Vimalakīrti's Deconstructive Moves on Conventional Sīla

I. The Question

Once the precept is read as a "checklist of prohibitions"—a column of "thou shalt nots" to be ticked off one by one, a ledger of measurable "marks of guilt" to be entered, weighed, and then cancelled by the proper procedure—precept-keeping degenerates into bookkeeping: one records which articles were broken, records how grave the offence, records what procedure will erase it. The first part of this volume (SILA-P01), working at the level of the Pāli Vinaya and the literal sense of the Chinese renderings, has already diagnosed how this "checklist" reading narrows the true meaning of the precept.¹ What the present paper takes up is the head-on encounter with that same disease on the Mahāyāna side: when prajñā, by its "sign-less" (Skt. animitta), breaks every mark, are the precept and the offence—these two marks—broken along with the rest? If they are, does precept-keeping not slide toward antinomianism: if emptiness dissolves even the offence, what is left to keep, to break, or to repent?

The worry is no idle one. It is the very drama staged in the third ("Disciples") chapter of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa. The figure interrogated there is no anonymous student but Upāli, "foremost in the Vinaya." Two monks have transgressed; ashamed, they dare not ask the Buddha, and turn instead to this authority on the discipline. Upāli expounds their offence to them "according to the Dharma"—procedurally the most unimpeachable handling imaginable. Vimalakīrti stops him on the spot. What is rebuked is not "upholding the Vinaya" but the particular way Upāli is handling the offence. The dramatic tension of the scene lies exactly here: that the one rebuked is the supreme representative of the discipline, and that the ground of the rebuke is not "you are too strict" or "you are unkind" but a wholly unexpected charge—that in doing so he is adding to the offence of these two monks.

This paper takes up the thread held out at the close of SILA-P21, but its register differs, and this should be said at once, lest the reader take the two papers for a repetition. P21 treated the perfection of pure precepts in the Mahāprajñāpāramitā: a sustained, expansive, doctrinal exposition running across the whole of that great scripture, whose hallmark is that prajñā's deconstruction of the precept-mark all but pervades the corpus rather than concentrating in any single passage.² P22 is the reverse. In the whole Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa the graph "precept" (戒) occurs only about two dozen times—a middling frequency—yet nearly all of its deconstructive treatment of the precept is compressed into this one chapter, into a single clinical case of transgression-and-repentance. P21, in other words, lays out the broad surface; P22 is the concentrated point. P21 is the slow unfolding of doctrine; P22 is a single scene. The two are complementary within Part VII ("Prajñā: Sign-less Precepts"), not redundant.

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II. The Canonical Basis

The Upāli passage of the "Disciples" chapter falls into seven movements. (Throughout this paper the citations follow Kumārajīva's Later Qin recension, whose renderings are 罪 "offence," 罪性 "the nature of the offence," 犯律行 "transgressing against the rules of the discipline," 奉律 "upholding the Vinaya," and 優波離 "Upāli."³) It opens with the two monks' request:

有二比丘犯律行，以為恥不敢問佛，來問我言：「唯，優波離！我等犯律，誠以為恥，不敢問佛，願解疑悔，得免斯咎。」我即為其如法解說。 "There were two monks who had transgressed against the rules of the discipline, and being ashamed dared not ask the Buddha. They came and asked me: 'Upāli! We have transgressed the discipline; truly we are ashamed and dare not ask the Buddha. We beg you to dispel our doubt and remorse, that we may be freed from this fault.' I then expounded it to them according to the Dharma." — Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa, "Disciples" chapter, T14n0475《維摩詰所說經》Vimalakīrti-nirdeśaT14, No. 475Kumārajīva (Later Qin, 406 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗, p0541b12–b15

It is worth noticing that what the two monks ask for is not a bare procedural ruling but to "dispel our doubt and remorse, that we may be freed from this fault"—"doubt and remorse" being a knot in the mind, not an entry in a ledger. This foreshadows what Vimalakīrti will fix his attention on below: "do not perturb their minds."

