The Three Repentances

I. Step Back and See the Whole Ladder

The preceding paper stood on a bridge. That bridge joined two banks: the near bank, where repentance washes the old offence-defilement clean; the far bank, where "then" a new precept-substance is received, as though one died and were thereafter reborn. On that bridge we walked only a single rung — the threshold of "seeing an auspicious sign," taken as the switch by which, the karma being cleared, the new precept might be received. We said at the time that beyond the seeing of signs there lies a whole apparatus of classification and a ladder ascending from shallow into deep, and that this was the matter of another paper.

This paper makes good on that line. We first step back.

The step back matters. For the word "repentance," in ordinary feeling, has been pressed almost to a point — own up to a fault, say sorry, sit with a moment's unease, and the thing is past. As though repentance came in one kind only, the same in depth throughout, differing solely in sincerity. Yet open the texts and one finds the ancients drawing finer distinctions than this. To settle a fault through a formal procedure of the saṅgha; to witness, within a stilled mind, the very signs of the offence's extinction; and to probe to the root-source of the offence so that it loses any ground to stand on — these three are not on one plane. They are three gradients of one road.

Zhiyi states these three gradients most clearly. In the second fascicle of the Explaining the Stages of the Perfection of Dhyāna, taking repentance "at its essentials," he sorts it into three: procedural repentance, sign-contemplating repentance, and the repentance that contemplates non-arising. The reader must hold one thing first: these are not three options ranged side by side, any one orderable like a dish from a menu; they are three rungs of a stair, each steadying the one above. How does Zhiyi himself put it? In the very sentence that lists the three, he fits each rung with a single word, buttress — procedural repentance "buttresses morality," sign-contemplating repentance "buttresses concentration," non-arising repentance "buttresses wisdom."¹

Morality, concentration, and wisdom are the oldest three axes of Buddhist cultivation, together the three higher trainings (adhiśīla, adhicitta, adhiprajñā). Zhiyi maps the three repentances one to one onto these three axes, and this step is the main beam of the paper's whole structure. It tells us: the three grades of repentance are not sorted by some idle hand, but ranged along the ascending line of morality-concentration-wisdom that was there already. The lowest rung buttresses the most phenomenal, most concrete layer, that of moral discipline; the middle rung buttresses the layer of concentration that gathers body and mind; the highest buttresses the layer of wisdom that beholds reality. From morality to concentration to wisdom is itself a sequence from the coarse into the fine, from the phenomenal into the principial — and the three grades of repentance lie stacked upon exactly that sequence.

So the word "ladder" takes its axis from Zhiyi himself; it is not a frame later hands forced on.

Before going down, one thing must be said in advance, lest the reader mistake it. Zhiyi appends to that sentence a further line: these three repentances "penetrate in meaning both the Tripiṭaka and the Mahāyāna," and are "spoken only according to the predominant case" — the first method belongs mostly to the disciple-vehicle (which he calls the lesser vehicle), the latter two mostly to the Mahāyāna.¹ The phrase "penetrate in meaning" is the keystone: the three grades do not each hold one sectarian plot, sealed off from the rest; they run through one another in meaning and may mutually contain. Keep this line; when we come to "why the ladder does not abolish the lower rung," it is the lodestone.

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II. The First Rung — Procedural Repentance: Buttressed by Morality, Closest to the Phenomenal

Look first at the lowest rung, the one set nearest the ground — procedural repentance.

The definition Zhiyi gives it is plain: "by doing a good deed to reverse an evil deed, this is named repentance."² The sense is that one turns and offsets the prior fault (the evil deed, the transgression committed) by performing a good deed (a lawful procedure), and this is repentance. The weight falls on the word procedure. The loan-word karman Zhiyi renders for the reader on the spot: "karman is here translated 'procedure.'"² That is, a formal procedure laid down by the saṅgha's discipline — a sufficient number of monks, following set steps and set words, settling the transgression of one who has broken a precept according to the rule.

