The Repentance of the Six Sense Faculties, Faculty by Faculty

I. The Problem: Six Gates and a Single Sun of Wisdom

On the ordinary understanding, repentance is a psychological act — owning a fault, reproaching oneself, mending one's ways. But driven through to its seventh part, this volume has forced repentance onto a far steeper claim: if a transgression is "originally still and empty," if "transgression has no own-being," then how can owning the fault and emptiness fail to cancel one another? To own a fault presupposes that the transgression is real, that I made it, that it is to be reckoned to my account. Emptiness, on the other hand, says that transgression has no own-being, that transgression and merit have no owner. If these two ends are struck flat against each other, repentance comes out either hollow — if all is originally empty, why own anything? — or fallen back into mere bookkeeping — if there is something to own, where does emptiness come in? This tension is no study-room abstraction. Any practitioner who both believes in karmic cause and effect and has heard "transgression has no own-being" will, on some night, be snagged by it: am I owning a real transgression, or owning a dream that was never there to begin with?

The previous paper borrowed a single celebrated verse from this same Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra to set the shape of this part: "the host of transgressions are like frost and dew; the sun of wisdom can dissolve them." Transgression is not struck from a ledger by some absolver, nor is it offset by purchased merit; under the single shining of the sun of wisdom — the wisdom that contemplates the real mark of all dharmas — it disperses of itself, as frost and dew disperse in the sun. Frost was never a solid thing in the first place; its "dissolving" is not its removal by an outside force but its never having truly congealed into anything removable. So ran the previous paper's conclusion.

But a conclusion always comes from somewhere; the "frost and dew" is not frost out of thin air. What this paper undertakes is to return to the sūtra that sealed that verse, and to the six gates on which the frost settles. In the Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra, the frost is not some hazy "host of transgressions" but the six sense faculties — eye craving form, ear chasing sound, nose attached to scent, tongue making verbal karma, body doing killing and stealing and lust, mind a monkey grasping without rest. Each faculty is a gate, and within each gate a layer of transgression-frost has gathered. What the six-faculty repentance does is precisely this: it takes "transgression has no own-being" — a claim that looks as though it could be established only in the abstract — and lands it, one by one, into the body's six sense-gates.

The line of this paper can thus be stated in a sentence: the previous paper used that verse's conclusion; this paper walks back from those four lines of verse to the six gates themselves. We shall see that the six-faculty repentance is not six parallel inventories of fault but the bodily version of phenomenal repentance grown into principial repentance. Each faculty first discloses, in concrete detail, the particular karma it has made — this is the phenomenal face (事懺, shìchàn): owning, disclosing, refusing to conceal — and is then dissolved at the point of "contemplating the real mark of all dharmas" — this is the principial face (理懺, lǐchàn): seeing through the very own-being of that transgression. The one two-beat is walked once at each of the six faculties, and the closing verse's "sit upright and contemplate the real mark" gathers them all at once. "Transgression has no own-being" is thereby no longer a piece of metaphysical talk but the site at which six gates of frost are shone through by one and the same sun of wisdom.

This site also meets head-on a question both ancient and cross-traditional. Against transgression that comes by way of the senses, the Western monastic tradition and Buddhism share a very old answer, which goes by the name of guarding the faculties — restraint, recollection, not indulging the six thieves. Shut the eye and do not gaze; cover the ear and do not chase; rein in the tongue and speak no falsehood. The six-faculty repentance plainly contains this phenomenal preliminary too; but the road it finally walks is not the road of "restraining the senses." Why this is so is left for the fourth part below, where it is set against the tradition of guarding the sense-gates. First, the text itself: how the six gates are opened one by one, and shone through by one and the same sun of wisdom.

II. The Textual Basis: The Faculty-by-Faculty Pattern

The Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra takes the bodhisattva Samantabhadra as the master who "instructs me to repent."¹ The practitioner has already set the six recollections as a prior foundation;² and the body of the six-faculty repentance is one long passage that, faculty by faculty, discloses and then contemplates the real mark in each. Its pattern is highly uniform: the repentance of every faculty walks the same two-beat — first disclosing the concrete evil karma that faculty has made, then, in "full prostration, rightly mindful of the Great Vehicle," turning back to contemplate the real mark of all dharmas. The phenomenal comes first, the real mark after; owning the fault first, seeing-it-empty after. To put it another way, each faculty first bows its head to own the karma it has made, and then lifts its eyes to see through the fact that this karma has no own-being — the bowing and the lifting are the down-stroke and up-stroke of one and the same prostration.

