the precepts and to purify before them — those at fault disclose and repent by the proper procedure, those without fault abide silent and pure (this section carries from the second paper of the series; its details of disciplinary procedure are not rehearsed again). The point of the uposatha lies not in any single recitation of the precepts but in the every half-month: it locks purity, away from being a one-time resolve, into a recurring point in time, so that every fortnight becomes an occasion to re-align with the body of the precepts. The second is the yearly pavāraṇā, the Invitation. The rains-retreat over, the assembly mutually invites correction: "If you have seen, heard, or suspected any fault of mine, tell me in compassion" — taking the year as its cycle, it hands faults that the individual cannot easily see in himself over to the eyes of the assembly to be illumined (this section carries from the third paper of the series). The pavāraṇā especially breaks open one thing: repentance is not wholly a private affair; some faults are visible only in another's gaze, and are settled cleanly only under the assembly's witness.

These two institutions, together with the personal six-period office, form a nested image of continuity: the six periods (a day), the uposatha (a fortnight), the pavāraṇā (a year). The time-structure of repentance is therefore not a single line but several cycles interlocked into one rhythm — the shorter cycle bearing up the longer, the personal office nested within the saṅgha's fortnight and year. More important still, institutionalization means that repentance was never a private emotional event of the individual — it is public, practiced in common by the assembly, with fixed hours and fixed cycles. A person alone may well let himself off in private; but a saṅgha with its uposatha and its pavāraṇā will not let purity stop at private self-consolation. The continuity of repentance lives both in the individual's six periods of day and night and in the saṅgha's fortnight and year; it is just this public and periodic structure that keeps repentance from degrading into a closed-door management of one's own feelings.

This image — "fixed hours, daily continuity, communal practice" — has a structural twin in the West's own tradition: the Liturgy of the Hours (the canonical hours; its performance also called the opus Dei, the "work of God"). The monastery gathers at fixed hours, dividing day and night into appointed times, to chant praise, to pray, in unbroken continuity. On the three points of fixed time, continuity, and communal practice, the Liturgy of the Hours can be set almost item by item against the rhythm of the six-period repentance and of the uposatha and pavāraṇā — a rarely exact structural twinning.

⚠️ Precisely because the correspondence is so close, the sharper the line must be drawn. The content of the Liturgy of the Hours is mainly praise and prayer; its orientation is toward God; and it presupposes an economy of absolution — within it the person petitions one who holds the power to absolve, receives absolution, and the dissolving of his fault hangs upon the absolution granted by one who can absolve. The content of the six-period repentance is mainly disclosure–contrition–dedication; its orientation is toward purity and the path; and within it there is no "absolving officer": the buddha can receive repentance but does not dispense absolution; the settling of a fault comes not from a written remission but from disclosure made according to the Dharma and the turning of karmic conditions. To receive repentance is not to be absolved (a thread carried from the fifth and twelfth papers of the series). To read the six-period repentance as a "daily office of petitioning God for absolution" is exactly the category error to be blocked — and this is the second line. The distinction drawn here is purely one of doctrinal structure and implies no ranking of any tradition above another: each rhythm has its own complete inner logic, and this paper only points out that a structural twinning does not entail a sameness of orientation.

IV. The Power of Continuity — Thought After Thought, Without Weariness

If continuity is both daily office and institution, then how is continuity itself possible? On what does a line stretching to the end of time stay unbroken, unlapsed, and yet not sink into weariness and despair?

This question is not a contrivance. A practice that demands continuity through the six periods of day and night, through fortnights, through years, and on to the very end of time — if its only fuel is the practitioner's resolve and grit — is almost bound to collapse one day. The will tires; and contrition, if it is repeatedly driven by guilt, will sooner or later push the person into the downward spiral of "the more I repent, the wearier; the wearier, the more I reproach myself." A line meant to run to the end of time cannot run on such fuel.