Zhiyi cites the Vinaya for instance: in the disciplinary texts, "this method is used throughout to extinguish offence." He points to the formal procedures — probation, emergence from the offence, and the rest — and says that once accomplished, "this is named extinction."² A whole machinery is at issue here by which the saṅgha restores a precept-breaker to purity — sequestration, disclosure, the assembly's joint acknowledgement of amendment, the final release from the fault — and that machinery is the home ground of this series' earlier papers on the saṅgha; we borrow only its outline and do not walk its detail again. For this paper, what must be seen is its texture.

The texture of this grade Zhiyi frames clean with two negations: "this neither treats of seeing various signs and appearances, nor treats of contemplating emptiness through wisdom."²

These two negations are crucial. The first — no seeing of signs: procedural repentance does not ask you to see in the mind any auspicious omen of the offence's extinction, no light, no Buddha coming to stroke the crown — that is the rung above. The second — no contemplating of emptiness: still less does procedural repentance ask you to behold that the nature of the offence is from the first empty — that is the highest rung. Procedural repentance asks one thing only: was the procedure lawfully completed? Completed lawfully, the offence is named extinguished. It does not travel inward toward felt experience, nor upward toward the principle of reality; it holds steady on the phenomenal face — an external procedure that can be verified, that has an objective standard, witnessed by the saṅgha.

Just because it sits closest to the phenomenal, it is also steadiest and least liable to error. There is no subjective reckoning of "did I really see a sign?", no still harder self-examination of "do I truly understand emptiness?" The standard is external, held in common sight. This is how the first rung of a ladder ought to look: feet on the ground, the most concrete layer of offence settled first.

Zhiyi calls it "buttresses morality," and the sense lies just here — this grade of repentance is morality's own built-in tool for repairing morality. Where the discipline is breached, one mends it lawfully, and the saṅgha's moral order is made whole again. What it serves is precisely the axis of morality.

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III. The Second Rung — Sign-Contemplating Repentance: Buttressed by Concentration, Drawn One Layer Inward

Climbing one rung up from procedural repentance, one reaches sign-contemplating repentance. The gradient plainly turns here.

Zhiyi's definition: the practitioner, following the method of repentance set out in the scriptures, "with focused mind and applied intent, within a stilled mind sees various signs."³ The keyword leaps out — stilled mind. The prior grade was completed in the external setting of the saṅgha; this one turns inward, into the concentrated mind of the individual. What it asks is no longer a public procedure but that the practitioner gather body and mind, enter a relatively settled state of concentration, and then, within that concentrated mind, see the signs of the offence's extinction.

What kind of signs? Zhiyi gives the bodhisattva-precept case: to repent a grave offence such as breaking one of the ten grave precepts, "one must see an auspicious sign before it is extinguished" — one must see a Buddha come to stroke the crown, see light, see flowers, and the like, before the offence counts as extinguished. And he adds a heavy line: "without a sign seen, repentance, though made, brings no avail."³

This line is easily read awry, as though it said "repentance is useless." It does not. It says that, for a grave offence, "no sign seen" means the verification of extinction has not yet appeared — not that the act of repentance is itself void. This point the preceding paper has already examined closely, and it is not repeated here; the reader may return to that paper's correction. What this paper goes on to ask is the other end: what role, within the whole ladder, does this "sign" play?

Zhiyi sorts the signs seen into four kinds: first, signs seen in dream; second, hearing a voice in the air while practising, or seeing a strange or numinous appearance; third, seeing in seated stillness signs of good and evil, of precept-breaking and precept-keeping; fourth, the inward realization of various dharma-gates, the opening-forth of the mind of the way, and so on — this too counts as a kind of "sign."⁴ The four run from outer to inner, from sleep and the scene of practice all the way to the disclosure of inward dharma-gates.