The eye sets the template for this pattern. After disclosing the grave karma of form-craving the eye has accrued, the sūtra closes the movement so: "the grave transgressions of my eye-faculty, its obscurations and defiling impurities, I now repent… said three times, full prostration, rightly mindful of the Great Vehicle, the mind not abandoning it; this is named the method of repenting the eye-faculty's transgressions."³ The closing line — "this is named the method of repenting the eye-faculty's transgressions" — is a paradigm sentence: it tells the reader that the whole preceding sequence, disclosure followed by being rightly mindful of the Great Vehicle, just is the standard shape of "the method of repenting a given faculty's transgressions." Ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind thereafter each run once through this same mould.

The ear-faculty passage gives the finest image for the entanglement between faculty and object. The sūtra says: "from many kalpas down to this present body, my ear-faculty, by conditions, in hearing sounds has clung to them, like glue stuck to grass… only now awakened, I disclose and repent before the world-honored ones."⁴ The four words "like glue stuck to grass" are crucial. The ear's chasing of sound is not a matter of the organ having done wrong; it is a stickiness arisen between faculty and object, glue stuck to grass, that no amount of pulling will pry loose. This stickiness cannot be unstuck by covering the ear — the glue on the grass will not fall off because you have shut your eyes. Here the passage already quietly foreshadows the parting of the six-faculty repentance from "restraining the senses": the trouble lies not in the sense-organ but in that layer of stickiness, and to undo the stickiness takes not the closing of a gate but something else.

What that "something else" is, the nose-faculty passage breaks open. After disclosing the evil karma of the nose's attachment to scent, the sūtra brings forward the principial pivot of the whole chapter: "you should now contemplate the cause of the Great Vehicle. The cause of the Great Vehicle is the real mark of all dharmas.' Having heard these words, he prostrated himself and repented once more."⁵ This single line lays bare the axis of the six-faculty repentance: the direction toward which every faculty's repentance turns is one and the same — contemplating the real mark of all dharmas. So with the nose, so with eye, ear, tongue, body, and mind, without exception. What "rightly mindful of the Great Vehicle" comes to, brought down to its concrete sense, is "contemplating the cause of the Great Vehicle," and that cause is nothing other than "the real mark of all dharmas." Each gate has its own object, its own stickiness; but once each gate is opened, the light that shines in is one and the same. Worth noting is that this pivotal utterance is not something the practitioner generates from within: the sūtra records it as heard — the text continues with "having heard these words," after which the practitioner prostrates and repents once more. That is, "contemplating the real mark" is not a state the practitioner forces into being but a direction pointed to, taught, awakened from without — of a piece with the "my own mind is empty" the third part will reach: since the contemplating mind has itself no own-being, contemplating the real mark is no achievement of a subject but the native condition that shows of itself once the subject's grasping is set down.

The tongue-faculty passage writes the phenomenal face most concretely, and most without mercy. The sūtra says: "this tongue-faculty stirs the marks of evil karma — false speech, frivolous speech, harsh speech, divisive speech, slander, lying, praising wrong views, speaking what is of no profit… the thorns of evil karma issue from the tongue; the breaking of the wheel of the true Dharma begins from this tongue."⁶ There is not a breath of the rarefied here — only a naked inventory of verbal karma: false, frivolous, harsh, and divisive speech, up to the praising of wrong views and the ruin of the true Dharma. To read this passage set before "transgression and merit have no owner" is of the first importance: it proves that the six-faculty repentance never once skips the owning of fault. The "seeing-empty" of principial repentance is spoken only while standing upon an inventory of karma so concrete it is uncomfortable to read — not by going around it.