Then comes the keystone of the whole chapter, and the main anchor of this paper:

唯，優波離！無重增此二比丘罪！當直除滅，勿擾其心。所以者何？彼罪性不在內、不在外、不在中間，如佛所說，心垢故眾生垢，心淨故眾生淨。 "Upāli! Do not add further to the offence of these two monks! Remove it directly, do not perturb their minds. Why so? The nature of the offence lies neither inside, nor outside, nor in between; as the Buddha has said, because the mind is defiled, beings are defiled; because the mind is pure, beings are pure." — ibid., p0541b15–b19

The line must be read word by word. Vimalakīrti's injunction has two faces: a prohibition—"do not add further to the offence of these two monks"—and a requirement—"remove it directly." What is prohibited is that Upāli's "expounding according to the Dharma" should somehow have added to the offence; what is required is that the offence be "directly removed." Vimalakīrti is plainly not telling anyone that the offence need not be removed; he is calling for another, more thoroughgoing removal of it. The reason that follows is an unobtainability of location: "the nature of the offence lies neither inside, nor outside, nor in between." The offence is not abolished; it is shown to have nowhere to lodge. And this unobtainability is anchored firmly to the more fundamental axis of mind-purity: "because the mind is defiled, beings are defiled; because the mind is pure, beings are pure."

The next movement carries the homology of mind and offence to its limit and gathers it up into "suchness":

心亦不在內、不在外、不在中間，如其心然，罪垢亦然，諸法亦然，不出於如如。優波離！以心相得解脫時，寧有垢不？我言：不也！維摩詰言：一切眾生心相無垢，亦復如是。 "The mind, too, lies neither inside, nor outside, nor in between. As the mind is, so is the defilement of the offence, and so are all dharmas: none of them departs from suchness. Upāli! When one attains liberation through the mark of the mind, is there any defilement then? I said: There is not. Vimalakīrti said: The mind-marks of all beings are, in just this way, without defilement." — ibid., p0541b19–b23

The unobtainability of the offence is one and the same matter as the unobtainability of mind and of all dharmas; none "departs from suchness" (tathatā). The offence is thereby relocated, from a fixed object measurable against a rule-book, into something as devoid of own-being as every other dharma.

Where the defilement truly lies, Vimalakīrti states with full clarity in the fourth movement:

唯，優波離！妄想是垢，無妄想是淨；顛倒是垢，無顛倒是淨；取我是垢，不取我是淨。 "Upāli! Deluded thought is defilement, freedom from deluded thought is purity; inversion is defilement, freedom from inversion is purity; grasping at a self is defilement, not grasping at a self is purity." — ibid., p0541b23–b25

The defilement does not lie in the bare deed regarded as an object; it lies in the grasping—grasping at marks, grasping at a self. The next movement seals the arising-and-perishing, non-abiding character of all dharmas with a chain of similes, "like an illusion, like lightning":

一切法生滅不住，如幻如電，諸法不相待，乃至一念不住；諸法皆妄見，如夢、如炎、如水中月、如鏡中像，以妄想生。 "All dharmas arise and perish without abiding, like an illusion, like lightning; dharmas do not wait upon one another, and not even for a single thought-moment do they abide. All dharmas are falsely seen—like a dream, like a flame, like the moon in water, like an image in a mirror—arising out of deluded thought." — ibid., p0541b25–b28

Then the conclusion of the chapter, and the crucial turn against antinomianism:

其知此者，是名奉律；其知此者，是名善解。 "One who knows this—this is what is meant by upholding the Vinaya; one who knows this—this is what is meant by understanding well." — ibid., p0541b28–b29

Mark this with particular care: Vimalakīrti does not say "therefore there is no Vinaya to uphold." He says that the one who can know this "is what is meant by upholding the Vinaya." The two graphs 奉律 "upholding the Vinaya" are not abolished; they are redefined at a deeper level.

Finally the narrative closes with a successful purification:

時二比丘疑悔即除，發阿耨多羅三藐三菩提心，作是願言：令一切眾生皆得是辯。 "At that the two monks' doubt and remorse were then and there removed; they gave rise to the mind of unsurpassed perfect awakening and made this vow: 'May all beings attain such eloquence.'" — ibid., p0541c03–c05

The "dispelling of doubt and remorse" the monks asked for at the outset is answered in full: the doubt and remorse are "then and there removed." This shows that Vimalakīrti's move is not a dispensation (a licence to transgress without consequence) but a cure—the offence really is eradicated; only the manner of its eradication has changed.

One more thing must be added: the axis "because the mind is defiled, beings are defiled; because the mind is pure, beings are pure" is no private opinion of Vimalakīrti's. It issues from the Buddha's own teaching in the "Buddha-Field" chapter:

是故，寶積！若菩薩欲得淨土，當淨其心；隨其心淨，則佛土淨。 "Therefore, Ratnākara, if a bodhisattva would win a pure land, let him purify his mind; as the mind is purified, so the buddha-field is purified." — Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa, "Buddha-Field" chapter, p0538c04–c05

So the deconstruction of the formal precept is internal to the doctrinal logic of the sūtra itself, not a stray flourish of Vimalakīrti's. By the same token, the "Disciples" chapter is a deliberately built series: the ten great disciples each decline to call upon the ailing layman because Vimalakīrti had once deconstructed the form of his signature practice (seated meditation, preaching, alms-gathering, and the rest), and Upāli—the literalism of the discipline—is only one link in that chain. The locating syntax "neither inside, nor outside, nor in between" recurs word for word in the Upāli passage (on the defilement of the offence) and in the Rāhula passage (on going-forth, "neither this nor that, nor in between"); the syntax is itself the argument.⁴ Vimalakīrti's handling of "the precept" is thus no isolated outburst of rule-breaking but the necessary landing-point of prajñā's mark-breaking upon the precept, inheriting the legitimacy of the whole series.