The seventh paper of this series, on Samantabhadra's vows of practice, already touched the core of this question. Samantabhadra's vow is "thought after thought continuous, without break, the deeds of body, speech, and mind without weariness" — and this "without weariness" is possible because it rests on "the strength of Samantabhadra's contemplative practice," not on the practitioner's gritted will.³ This bears especially on the daily use of repentance: the strength of continuity lies not in the resolve of "I must persist" but in the power of the practice relied upon itself — when repentance is set within a power of vow and contemplation like Samantabhadra's, continuity is no longer dragged forward by force of will but carried forward by a greater momentum. This is the hinge by which "never ceasing" can stand without collapsing into self-flagellation: one never ceases not because one grits one's teeth but because the line itself is held up by a power that does not tire.

From here the previous paper's negative diagnosis can be cashed out positively. The first misreading the previous paper diagnosed was the therapeutic reduction — reading repentance as a long-term emotion-management. The continuity of the six-period repentance is precisely not emotion-management: it does not chew and ease the same guilt over and over, but is the exercise of practice, a daily return and dedication. The fourth paper of the series pointed out that once a wholesome disclosure is duly received, it concludes and does not recur, rather than ruminating the emotion; the fifteenth paper tightened this further — the repentance free of any attributive mark of transgression is a turn at the level of prajñā-cognition, not the easing of emotional tension. Continuity, therefore, is a continuous seeing and a continuous turning toward the path, not a continuous anxiety: the same act repeated daily is rumination within emotion-management but tempering within practice — the difference lying not in form but in what drives it and where it heads. It is for just this reason that the daily continuity of repentance does not push the person ever deeper into himself: emotion-management draws attention back again and again to "how I feel," while the six-period repentance dedicates every disclosure outward, toward the buddhas and the path; the former is an inward circling, the latter an outward and upward unfolding. A continuity that dedicates and a continuity that merely ruminates, walked far enough, become two utterly different roads.

A third mirror may be borrowed for a brief comparison — Aristotle's account of habituation. The Nicomachean Ethics holds that virtue is formed by habit: a human being is not born virtuous but, by repeatedly performing a certain kind of action, gradually cultivates the corresponding settled disposition (hexis); the just person becomes just by doing just deeds, the temperate person temperate by doing temperate deeds. On the side of "cultivation by repetition," the repeated contrition-and-vow exercise does indeed cultivate a disposition: a person who performs repentance daily gradually grows into a temper of mind sensitive to fault and naturally inclined toward the good.

⚠️ Yet the line is still there, and this one is drawn deepest. The terminus of habituation is a stable, reliable "I" shaped by good habit — virtue perfected just is this "I" become a good person. But the ultimate face of repentance is to see through even this "cultivated I" along with everything else (a sense carrying from the sixteenth and nineteenth papers of the series, on the axis of the "self"). Repentance is not merely a project of moral habit: habituation is only one phenomenal side of it, while its ultimate point is that even the cultivated subject — the one that takes itself to be already virtuous and good — must be seen through in emptiness. Otherwise daily contrition would instead feed an "I that is skilled at repenting," which is exactly the grasping the repentance of non-arising sets out to break. Of all the mirrors this one reflects the shallowest resemblance and draws the deepest line — and so it leads naturally into the next chapter, the seal.

V. The Seal — Twofold Hand-Off: To Wisdom, To Vow

With the three pillars raised, repentance as a continuous rhythm of daily use has taken its shape. This chapter is the seal of the whole paper, and the point of the volume's highest tension: this continuous phenomenal repentance finally hands off in two directions.

First, to wisdom.

Repentance's personal office and communal institution seem alike to fall at the phenomenal level; but the whole volume has shown that repentance has another pole — the repentance of non-arising. The empty summit of the seventh part carried repentance to the direct contemplation of emptiness: contemplating the empty nature of transgression. It is at just this pole that the repentance gate meets prajñā — that repentance opens onto a single line of view and of wisdom. The daily six-period phenomenal repentance, which looks like nothing but a repetition of homage, disclosure, and dedication, runs at its base along a road upward: each disclosure made according to the Dharma loosens the reified grasping at "self" and at "transgression," and at the end of that loosening is the empty nature of transgression that the repentance of non-arising sees. The continuity of phenomenal repentance must finally have its base illumined within the emptiness of principial repentance; this is the seam the repentance gate holds out toward the study of wisdom.