When the sūtra reaches body and mind, it no longer treats each faculty separately but speaks them together, gathering the six into one by means of an image of a tree: "the body: killing, stealing, lust; the mind: thinking the unwholesome, making the ten evil deeds and the five heinous acts, like a monkey… pervading all six sense faculties. The karma of these six faculties — its branches, flowers, and leaves — fills the three realms."⁷ The body does killing, stealing, and lust; the mind thinks the unwholesome, a monkey grasping without rest; and this mind "pervades all six sense faculties." The mind is not a sixth item set alongside the first five but the grasping force running through them, the force that makes the first five into transgression at all. That the eye can crave form, that the ear can chase sound — behind both is this monkey that will not be still. The karma of the six faculties is one tree, its branches, flowers, and leaves filling the three realms: the root is one, the karma branches without end. The sūtra gathers the first five faculties' doings under "body" (killing, stealing, and lust are the body's deeds) and gathers that pervading grasp under "mind," so that here the six faculties are drawn into one organic whole — not a list of six parallel organs, but a single tree, grown from one root, its foliage filling the realms. This image of "one tree, six branches" sets up the third part's "the six faculties are not six transgressions but the six gates of one deluded thought": if the six faculties spring from one root and fill the three realms together, then what dissolves them should likewise be one light reaching to the root, not six shears sent off separately to clip the foliage.

Having walked all six gates, the sūtra names itself: "you shall now uphold this 'Method of Contemplating the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra for Repenting the Six Faculties,' and expound it widely for all the gods and humans of the ten directions."⁸ The proper name of this method of practice is just "repenting the six faculties." With this the faculty-by-faculty pattern stands complete: six gates, one light; the phenomenal first and the principial after, disclosure first and seeing-empty after. What the next part asks is this: once the light has shone in, what, within the gate, is actually seen?

III. The Core Argument: The Sūtra's Internal Repentance of Non-Arising, and the Closing Verse's All-at-Once Gathering

The deepest beat of the six-faculty repentance lies in none of the six faculties severally, but in what is seen once the light has shone in. There is a passage in the sūtra that drives "contemplating the real mark" to its summit and reaches a ground this volume has, all along, called the repentance of non-arising, the repentance of the real mark:

Contemplate the mind as no-mind; it arises from inverted thought. This thinking-mind arises from deluded thought… such dharma-marks neither arise nor cease. What is transgression? What is merit? My own mind is empty; transgression and merit have no owner… One who contemplates thus — this is named the great repentance, the adorned repentance, the repentance free of the mark of transgression.⁹

This is the repentance of non-arising internal to the Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra. Its step is this: first contemplate the "mind," and find that the mind is no-mind — that what is called the mind arises from inverted thought, and this thinking-mind in turn arises from deluded thought; traced back layer by layer, no solid "mind" can be found to serve as a floor. The mind being thus, so too is the transgression and merit that the mind adjudicates: "neither arising nor ceasing. What is transgression? What is merit?" Transgression comes from nowhere to arise and goes nowhere to cease; it has no own-being to stand upon. "My own mind is empty; transgression and merit have no owner" — even the "my mind" that could make transgression, receive its retribution, and adjudicate "this is my transgression" is itself empty; transgression and merit therefore have no owner to whom they might be assigned. To this contemplation the sūtra gives a name of the utmost precision: "repentance free of the mark of transgression."

The four words "repentance free of the mark of transgression" are this sūtra's own name for the repentance of non-arising. They do not say "there is no transgression" — the six faculties' inventories of disclosure all stand. They say "a repentance carried through to the point of seeing that transgression has no own-mark." One word must be held fast here: what is negated is the mark of transgression, not transgression itself. The mark of transgression is the "mark" by which one takes a transgression to be a bounded, self-subsistent, identifiable, accruable object; what the six-faculty repentance dissolves is exactly this mark, not the fact that karma was once made. Once a transgression is fixed as a solid thing, it does indeed become something that can be heaped up and made heavier — which is just what the commentarial gloss cited in the previous paper brings to light: "fixing the mark of transgression makes transgression increase."¹⁰ Why should "fixing the mark of transgression" cause transgression to increase? Because the act of "fixing" is itself a grasping, the forcible installing of an own-being where there is none; and that installing is one more layer of deluded thought, one more drop added to the sea of transgression. Conversely, "repentance free of the mark of transgression" is not a refusal to own one's fault but the owning of it carried all the way down — owned until even the mark of "this is a really-existent transgression" is seen through. To admit that one has made karma, and to congeal that karma into a leaden label upon the self, are two different acts; what the six-faculty repentance wants is the former, and what it dissolves is the latter.