But Zhiyi at once applies a most important brake. He says: māra too can conjure these signs. Light and auspicious flowers, Māra can make as well, so that "the false and the true are hard to tell apart and cannot be fixed upon." Therefore, when a sign is seen, there must be "a good teacher to discern it"; one must keep close to a good and wise friend, and let one who can tell the false from the true make the judgement.⁴ In Zhiyi's own words:

魔羅亦能作此等相……邪正難別，不可定取……必須近善知識，別邪正之人。⁴

Māra too can produce signs of this kind … the false and the true are hard to tell apart and cannot be fixed upon … one must keep close to a good and wise friend, one able to distinguish the false from the true.

This brake is sign-contemplating repentance's deepest wisdom, and the place where it draws a clean line against many traditions of mystical experience. The sign, here, is not the goal; not the more-the-better, brighter-the-higher spiritual attainment. The sign is only a verification — an external signal of whether the offence has been extinguished — and that signal may itself be misread or counterfeited, and must be handed to an experienced teacher to check. The practitioner cannot "fix upon" it himself. Once seeing a sign is taken for a peak to be grasped, to be paraded, to be self-certified, the direction is reversed. Zhiyi says it bluntly: to grasp at signs invites the work of māra.

A word of honest explanation is owed for the name "sign-contemplating repentance." Zhiyi himself uses, throughout, the four characters contemplating signs (觀相懺悔). In the preceding paper we used the name sign-based repentance (取相懺) — that is the later common name (as in the Song Vinaya master Yuanzhao's Zichi ji).⁵ The two name one and the same thing: same referent, different name. In this paper, wherever Zhiyi's text is cited word for word, his "sign-contemplating" is kept; only when the later common usage is in view is "sign-based" used, with a note. The reader need not be snared by the two names; they are one and the same rung.

And what does this rung "buttress"? Zhiyi says it "buttresses concentration." It must be done in the concentrated mind; its standing depends on the abiding of dhyāna. So what it serves is the axis of concentration — and against the first rung, which halts at an external procedure, it has already drawn one layer inward, into the practitioner's own concentrated state. The ladder, here, has risen one rung.

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IV. Why It Is a Ladder: The Hard Evidence of Three Tiers

By now the reader may raise a fair question: you keep saying these three repentances are a "ladder," one rung higher than the next — but might this be only an order you (the author) have laid out? On what ground call it high or low, deep or shallow, rather than three things standing as equals?

The question is well asked. This chapter answers it directly. The answer: in his own text Zhiyi uses, at the least, three distinct languages, each independently ranging the three repentances from shallow to deep. The three tier-languages stack one upon another — and that is the hard evidence for the word "ladder." It is not the author's arrangement; it is the layering the text itself supplies again and again.

First tier: buttressing morality, concentration, wisdom. This has been treated above; it is the main beam. Procedural repentance buttresses morality, sign-contemplating buttresses concentration, non-arising buttresses wisdom.¹ Morality-concentration-wisdom is itself a sequence from coarse to fine, from phenomenal to principial, and the three repentances stacked upon it sort themselves high and low.

Second tier: the offence broken, from shallow to deep. Zhiyi says the offence has three grades: first, "the path-obstructing offence arising from violating the non-expressive [precept]" (the non-expressive, avijñapti); second, "the offence of intrinsic nature"; third, "the root offence of ignorance-and-affliction." Then he maps the three repentances one to one — procedural repentance breaks the path-obstructing offence; sign-contemplating repentance breaks the offence of intrinsic nature; the repentance that contemplates non-arising breaks the offence whose causal seed is the whole habit of ignorance-and-affliction, and this last grade "ultimately removes the very root-source of offence."⁶

See where this line runs: the first rung handles the offence that arises from violating a precept and obstructs the path; the second digs down to the "intrinsic nature" of the offence; the third probes all the way to the offence's root cause — ignorance-and-affliction — and removes even that source at the root. The five words "ultimately removes the very root-source" mark the ladder's highest point: not the extinguishing of some particular offence, but the cutting-off of the very source from which offence arises. What is broken contracts from twig to root — and that is depth and shallowness.