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III. The Core Argument

A discipline of voicing must be observed strictly at this point: which statements are what the text says directly, and which are what this paper reads out (this is the own-it discipline established for the volume from P18 onward).⁵ "The nature of the offence is neither inside, nor outside, nor in between," "remove it directly," "this is what is meant by upholding the Vinaya"—these the text says directly. But "the disease of the formal precept is grasping at marks," "the checklist of prohibitions," "the sign-less keeping is more binding than the sign-grasping keeping," and the tag "the precept that breaks precepts" are all this paper's analytic phrasings, not the wording of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa; this is flagged here expressly (and corrected again in §V).

The core reading proposed here is this: Vimalakīrti's intervention upon Upāli breaks not "the Vinaya" but "grasping at marks."

What is the disease of "grasping at marks"? When one who keeps the precepts reifies precept and offence into a checklist of prohibitions, a roster of measurable marks of guilt to be checked off line by line, one is grasping at a mark that has no own-being and supposing that mark to be substantially existent, measurable, externally fixed. The reason Upāli's "expounding according to the Dharma" is censured as "adding to" the offence is precisely that the procedure treats the offence as a thing: the more one discriminates it, locates it, measures it, the more one falsely generates a mark of the offence and hardens something without own-being into something substantially real. The fourth movement of the text already names the remedy outright: "grasping at a self is defilement, not grasping at a self is purity." The defilement was never in the bare deed taken as an object; it is in the act of grasping itself. This is one and the same as the whole spine of Part VII ("Prajñā: Sign-less Precepts"): what prajñā breaks is always the mark, never the event that the mark is taken of. Vimalakīrti does no more than bring that same prajñā-blade to bear upon the very moment of transgression-and-repentance.

So "the nature of the offence is empty" (used here as this paper's summary of Vimalakīrti's own words "the nature of the offence is neither inside, nor outside, nor in between," not as a ready-made formula⁶) breaks only "the clinging to the mark of the offence"—this is precisely the dimension the tradition calls principial repentance (repentance by contemplating that the nature of the offence is empty and that true reality is unarisen). It in no way amounts to abolishing the precept itself. Three guards built into the text hold this in a single frame, and the three must be read together; drop any one and the misreading begins.

First, "remove it directly"—this is the phenomenal repentance (the actual eradication of the offence) explicitly retained as a command. What Vimalakīrti calls for is not "no need to remove it" but "directly remove it"; the offence is, in the end, to be removed.

Second, "this is what is meant by upholding the Vinaya"—this is the proof that "keeping the Vinaya" is redefined, not discarded. One who knows the nature of the offence to be empty is, in just that, named one who "upholds the Vinaya."

Third, "doubt and remorse then and there removed"—this is the narrative evidence that phenomenal repentance genuinely lands. The monks' doubt and remorse are not shelved or skipped over; they are removed.

Take these three guards together with "grasping is defilement," and the conclusion follows of itself: after this formal deconstruction, "keeping" and "repentance" do not grow slacker but stricter. Sign-grasping keeping guards the items on the list, and supposes itself pure once the items are guarded; sign-less keeping guards instead the very mind that goes off to "grasp at marks" and "grasp at a self"—and the latter sets the bar higher and leaves nowhere to hide. This is the mirror-image of the thesis already established in P21: the sign-less keeping is more binding than the sign-grasping keeping.⁷ This paper names this structure "the precept that breaks precepts"—where "the precept that breaks precepts" is not "licence to do as one pleases once the precept is broken down" but "the precept that survives the deconstruction of the formal precept, and binds one layer deeper."

Set back into the context of the volume, this is precisely the Mahāyāna wing of P01's critique of the "checklist of prohibitions" reading. P01, on the Pāli and lexical side, showed how the checklist reading (taking the lay observance of the five precepts as its chief example) narrows the precept; Vimalakīrti, on the Mahāyāna side, mounts a frontal challenge against the same reading—and his weapon is the sign-lessness of prajñā. The two wings attack one target with two different blades.