This contemplation "free of the mark of transgression" is exactly of one structure with the case of Vimalakīrti taken apart in the previous paper: Vimalakīrti rebukes Upāli, holding that the nature of transgression is "neither within, nor without, nor in between, and this is named upholding the Vinaya" — transgression has no own-being, the very same thing as "no owner, neither arising nor ceasing" here.¹¹ The difference lies only in the site: that case takes apart the "mark of transgression" in the context of the Vinaya, while the six-faculty repentance takes it apart in the context of the senses. And carried one step further, this also joins the line of prajñā — "all dharmas are marked with emptiness, neither arising nor ceasing": what "contemplating the mind as no-mind" sees and what the Heart Sūtra's "the five aggregates are seen to be empty" sees are one and the same vista. But how repentance and prajñā finally converge is the business of this part's closing paper; here only a signpost is set, and the matter is not developed.¹²

By what right, then, can this in-shining light dissolve transgression? The sūtra gives its own answer in the closing verse. First, the full text of the celebrated verse the previous paper borrowed for its conclusion:

These six dharmas are named the six sense faculties. The sea of all karmic obstruction is born from deluded thought; if you would repent, sit upright and contemplate the real mark. The host of transgressions are like frost and dew; the sun of wisdom can dissolve them. Therefore, with all your heart, repent the six sense faculties.¹³

"The sea of all karmic obstruction is born from deluded thought" — this line is the very core of the mechanism of the whole six-faculty repentance. Karmic transgression is like a sea, but this sea is "born from deluded thought." The nose-faculty passage has already told us that every faculty's repentance turns back toward "the real mark of all dharmas"; the closing verse supplies the other half: the reason transgression can be dissolved by "contemplating the real mark" is that transgression was knit from deluded thought to begin with, and to contemplate the real mark is to cut off its source. This answers, across a distance, to the commentarial gloss of the Vimalakīrti case: there it was said that "fixing the mark of transgression makes transgression increase,"¹⁰ and "fixing the mark of transgression" is itself a species of deluded thought — to fix a transgression that has no own-being as a solid object is itself the deluding, the taking of frost for a thing that can be carried off. The ear-faculty's stickiness, "like glue stuck to grass," is likewise a knot of deluded thought. The cravings of the six faculties were never six different things; they are one and the same deluded thought, congealed into a layer of frost at each of six gates.

So the central claim of this paper can be stated. The verse "sit upright and contemplate the real mark; the host of transgressions are like frost and dew; the sun of wisdom can dissolve them" is not a "seventh method" standing alongside the six faculties, one that might be picked out and practiced on its own. It is the all-at-once gathering that follows the walking, one by one, of the six sense faculties. The six gates having each been disclosed and each contemplated for its real mark, by the closing verse the sun of wisdom no longer needs to shine gate by gate — one shining, and the frost on all six gates melts together, because those six layers of frost were one deluded thought all along. The six faculties are not six separate transgressions but the six gates of one deluded thought; and this is just the cashing-out of the second part's "one tree, six branches" image — the branches are six, the root is only one. "Sit upright and contemplate the real mark" can gather "all at once" precisely because what it counters is, at bottom, one.

This is also what makes the six-faculty repentance a singular text within this volume: it is the one place in the whole volume where, within a single gate of practice, both phenomenal and principial repentance are brought to completion. Elsewhere, the phenomenal and the principial tend to belong to different chapters, different rites, different stages — first the procedural disclosure, then the contemplation of marks and the seeing of auspicious signs, then the contemplation of non-arising. The six-faculty repentance, by contrast, presses these two faces into one act: disclose this faculty's particular karma (the phenomenal) → contemplate the real mark that this faculty meets and dissolve it (the principial). These are not two successive stages but the two beats of one act, replayed six times across the six faculties. In just this sense the six-faculty repentance is the footnote, at the level of the senses, to the "death-and-rebirth bridge" of this volume's fourth part: each faculty's "death" (disclosure, owning the fault, refusing to conceal) and "rebirth" (seeing its emptiness, the transgression-frost melting away) are completed within one faculty, in one breath. Other chapters spread "death-and-rebirth" out as a sequence in time — first the death of disclosure, then the newness of rebirth; the six-faculty repentance presses that one death and one rebirth into a single prostration at each faculty, so that "death-and-rebirth" is no longer only a vertical sequence but a horizontal gathering in the present. The six gates are one and the same bridge walked six times; and what is walked six times is one and the same road from death to life.