A hidden thread joins here in passing. Treating sign-contemplating repentance's breaking of the offence of intrinsic nature, Zhiyi cites a passage (which he calls the Mahāyāna treatise — Tiantai's customary name for Nāgārjuna's Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra): a monk has broken the precept against killing, and though he repents, "the precept-substance is made pure and the path-obstructing offence extinguished, yet the karmic retribution for the killing is not extinguished."⁷ The line is cool-eyed: repentance can make the precept-substance pure again and extinguish the layer of offence that obstructs the path, but the retribution owed to the one killed is not thereby wiped clean in a stroke. This echoes the salt-simile of this volume's earlier paper on retribution — repentance can lighten, can transmute, but does not equal erasing an already-made fruit. The ladder of the three repentances and the earlier doctrine of retribution are one and the same teaching; they do not fight.

Third tier: restoration, surpassing the original, further surpassing the original — the three-medicine simile. This is Zhiyi's most vivid figure at the close, and the ladder's most pictorial seal. Corresponding to the three repentances, he says, one may also distinguish three layers of sense: "restoration" (returning to the original), "surpassing the original" (going beyond the original), and "further surpassing the original" (surpassing it yet more).⁸

He likens them to three medicines:

Procedural repentance is like a patient who fears cold taking ginger and cinnamon — the cold malady is cured, and one is restored to one's original health; the offence is extinguished or not, but at most one returns to the starting point. This is restoration.

Sign-contemplating repentance is like taking a mineral powder — not only is the cold malady cured, but the body grows stronger than before the illness. It not only extinguishes offence; it can give rise to concentration. This is surpassing the original — going beyond the prior state.

The repentance that contemplates non-arising is like taking an elixir of immortality — not merely health restored, but the attaining of the immortal, of unobstructed spiritual power. It not only extinguishes offence, not only gives rise to concentration; it can accomplish the way. This is further surpassing the original.⁸

Three medicines — ginger-and-cinnamon, the mineral powder, the elixir — each stronger in potency than the last, each greater in effect. Restore, surpass, surpass yet more: these three verbs are themselves a clear ascending line. With the plainest of medicinal figures, Zhiyi draws the whole climb of the ladder.

Three tier-languages, each independent, all pointing one way. This is the entire ground for the word "ladder."

But here — here the single most important brake of the paper must be applied, or the "ladder" figure will be read into its most dangerous opposite.

To climb a higher rung is not to tear down the rung below.

This must be said flatly. There is a reading both handy and wrong: since non-arising repentance is highest and ultimately removes the root-source of offence, are not procedural and sign-contemplating repentance then the lower, the outdated, the superseded? Once one has cultivated to the height, may the first two rungs be dropped?

No. The reason lies in Zhiyi's line, "penetrate in meaning both the Tripiṭaka and the Mahāyāna" — the three run through one another in meaning, mutually containing. The more direct evidence is that word buttress: to buttress is to aid, to reinforce, not to replace. Procedural repentance has its own portion of duty in extinguishing the path-obstructing offence; the Vinaya "uses this method throughout to extinguish offence,"² and that portion does not vanish because one has learned the contemplation of non-arising. So too the second tier's "surpassing" and "further surpassing" speak of going beyond an existing base, further beyond it — they presuppose the prior rung still standing, stacked upon, not levelled and rebuilt. The medicine simile is the same: the elixir is "further" beyond the original precisely because it stands upon "restoration" and "surpassing" and adds above them, not because it declares the first two medicines void.

So the right image of this ladder is: layer containing layer, climbing the rungs, not dismantling them. The higher rung contains the lower, extinguishing one more layer of offence at a greater depth, rather than negating or abolishing the lower. This carries forward the very line held in the preceding paper — "then" is continuation, not the abolishing of what came before. If the reader holds this one line, no later discussion of "the summit" can go astray.