But here the single most critical line of the whole paper must be set: emptiness is never annihilation.

❌ To read "the nature of transgression is originally empty" as "since transgression is empty, then there is no karma, no cause-and-effect, and repentance too may be dispensed with" — this is the category error to be sealed off. To contemplate the empty nature of transgression is to see through the reified grasping at "self" and at "transgression": transgression has no own-being, there is no substantial "transgression" to be seized, and no substantial "I" that is its permanent owner; but this in no way says that there is no karma, no recompense, no causal continuity. Karmic cause-and-effect is not empty (a sense carried from the fifteenth paper of the series). What was said earlier — "to receive repentance is not to be absolved" — rises at this pole to a sterner sentence still: emptiness is not absolution. Emptiness is a seeing, not a remission; it is the seeing-through of "transgression" and "self" as both lacking any mark of their own, not a declaration that the causal chain of karmic conditions does not exist. A person who has seen the empty nature of transgression cannot therefore disregard cause-and-effect and act as he pleases — quite the reverse: precisely because he has seen emptiness, he bears the causal continuum all the more, and without contention. ⚠️ The stronger the correspondence, the sharper the line must be drawn — and between "emptiness" and "annihilation" lies the line the volume most needs to draw. What this seam toward wisdom hands off is a prajñā-seeing of this kind, not a nihilism of "all is empty, cause-and-effect may be dispensed with."

A word must be added: this hand-off is a doctrinal seam — the seam by which the repentance gate opens onto the study of wisdom — and not a citation pointing to any specific text. The full unfolding of the direct contemplation of emptiness has its own context and its own destination; this paper only sets the seam, and does not overstep to lay it out in another's stead.

Second, to vow.

The seam toward vow was in fact already laid in the second chapter. In the text of the six-period repentance, repentance always stands listed alongside dedication: repent, entreat, rejoice, dedicate — dedicate toward bodhi, never ceasing. Repenting karmic obstacles and making the vow-dedication are a pair practiced together, not two stages set one after the other: where there is something to regret, there is something to turn toward; having disclosed the obstructions of the past, one dedicates this thought of purity to the path of the future. The five-fold repentance structure of the Chinese repentance rites (carrying from the thirteenth paper of the series, on the Lotus Samādhi Repentance) gathers this pair into one complete rite: it opens with repentance and seals with vow — repentance and vow being, from the start, the head and tail of one and the same line of practice. What the fourth chapter called "thought after thought continuous, without weariness" is both the strength of continuity and, just so, one stake of the vow: that weariless continuity must finally run, continuously, toward a vow.

So repentance finally passes the baton to vow: repenting karmic obstacles and making vows, practiced together, handed to the vow-gate.

As for what comes after this step — how "the attainment of anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi" is consummated within dedication-and-vow, how the bodhisattva's ultimate nirvāṇa turns into the attainment of bodhi by the buddhas of the three times — that is the proper province of the vow-gate's closing volume, belonging to the very last volume of the whole series. Here this paper only sets a signpost and does not unfold it: at this point the repentance gate is responsible only for passing the baton cleanly, letting the water reach its channel of itself, drawing no advance on text not yet written. What repentance can do is to carry this continuous line all the way to the door of the vow-gate and point out the direction of that door; to push it open is the business of another volume. In other words, repentance has here done its part: it has carried the person from a single disclosure, through the continuity of daily use, through the seeing of emptiness, and set him at last before the door of the vow-gate — and from there on, it is for vow to speak.

VI. Volume Close — Summiting Does Not Dismantle the Stairs; the Repentance Gate Seals

One point easily mistaken must finally be recovered: now that the repentance of non-arising has climbed the empty summit, has it abolished all the daily phenomenal repentance below it?

No. Summiting does not dismantle the stairs.