Finally, the sūtra points out where this road leads: "the practitioner, hearing the teaching of ultimate-truth emptiness… straightaway enters the bodhisattva's correct position." And again: "one who practices thus is named one who repents; this repentance is the repentance-method of all the buddhas and great bodhisattvas of the ten directions."¹⁴ To hear ultimate-truth emptiness (paramārtha-śūnyatā) and enter the bodhisattva's correct position — the end of the six-faculty repentance is not the settling of a private affair, "my transgression is now cleared," but the arousing of the mind and the entering of the position, the turning toward the vow that benefits others. This is already the territory of the gate of vow; here only a signpost is set, and the rest is left to a later paper.

IV. Cross-Disciplinary Mirrors: Three Western Mirrors

The six-faculty repentance takes the senses as its gates and "contemplating the real mark" as its solvent; a structure of this kind may be set, for structural comparison, beside several Western traditions that handle the triad of "sense, transgression, and mind." The aim of the comparison is not to force an equation but to use alien mirrors to throw the particularity of the six-faculty repentance into sharper relief.

The first mirror is the Western monastic tradition's custody of the senses (custodia sensuum, the guarding of the sense-gates). The desert fathers and the later cenobitic rules set great store by guarding the senses: the senses are the doors by which transgression enters the heart, and so must be restrained, recollected, kept from the eye's craving, the ear's chasing, the tongue's licence. This face the six-faculty repentance does not deny — what it discloses faculty by faculty is exactly the eye's craving of form, the ear's chasing of sound, and the rest; among its phenomenal preliminaries there really is a component of "not indulging the six thieves." The instructive divergence lies here: custody of the senses takes "restraining the senses" as its remedy, and is in essence the suppression of the faculty, the guarding of the door — the treating of the symptom; whereas the final move of the six-faculty repentance is "contemplating the real mark," the unsticking of deluded thought — the treating of the root. The ear-faculty's layer of stickiness, "like glue stuck to grass," shows why the road to the root must be walked: glue stuck to grass cannot be pulled free by shutting the eyes; only the seeing that both the sticker and the stuck are born of deluded thought loosens the stickiness at its root. Custody of the senses guards the door; the six-faculty repentance shines through to the fact that the frost within the door has no own-being. This single divergence frames the whole of the present paper.

The second mirror is phenomenology's intentionality. Husserl (胡塞爾) and Merleau-Ponty (梅洛龐蒂) hold that perception is never an object given ready-made but consciousness's active constituting of its object. Read through this lens, the "craving" of the six faculties is precisely a constitutive grasping — the object can be craved because it is constituted by the grasping consciousness — which chimes well with the sūtra's "born from deluded thought": the craved object is itself a construct of deluded thought. The instructive divergence lies here: phenomenology's epoché (suspension) halts at describing the structure of consciousness, bracketing judgment and resting in an epistemically neutral position; the six-faculty repentance does not halt at description but proceeds to the liberative seeing of "transgression and merit have no owner," seeing that the constituter — "my mind" — is itself empty. Phenomenology says "the object is constituted"; the six-faculty repentance goes one step further and says "even that constituter has no own-being." The mirror shows that both break the naïve view that "the object is given ready-made"; but one stops at description, while the other turns toward liberation.

The third mirror, the most distant and offered only for reference, is the Stoic training upon impressions. Marcus Aurelius (馬可奧勒留) teaches that, faced with the press of incoming impressions (phantasia), one is to "withhold assent": the impression comes of itself, but whether to endorse it and react to it lies with me. This bears a surface likeness to the six-faculty repentance's loosening of stickiness by "contemplating the real mark." The instructive divergence lies here: the Stoic "withholding of assent" is still a gate of the will, presupposing a "ruling rational subject" (hēgemonikon) standing there to decide what to take up and what to let go; whereas the six-faculty repentance's "sit upright and contemplate the real mark" sees that "my own mind is empty" — even that rational subject which can "withhold assent," which can rule over taking-up and letting-go, has itself no own-being to stand upon. Stoicism holds the ruler fast and trains its choices; the six-faculty repentance shines the ruler empty along with everything else. The one strengthens the subject's self-mastery, the other dissolves the subject's own-being; the directions are exactly opposed.