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V. Three Mirrors: Letting Other Traditions Show the Ladder's Shape

With the structure of the three repentances set up, we now borrow three foreign mirrors to look at it — not to use Western things to explain the Dharma, but because the intuition that "spiritual ascent has grades" is not Buddhism's alone. Seeing how others layer it can, by contrast, throw into relief just where this ladder's own outline is distinctive. Three mirrors, taken up to show shape and then set down. No Western thinker here is claimed to have addressed the Buddhist threefold repentance.

The first mirror: the "three ways" of Christian mystical theology. In the Western Christian contemplative tradition there is a famous three-stage frame, often rendered the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways (rooted in Pseudo-Dionysius's Mystical Theology and developed by such writers as John of the Cross). The practitioner first passes through purgation, washing away faults and attachments; then enters illumination, receiving light and revelation; and at last reaches union.

This mirror sets against the three repentances with surprising neatness: purgation, like procedural repentance, first settles the fault; illumination, like sign-contemplating repentance, sees light, sees flowers, sees various auspicious signs in concentration; union faces the highest rung. It tells us at least this: the form "repentance/purification has grades, ascending layer by layer from outer to inner" is a contemplative structure recognizable across cultures; the three repentances are not alone.

But once the mirror has shown its likeness, the difference must be stated. The summit of the Christian three ways is union with a divine Other — its ultimate orientation is some transcendent object. The summit of the three repentances points to no Other and is no union with anyone; it points to the offence's own non-arising, to the ultimate removal of the offence's source. More telling still: as said above, Zhiyi applies a heavy brake to "seeing a sign" — the sign must be sorted true from false by a good teacher, and the practitioner must not grasp at it, for grasping invites the work of māra.⁴ This runs exactly opposite to the many mystical currents in which the more visions, the higher. In the three repentances, seeing a sign is a verification, not a peak.

The second mirror: from external rite toward interiorization. This is a common motif in the history of religion, and a critique that recurs in talk of religious reform: that religion ought to move from the external, formal rite toward the internal, the truth of the heart (the Protestant interiority critique of outer works versus inner faith; and, in modern ritual theory, Catherine Bell's analysis of ritualization). At first glance the three repentances look like just this road — from procedural repentance (the external saṅgha procedure) all the way to non-arising repentance (purely inward contemplative wisdom): is this not "the interiorization of ritual"?

This mirror is the most dangerous, for it is the most alike and yet, at the decisive point, the most unlike. It lands exactly on the brake applied in the chapter above.

The "interiorization of ritual" narrative is, at bottom, a story of replacement: once the inner truth arrives, the outer rite is counted superfluous, even disparaged as mere form. Its structure, in other words, is "the latter abolishes the former." But the three repentances are precisely not this. We have proved it again and again: they "penetrate in meaning both the Tripiṭaka and the Mahāyāna," buttressing is aiding and not replacement, procedural repentance has a portion of duty that cannot be abolished, "surpassing" and "further surpassing" are additive and not a levelling. The three repentances are a cumulative mutual pervasion, not a later wave dashing the earlier dead on the sand.

So the value of this mirror is just this: it throws into relief the line most easily crossed. The three repentances look like "rite moving toward the inner," but the road they walk is climbing the rungs, not dismantling them. To see this line clearly says more about the structure of the three repentances than any direct praise.

The third mirror: the stage theories of moral cognition. In Western psychology and ethics there are accounts that sort moral development into stages from low to high (Kohlberg's stages of moral development, or the Aristotelian path from habituation toward practical wisdom, phronesis). A person moves from following rules (heteronomy) toward a self-governance born of insight (autonomy). This too ascends rung by rung, in form, alongside the three repentances' movement from "keeping the rule of the procedure" to "seeing the verifying sign" to "the deepest insight."

But the summit differs. The stage theory, climbed to its highest, yields still "better moral reasoning," "a more mature, more continuously thickened agent" — what ascends is one and the same person's faculty of judgement. The summit of the three repentances is a qualitative turn: what it would dissolve is the whole category of "the offence to be repented" itself (the ultimate removal of the root-source). Not to think the rules through more deeply, but a shift in the very ground on which an offence is an offence at all. What this "qualitative turn at the summit" is, we only touch here and leave for later.