The repentance of non-arising, seeing the empty nature of transgression, does not cancel the six-period repentance, nor the uposatha and pavāraṇā, nor the daily continuity of thought after thought. Principial repentance does not replace phenomenal repentance — this is the red thread running through the whole volume: the two faces stand distinct, and the seeing of principle does not abolish the doing of phenomena. Above the summit the practitioner still returns, day after day, into the six-period phenomenal repentance; it is because he has seen emptiness that the daily continuity no longer degrades into self-flagellation but becomes, instead, an unforced line stretching to the end of time. The stairs are not torn down at the summit — they remain, there to be walked daily; and it is precisely the one who has summited who walks them most steadily, least graspingly.

So the volume may now be sealed.

Look back over the road this volume has walked: from the raising of the foundation of phenomenal repentance — parivāsa, mānatva, uposatha, pavāraṇā, that discipline of disclosure and procedure in the Vinaya for purification; to the twofold seam, joining the reception of the body of the precepts with the repentance of karmic obstruction; to the staircase of the three repentances, climbing rung by rung from act-based repentance and sign-seeking repentance up to the repentance of non-arising; to the Chinese repentance rites, the Lotus Samādhi and the Emperor Liang Jewelled Repentance, which set repentance down into a whole system of practice; to the empty summit of the repentance of non-arising, contemplating the empty nature of transgression and pressing repentance to the furthest reach of prajñā; and finally to this last part, on modern diagnosis and daily use, which first broke the three misreadings and then gathered repentance back into the continuous rhythm of daily use. This road was never meant to dwell long on any one rung, but to see repentance whole, rung by rung: it is at once a single disclosure within the Vinaya, a single seeing within emptiness, and a line running to the end of time, thought after thought continuous. The eight parts each illumine one face of repentance, and only together do they make its whole body — leave out any one face and repentance is read awry: look only at the Vinaya's disclosure, and repentance becomes a saṅgha affair; look only at emptiness's seeing, and repentance turns into a metaphysics that seems to cancel cause-and-effect at a stroke. Only when the foundation of phenomenal repentance, the empty summit of principial repentance, and the continuity of daily use are gathered together does the form of repentance stand up complete. And to gather this complete form and hand it on is exactly the part of this closing piece.

Repentance does not halt at the empty summit — it walks, along the rhythm of the six periods of day and night, back to daily use, and there hands off to wisdom and to vow; the single disclosure within the Vinaya becomes, by this point, a line running to the end of time, thought after thought continuous, without weariness. The repentance gate closes here.

And the vow-gate awaits opening.

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References

I. Primary Buddhist Sources

• Nāgārjuna, Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā (十住毘婆沙論), tr. Kumārajīva (Later Qin), Taishō vol. 26, No. 1521.
• Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna (大乘起信論), attrib. Aśvaghoṣa, tr. Paramārtha (Chen), Taishō vol. 32, No. 1666.
• Passages on Samantabhadra's vows of practice, as cited in the seventh paper of this series (the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, the Chapter on the Practices and Vows of Samantabhadra, on entering the inconceivable realm of liberation).
• The disciplinary institutions of uposatha and pavāraṇā, as cited in the second and third papers of this series (the broad Vinaya and the relevant texts of the Saṃyukta-āgama).
• Passages on "to receive is not to be absolved" and on the repentance free of any attributive mark of transgression, as cited in the fourth, fifth, and fifteenth papers of this series.
• The five-fold repentance (repentance–vow) structure, as cited in the thirteenth paper of this series (the Lotus Samādhi Repentance Rite).

II. Modern Scholarship

• Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Michael Chase, Blackwell, 1995.
• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. (On virtue as formed by habit and on the settled disposition, hexis; see Book II.)

III. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

Short title	Full title	Taishō No.	Author / Translator
Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā	十住毘婆沙論	No. 1521	Nāgārjuna; tr. Kumārajīva
Awakening of Faith	大乘起信論	No. 1666	attrib. Aśvaghoṣa; tr. Paramārtha

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Series Cross-References

• Carries forward from: the previous paper, Modern Diagnosis: Three Misreadings (Part VIII #1 · the three-misreadings diagnostic map) — this paper takes up its closing hand-off, "the exhaustive daily use is left to the next paper," and turns the negative map of "what repentance is not" into the positive statement of "what repentance is."
• Loops back to: the new scriptural witnesses for the six-period repentance (Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā / Awakening of Faith); the papers on uposatha and pavāraṇā (institutional rhythm · carrying from the second and third papers); the paper on vow (thought after thought continuous, without weariness · carrying from the seventh paper); the papers on the empty summit of the repentance of non-arising (the seam toward wisdom · carrying from Part VII); the papers on "to receive is not to be absolved" (to receive is not to be absolved · emptiness is not absolution · carrying from the fifth, twelfth, and fifteenth papers); the paper on the Chinese repentance rites (the five-fold repentance–vow structure · carrying from the thirteenth paper); the previous paper's three misreadings (the positive cashing-out of the anti-therapeutic point · carrying from the previous paper).
• Hand-off (→ the vow-gate's closing volume): the complete stitching of repenting karmic obstacles with making vows, and how dedication-and-vow turns the bodhisattva's ultimate nirvāṇa into the buddhas of the three times' attainment of anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi — these belong to the proper part of the very last volume of the whole series; this paper sets only the signpost and does not unfold them.
• Volume seal: this paper is the closing piece of the KṢAMĀ volume on repentance (Part VIII #2). The eight parts — the Vinaya's disclosure → the twofold seam → the three repentances → the bridge of death and life → the adjudication of the three repentances → the Chinese repentance rites → the empty summit of the repentance of non-arising → modern diagnosis and daily use — are here gathered in, the repentance gate closes, and the baton passes to wisdom and to vow.

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CBETA collation: the daily-use spine rests on two primary citations newly verified against the CBETA Electronic Tripiṭaka — the Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā (No. 1521, T26 p. 0047b07 / 0045a22) and the Awakening of Faith (No. 1666, T32 p. 0582a10); the body adopts the latter's reading 常不休廢 "never ceasing" over the variant 休息 "rest" in the Śata-mahāyāna commentary (No. 1668). Remaining cross-references are to loci already verified in this volume's prior papers.

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — Attribution · NonCommercial · ShareAlike Textual Verification: CBETA Electronic Tripiṭaka (Chinese canon) Project: Point-to-the-moon · six-practice-gates (KṢAMĀ volume on repentance · Part VIII · Modern Diagnosis and Daily Use #2 · Returning to Daily Use · volume seal) Repository: https://github.com/pointing-at-the-moon/six-practice-gates Author: Shi Huijing (釋慧鏡) — the treasury of the true Dharma eye, not established in words

Footnotes

1. Nāgārjuna, Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā (十住毘婆沙論, Treatise on the Ten Stages), tr. Kumārajīva (Later Qin), Taishō vol. 26, No. 1521, fascicle 6, p. 0047b07; the introductory line ("not merely being mindful, naming, and paying homage; one should further, before all the buddhas, repent, entreat, rejoice, and dedicate") appears in the same treatise at p. 0045a22. The phrasing "three by day, three by night / day and night together make six periods" is one of the classical loci of the later "six-period repentance." ↩ ↩²

2. Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna (大乘起信論), attrib. Aśvaghoṣa, tr. Paramārtha (Chen), section on cultivating faith, Taishō vol. 32, No. 1666, p. 0582a10. The body reads 常不休廢, "never ceasing" (unbroken, not let to lapse), not "rest"; the variant 休息 "rest" appears in the differing citation of the Śata-mahāyāna commentary (釋摩訶衍論, No. 1668), a distinct source, and this paper takes the Awakening of Faith's own wording. The authorship and transmission of the Awakening of Faith have long been discussed in scholarship; here the traditional ascription is followed and the matter not unfolded. ↩ ↩²

3. That "thought after thought continuous … the deeds of body, speech, and mind without weariness" rests on "the strength of Samantabhadra's contemplative practice" rather than gritted will is set out in the seventh paper of this series. Here only the single sense — that the strength of continuity is not willed strain — is taken, and that paper's argument is not restated. ↩