The three mirrors set side by side make the particularity of the six-faculty repentance plain: it is neither the guarding of custody of the senses, nor the description of phenomenology, nor the willed self-mastery of the Stoics, but, standing upon the phenomenal disclosure made faculty by faculty, the seeing — by "contemplating the real mark" — that faculty, object, and even the ruling mind are all born of deluded thought and have no own-being. This is its one move that none of the three shares. Each of the three holds fast to some single link: custody of the senses holds the faculty (restraining the senses); intentionality sees the object as constituted (breaking the naïveté of the object); withholding assent holds the ruling mind (training judgment). The six-faculty repentance shines all three links empty at once: the faculty has no own-being, the object is from deluded thought, and the mind too is empty. What the three mirrors throw back is, rather than a sameness, a showing of how the six-faculty repentance walks one step further at each point of meeting — and that further step is exactly "shining the ruler itself empty." Only by walking to this step is the ear-faculty's stickiness, "like glue stuck to grass," loosened: the stickiness is hard to undo because we keep straining between "the I that sticks" and "the object stuck to"; the six-faculty repentance pulls the firewood out from under the cauldron — seeing both subject and object empty, the glue and the grass have nothing left to cling to.

V. Middle-Way Corrections

❌ The six-faculty repentance must not be read as an operating manual that "teaches you how to perform the six-faculty repentance." It has to be conceded honestly: the original genre of the Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra is indeed a contemplation manual — it records a whole sequence of contemplative procedure (the six daily periods, the passing of seven days, full prostration, kneeling, and on to the welling-up of the stūpa of Many-Jewels and the samādhi of the universal manifestation of forms). But the lens this paper takes is descriptive: it sets out the doctrinal structure of the six-faculty repentance, and how the closing verse gathers, without turning that ritual sequence into a second-person instruction in method. Everything touching contemplation, prostration, and the seeing of signs is framed throughout as "the sūtra so records" — the matter is "this is how the sūtra arranges it," not "this is what you should do." To misread a structural analysis as a set of practice steps is the easiest pitfall of this paper.

❌ "Transgression and merit have no owner" must not be read as "breaking the precepts is of no consequence," nor as the denial of karmic fruit. "My own mind is empty; transgression and merit have no owner" is all too easily lifted out of context and made to slide into "since transgression and merit have no owner, it makes no difference whether one keeps the precepts or breaks them." The sūtra itself sets a guard against this: "transgression and merit have no owner" is said only after each faculty's "disclose the black evil, repent with a sincere heart" — principial repentance never rescinds phenomenal repentance. The tongue-faculty's naked inventory of verbal karma in the second part and this "no owner" are two successive beats on one and the same road, not two options between which one may choose. Any citation of "contemplating the real mark dissolves transgression" must be tied back to its preceding concrete disclosure (the eye's craving of form, the tongue's four evils of speech, the body's killing, stealing, and lust). This is continuous with what the earlier papers of this volume established: that transgression can be lessened or dissolved does not mean transgression need not be owned or that karma may be denied; to see the mark of transgression as empty does not mean to deny the fact of having broken a precept. Emptiness is not annihilation.

⚠️ The order of the prose and the order of the verse do not match; "faculty by faculty" is the reading fixed by the verse, not a mechanical sectioning of the prose. One internal textual unevenness must be flagged honestly: the prose narrative of the sūtra runs eye → ear → nose → tongue → body-and-mind-together (body and mind are spoken in a single passage), whereas the closing verse, in listing the six faculties, gives the order eye → ear → nose → tongue → mind → body (mind, in fact, placed before body). The tidy one-to-six structure this paper employs, therefore, is clear in the verse but is, in the prose, a guided contemplative sequence (interleaved with scene-frames such as the stūpa of Many-Jewels). In other words, the tidy "faculty-by-faculty" form is a reading fixed by the closing verse and then carried back to the prose, not a mechanical division the prose itself sets out one faculty per section. To admit this unevenness, far from weakening the case, makes the "gathering" work of the verse all the more visible: it is the verse that gathers a flowing contemplative sequence into a speakable "six sense faculties."