Three mirrors: the first frames the shape of the "ladder"; the second throws into relief the line most easily misjudged — replacement, or buttressing; the third reflects the qualitative turn at the summit. All three are borrowed to show shape, and all stop at shape.

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VI. The Summit Named Only · And a Few Boundary-Stones

At last we stand at the foot of the summit and look up at the highest rung — non-arising repentance. And we stop here.

This paper has, throughout, deliberately not spoken of what non-arising repentance contemplates within. This is by design. The interior of non-arising repentance is the climax this whole volume is to reach at the last, where the deepest layer of doctrine lies, and it is fit to be opened only when all the rungs before it have been laid. In this structure-first paper we do one thing only: we name it, mark its place on the ladder, and leave the door ajar.

How does Zhiyi name it? He says:

深觀無生，名大懺悔，於懺悔中最尊最妙。一切大乘經中明懺悔法，悉以此觀為主。⁹

To contemplate non-arising in depth is named the great repentance, the most honoured and most sublime among repentances. In all the Mahāyāna scriptures, the method of repentance set forth takes this contemplation for its master.

"The most honoured and most sublime" — this is the summit's mark. The three tier-languages all pushed it to the top as well: it buttresses wisdom (the crown of the three axes); it ultimately removes the root-source (the deepest of what is broken); it is "further surpassing the original," like taking the elixir (the apex of the medicine simile). Non-arising repentance is the ladder's highest rung. Of its content this paper says only this much — it names it, and does not open its meaning.

And Zhiyi has one line that joins this summit back onto the road we have walked. He says: "if one attains the wisdom of the forbearance of non-arising, one exhausts the source of offence; then śīla becomes pure, and concentration may be cultivated."¹⁰ "Śīla" is morality, the precept. This line is like a thread stringing repentance, precept, and concentration into one breath: at the rung of non-arising the source of offence is exhausted, and so the precept-substance (śīla) is pure, and so concentration may be cultivated. Repentance makes the precept pure; the precept made pure opens onto concentration. This rejoins the bridge of the preceding paper — repentance clears the old karma, "then" a new precept-substance is received — and it foretells the later fascicles on concentration. The summit of the ladder is no terminus hung in air; it joins onto the next stretch of road.

Before closing, a few boundary-stones are set, lest the reader read this paper awry:

Boundary-stone one: the three repentances are not "the latter abolishes the former." This is the line most to be held in the whole paper, declared again and again. Procedural repentance is not abolished by the arrival of non-arising repentance. Buttressing is aiding; climbing the rungs is not dismantling them. Whoever reads this as "once cultivated to the height, one needs neither procedural nor sign-contemplating repentance" has read the ladder backwards.

Boundary-stone two: the ladder grades the depth of dharmas, not the rank of persons. To say a grade of repentance is deeper is said of "how deep the offence it extinguishes, how fine the training it buttresses," not a ranking of practitioners into higher and lower castes of character. The ladder measures dharmas, not persons.

Boundary-stone three: "from the phenomenal to the principial" is a depth-containing-depth, not a hard order in time. To say the move from procedural to non-arising is "from the phenomenal to the principial" speaks of layers of doctrinal depth, not that one must first do procedural repentance for some set number of years before touching sign-contemplating repentance, then queue for non-arising. The three rungs have a before-and-after in depth of doctrine, yet within one person's practice they may mutually contain and be used at once.

The boundary-stones set, a few words of honest accounting are still owed the reader:

First, the source of this list of "three repentances" — procedural, sign-contemplating, non-arising — is the second fascicle of Zhiyi's Explaining the Stages of the Perfection of Dhyāna, not the Great Calming and Contemplation (Mohe zhiguan) so often on people's lips. Loose references to "Tiantai's three repentances" or "Zhiyi's sorting of repentance into three" are many, but the passage that ranges the three into a list, fits them with morality-concentration-wisdom, and ranks them in grades is indeed found in the Explaining the Stages. Wherever this paper cites the three repentances, it marks that text and that fascicle.¹

Second, as already said, Zhiyi's own term is "sign-contemplating repentance," while the later common name is "sign-based repentance" — same referent, different name.⁵ This is no error but a name shifting with the times. Where the reader meets "sign-based repentance" elsewhere, it suffices to know it is the sign-contemplating repentance of this paper.

Third, and most to be owned: the overall figure of the "ladder" is this paper's (the author's) synthesis over Zhiyi's three tier-languages. Zhiyi himself set down three plain layered languages — buttressing morality-concentration-wisdom, the three grades of offence, the three senses of restoration — and this is the firm ground the text gives; but to gather them and call them one "ladder" is this paper's organizing frame. Likewise, to read the morality-concentration-wisdom that the three repentances buttress as resonant with this series' through-line of "repentance → precept → concentration" is the series' consistent architectural reading, not a claim that Zhiyi presupposed that line. That this paper still reads so rests on the line above — "śīla becomes pure, concentration may be cultivated" — which does in fact join repentance, precept, and concentration together. Keeping in mind that "this is the author's organizing frame," the reader will not mistake this paper's arrangement for the literal structure of the source.

As for what scenery lies within the door of that highest rung — how the offence is non-arising, how its source is ultimately removed — we keep to the near side of the door and leave it for this volume's end. A ladder once set up, the important thing is not to rush the topmost rung, but first to see clearly: every rung still stands, every rung still counts, and they do indeed steady one another, toward one direction, all the way up.

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References

I. Primary Buddhist Sources

• Zhiyi, Explaining the Stages of the Perfection of Dhyāna (釋禪波羅蜜次第法門), recorded by Fashen, edited by Guanding, Sui dynasty, Taishō vol. 46, no. 1916.
• Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra (大智度論), attributed to Nāgārjuna, trans. Kumārajīva, Later Qin, Taishō vol. 25, no. 1509. (Zhiyi's "Mahāyāna treatise"; distinguished from the Śāstra Explaining the Mahāyāna, no. 1668.)
• Yuanzhao, Zichi ji (四分律行事鈔資持記), Song dynasty, Taishō vol. 40, no. 1805. (For the later name "sign-based repentance.")

II. Modern Scholarship (the mirror of comparison in §V, not a proof of Buddhist doctrine)

• Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Mystical Theology. (The purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways.)
• John of the Cross. The Ascent of Mount Carmel.
• Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford University Press, 1992.
• Kohlberg, Lawrence. Essays on Moral Development. Harper & Row, 1981.
• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. (Book II, on habituation; Book VI, on phronesis.)

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Cross-References

• This paper continues the precept-side seam paper (The Death-and-Rebirth Bridge · The Precept-Side Seam), which walked the single rung of "seeing an auspicious sign" and forward-referenced the full classification and ladder of the three repentances to this paper; it opens Part V.
• This paper is a structure-first opener (parallel to The Confession Limb of the Sevenfold Worship): it lays out the architecture of the three repentances and defers the climax.
• The interior of non-arising repentance — how the offence is non-arising, how its root-source is ultimately removed — is reserved for this volume's end; this paper names the summit only and unfolds no content.
• The ontology of the precept-substance (form / mind / seed, and the transformation of the basis) is forward-referenced to the Śīla volume; this paper names śīla only as the hinge "śīla becomes pure, concentration may be cultivated."
• The salt-simile (mitigate ≠ erase; "the karmic retribution for the killing is not extinguished") carries forward this volume's earlier paper on retribution.