VI. Conclusion

The essentials. The six-faculty repentance lands the repentance of non-arising, one by one, into the body's six sense-gates. Each faculty first discloses its particular karma in concrete detail (the phenomenal), and is then dissolved in contemplating the real mark of all dharmas (the principial); the closing verse's "sit upright and contemplate the real mark" gathers all six at once. Its mechanism lies wholly within the sūtra: the nose-faculty passage uncovers the axis — "the cause of the Great Vehicle is the real mark of all dharmas"; the closing verse answers why this works — "the sea of all karmic obstruction is born from deluded thought," transgression being knit of deluded thought, so that to contemplate the real mark is to cut off its source; and the "contemplate the mind as no-mind" passage reaches the sūtra's internal repentance of non-arising — "transgression and merit have no owner," "repentance free of the mark of transgression." The celebrated verse the previous paper borrowed for its conclusion is thereby shown to be no stand-alone method but the all-at-once gathering after the six gates have each been walked: the six faculties are not six separate transgressions but the six gates of one deluded thought, and when the sun of wisdom shines once, the frost on all six gates melts together. "Transgression has no own-being," then, lands as a bodily map of principial repentance.

The gate's import. What is precious in the six-faculty repentance is that it gathers the phenomenal and the principial into one gate of practice: owning a fault and seeing-it-empty are not two successive lessons but the two beats of one act, replayed once at each of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. It reminds the reader of this volume that principial repentance is no shortcut around phenomenal repentance — the seeing that transgression has, at root, no own-being can be spoken only while standing upon that inventory of particular karma so naked it is uncomfortable. Disclosure comes first, seeing-empty after; the gates must be opened honestly, one by one, before the sun of wisdom shines them through all at once. If anyone, wearying of faculty-by-faculty disclosure, would seize "transgression has no own-being" in a single line and be done, the very form of this sūtra is a rebuttal: it insists on landing emptiness into six concrete gates, insists that you first say what form the eye craved and what verbal karma the tongue made, before it will let you say "transgression and merit have no owner." Emptiness is not for skipping the phenomenal; emptiness is what the phenomenal looks like once it has been shone through.

An open question. The six-faculty repentance ends in "hearing the teaching of ultimate-truth emptiness, straightaway entering the bodhisattva's correct position" — the end of repentance handed over to the arousing of the mind and the entering of the position. The dissolving of one person's transgression-frost becomes "the repentance-method of all the buddhas and great bodhisattvas of the ten directions," and turns toward the vow that benefits others. How, then, when repentance walks from "clearing my own single body of transgression" to "entering the repentance-method of all the buddhas," does it join with vow, and with the burden of benefiting others? This is already the territory of the gate of vow; here only a signpost is set, and the rest is left to a later paper. Where the frost and dew dissolve is no conclusion, but the opening of another gate.

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Index of Sūtras & Treatises

Short title	Full title	Reference	Translator / Compiler	Use
Samantabhadra Contemplation Sūtra	Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra	Taishō vol. 9, No. 277	trans. attrib. Dharmakṣema, Liu Song (so recorded in the Taishō; the translator and place of composition remain debated in scholarship, and the work is cited here per the Taishō record)	primary source · the full six-faculty repentance passage
Vimalakīrti Sūtra	Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa	Taishō vol. 14, No. 475	trans. Kumārajīva, Yao Qin	transgression has no own-being · single-line cross-reference
Commentary on the Vimalakīrti	Commentary on the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa	Taishō vol. 38, No. 1775	comp. Sengzhao et al., Later Qin	"fixing the mark of transgression makes transgression increase" · cross-reference
Heart Sūtra	Heart of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra	Taishō vol. 8, No. 251	trans. Xuanzang, Tang	all dharmas marked with emptiness · signpost (later paper)

Series Cross-References

• The previous paper set the shape of "the repentance of non-arising as the seeing that transgression has no own-being," borrowing this sūtra's verse for its closing image (the sun of wisdom, the frost and dew); the present paper walks back from those four lines of verse to the six gates on which the frost settles.
• The previous paper took apart the case of Vimalakīrti rebuking Upāli (transgression "neither within, nor without, nor in between," "this is named upholding the Vinaya"); the present paper's "transgression and merit have no owner, repentance free of the mark of transgression" is of one structure with it.
• This sūtra's line "all dharmas are marked with emptiness, neither arising nor ceasing" joins the line of the Heart Sūtra; that convergence is reserved for the closing paper of this part, and the present paper sets only a signpost.
• Samantabhadra here is "the master who instructs one to repent"; this illuminates, and is illuminated by, his aspect of vow-power (the practices and vows of Samantabhadra), for which see the relevant papers.
• The sense that "transgression can be lessened and dissolved, yet need not therefore be left unowned, nor may karma be denied," is carried forward from what the earlier papers of this volume established.