Footnotes

1. Explaining the Stages of the Perfection of Dhyāna (釋禪波羅蜜次第法門), fascicle 2, Taishō vol. 46, no. 1916 (spoken by the Sui master Zhiyi, recorded by the disciple Fashen, edited and settled by Guanding), 0485c01–c06. The list of three repentances and their pairing with the buttressing of morality, concentration, and wisdom — and the line "these three methods of repentance penetrate in meaning both the Tripiṭaka and the Mahāyāna, spoken only according to the predominant case: the first method belongs mostly to the lesser vehicle, the latter two mostly to the Mahāyāna" — are found here. The textual home of the "three repentances" discussed in this paper is this work and this fascicle, not the Great Calming and Contemplation (摩訶止觀). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Ibid., 0485c06–c18. The definition of procedural repentance ("by doing a good deed to reverse an evil deed, this is named repentance"), the rendering "karman is here translated 'procedure,'" the citation that the Vinaya "uses this method throughout to extinguish offence" with the procedures of probation and emergence-from-offence, and the texture-framing two negations — "this neither treats of seeing various signs and appearances, nor treats of contemplating emptiness through wisdom" — all appear here. The detail of the probation/emergence machinery by which the saṅgha restores purity is the home ground of this series' earlier papers on the saṅgha; only its outline is taken here. Zhiyi also cites in support the Sūtra of the Most Excellent First Teaching (最妙初教經), now largely lost and given here as Zhiyi's paraphrase. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Ibid., 0485c18–c27. The definition of sign-contemplating repentance ("with focused mind and applied intent, within a stilled mind sees various signs"), its dependence on the concentrated mind ("all this is done within the concentrated mind"), and the line "one must see an auspicious sign before it is extinguished … without a sign seen, repentance, though made, brings no avail." The correction of the misreading of "without a sign seen, repentance, though made, brings no avail" is given in the preceding paper and is not re-examined here. ↩ ↩²

4. Ibid., 0485c29–0486a08. The four kinds of sign (in dream / while practising / in seated stillness / inward realization of dharma-gates), and "Māra too can produce signs of this kind … the false and the true are hard to tell apart and cannot be fixed upon … one must keep close to a good and wise friend, one able to distinguish the false from the true." ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. (No Taishō number.) "Sign-contemplating repentance" (觀相懺) is Zhiyi's own term throughout no. 1916; "sign-based repentance" (取相懺) is the later common name, as in the Song-dynasty Vinaya master Yuanzhao's Zichi ji (資持記). Same referent, different name. ↩ ↩²

6. Ibid., 0486b22–c14. The three grades of offence — "the path-obstructing offence arising from violating the non-expressive [precept]" (the non-expressive, avijñapti); "the offence of intrinsic nature"; "the root offence of ignorance-and-affliction" — and the mapping by which each repentance breaks one grade, with non-arising repentance "ultimately removing the very root-source of offence." ↩

7. Ibid., 0486c09–c11, citing the "Mahāyāna treatise": "if a monk breaks the precept against killing, though he repents, the precept-substance is made pure and the path-obstructing offence extinguished, yet the karmic retribution for the killing is not extinguished." The "Mahāyāna treatise" Zhiyi names here is Tiantai's customary name for the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra (大智度論), composed by Nāgārjuna and translated by Kumārajīva (Taishō vol. 25, no. 1509); it must not be confused with the Śāstra Explaining the Mahāyāna (釋摩訶衍論, no. 1668). This line echoes the salt-simile of this volume's earlier paper on retribution. ↩

8. Ibid., 0486c20–c28. The three senses of restoration (restoration / surpassing the original / further surpassing the original) and the three-medicine simile — ginger-and-cinnamon, a mineral powder, an elixir of immortality. ↩ ↩²

9. Ibid., 0486b19–b21. "To contemplate non-arising in depth is named the great repentance, the most honoured and most sublime among repentances. In all the Mahāyāna scriptures, the method of repentance set forth takes this contemplation for its master." This is the summit-naming; the concrete content of the contemplation is reserved for this volume's later papers. ↩

10. Ibid., 0486c01–c02. "If one attains the wisdom of the forbearance of non-arising, one exhausts the source of offence; then śīla becomes pure, and concentration may be cultivated." This is the repentance → precept → concentration hinge. ↩