Footnotes

1. Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra (Guan Puxian pusa xingfa jing); Samantabhadra appears as the practitioner's master who "instructs me to repent." T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0392a08. ↩

2. Ibid.; the six recollections set as a prior foundation. T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0391b29. (For the six recollections in full, see the relevant papers of this series' gate of recollection.) ↩

3. Ibid.; the eye-faculty's closing formula — "the grave transgressions of my eye-faculty, its obscurations and defiling impurities, I now repent… said three times, full prostration, rightly mindful of the Great Vehicle, the mind not abandoning it; this is named the method of repenting the eye-faculty's transgressions." T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0391c12–17. ↩

4. Ibid.; the ear-faculty — "from many kalpas down to this present body, my ear-faculty, by conditions, in hearing sounds has clung to them, like glue stuck to grass… only now awakened, I disclose and repent before the world-honored ones." T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0392a17–21. ↩

5. Ibid.; the nose-faculty's pivot — "you should now contemplate the cause of the Great Vehicle. The cause of the Great Vehicle is the real mark of all dharmas.' Having heard these words, he prostrated himself and repented once more." T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0392a29–b02. ↩

6. Ibid.; the tongue-faculty — "this tongue-faculty stirs the marks of evil karma: false speech, frivolous speech, harsh speech, divisive speech, slander, lying, praising wrong views, speaking what is of no profit… the thorns of evil karma issue from the tongue; the breaking of the wheel of the true Dharma begins from this tongue." T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0392b16–22. ↩

7. Ibid.; body and mind taken together, the tree of the six faculties — "the body: killing, stealing, lust; the mind: thinking the unwholesome, making the ten evil deeds and the five heinous acts, like a monkey… pervading all six sense faculties. The karma of these six faculties — its branches, flowers, and leaves — fills the three realms." T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0392c08–12. ↩

8. Ibid.; the sūtra naming itself — "you shall now uphold this 'Method of Contemplating the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra for Repenting the Six Faculties,' and expound it widely for all the gods and humans of the ten directions." T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0393b14–15. ↩

9. Ibid.; the repentance of non-arising internal to the sūtra — "contemplate the mind as no-mind; it arises from inverted thought; this thinking-mind arises from deluded thought… such dharma-marks neither arise nor cease. What is transgression? What is merit? My own mind is empty; transgression and merit have no owner… one who contemplates thus, this is named the great repentance, the adorned repentance, the repentance free of the mark of transgression." T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0392c23–p0393a01. ↩

10. "Fixing the mark of transgression makes transgression increase"; gloss of Sengzhao and others of Kumārajīva's school. Commentary on the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa (Zhu Weimojie jing), T38n1775《注維摩詰經》T38, No. 1775View on CBETA online reader ↗; treated at length in the preceding paper of this part. ↩ ↩²

11. Vimalakīrti's rebuke of Upāli; the nature of transgression is "neither within, nor without, nor in between," "this is named upholding the Vinaya." Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa (Weimojie suoshuo jing), "Disciples" chapter, T14n0475《維摩詰所說經》Vimalakīrti-nirdeśaT14, No. 475Kumārajīva (Later Qin, 406 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0541b16; treated at length in the preceding paper of this part. ↩

12. "All dharmas are marked with emptiness, neither arising nor ceasing." Heart of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, T08n0251《般若波羅蜜多心經》Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdayaT8, No. 251Xuanzang (Tang, 649 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0848c08; the final convergence of repentance and prajñā is reserved for the closing paper of this part. ↩

13. Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra; the verse of the six sense faculties — "these six dharmas are named the six sense faculties. The sea of all karmic obstruction is born from deluded thought; if you would repent, sit upright and contemplate the real mark. The host of transgressions are like frost and dew; the sun of wisdom can dissolve them — therefore, with all your heart, repent the six sense faculties." T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0393b09–13. ↩

14. "The practitioner, hearing the teaching of ultimate-truth emptiness… straightaway enters the bodhisattva's correct position"; "one who practices thus is named one who repents; this repentance is the repentance-method of all the buddhas and great bodhisattvas of the ten directions." Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Practice of Samantabhadra, T09n0277《佛說觀普賢菩薩行法經》Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-dhyāna-cārya-dharma-sūtraT9, No. 277Dharmamitra (Liu Song, 424–442 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗_p0393a04–07. ↩