Finally, the sūtra itself does not confine this operation to the single instance of Upāli. In the "Entering the Gate of Non-duality" chapter, several bodhisattvas declare, on the offence-and-merit axis, the non-duality of the two—and this may be adduced as corroborating evidence.⁸ (It must be said plainly that these are all spoken before Mañjuśrī enters the scene; this paper adduces them only as corroboration. The discourse after Mañjuśrī's entrance, together with the "silence" passage of that chapter, is left to a later paper and not unfolded here at all.)

師子菩薩曰：「罪、福為二。若達罪性，則與福無異，以金剛慧決了此相，無縛無解者，是為入不二法門。」 "The bodhisattva Siṃha said: 'Offence and merit make a pair. If one penetrates the nature of the offence, then it is no different from merit; to resolve this mark by the adamantine wisdom (金剛慧), so that there is neither bondage nor release—this is to enter the gate of non-duality.'" — Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa, "Entering the Gate of Non-duality" chapter, p0550c24–c26

The phrase "to resolve this mark by the adamantine wisdom" echoes, across a distance, the prajñā of the Diamond Sūtra on which P21 drew; the bodhisattva Puṣya, saying that the good and the not-good "enter the limit of marklessness," and the bodhisattva Field-of-Merit, saying that "the offending deed and the unmoving deed … the true nature of the three deeds is just emptiness," are of one mind in this. The sūtra brings "marklessness" to bear on the offence-and-merit axis again and again—the Upāli passage being only its most clinically dramatic instance.

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IV. Cross-Disciplinary Engagement

Contemporary scholarship offers several studies worth bringing into dialogue with this passage, though each stands one step away from the reading proposed here. Three scholars are taken up below, each answered in the manner of "concede, then advance."

The first is Eun-su Cho. In two essays on the ethics of repentance she sets out a structural paradox: only on the basis of emptiness, on the basis of non-self, can repentance be "according to the Dharma"—for if there were a real "self" that committed a real "offence," the offence would become an immovable thing; it is precisely because self and karma are alike unreal that the transformation worked by repentance has any room to operate.⁹ Conceding: the paradox she names is a genuine problem, and the worry "whether emptiness causes normativity to collapse" cannot be dodged. Advancing: yet the ground on which she builds is the Wŏnhyo-line "Repentance of the Six Faculties" texts of Korea—a cross-traditional comparandum, one step removed from the Kumārajīva-Chinese core of Vimalakīrti. This paper contends that the move is already complete at an earlier, more economical site—Vimalakīrti upon Upāli, in the stratum Kumārajīva translated—and that the precision this paper supplies, the distinction of principial from phenomenal repentance ("remove it directly" being the retention of phenomenal repentance), fills exactly the blank her Korean-text frame leaves open. The point is not to oppose Cho but to ground her insight on an earlier and more direct proof-text.

The second is John R. McRae. He translated the sūtra directly from Kumārajīva's Chinese stratum (the same translation-stratum this paper fixes upon), yet in handling the Upāli passage he still sets it within the philosophical frame of "non-duality," so that the reading "a theory of the discipline" drops out of view.¹⁰ Conceding: the non-duality frame has its warrant in the text; the passage does indeed open onto the gate of non-duality. Advancing: yet the very same words of Kumārajīva can—and should—be read again as an instruction in precept-practice ("remove it directly" being a directive of phenomenal repentance), not merely as philosophical rhetoric. What this paper does is to turn the passage back from a "philosophical proposition" into a "proposition about the discipline."

The third is Richard B. Mather. His study of how medieval gentry Buddhism received, at the social level, the "ease" and "flexibility" the sūtra displays is full of historical acumen, but his account halts at the word "flexibility" and does not go on to distinguish whether that flexibility is "a loosening into licence" or "a flexibility that is in fact stricter."¹¹ Conceding: the gentry's social reception of the sūtra is just as he describes. Advancing: yet the "ease" the gentry admired, once read faithfully through "the nature of the offence is empty plus remove it directly," turns out to be an internalization—the drawing-in of the rule from an external roster of items to a watch kept over one's own mind's grasping at marks—and therefore a raising of the ethical bar, not a loosening of it. Beneath the surface "ease" Mather observed lies precisely a higher rigor.

One scholarly gap must be marked at the last, to make plain where this paper stands. The literature on the sign-less precept has long been anchored in the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch and in early Chan (as in Morten Schlütter's study of the transformation of the "sign-less precept" in the Platform Sūtra¹²); the Upāli passage of Vimalakīrti is read only as philosophy of non-duality and emptiness (McRae, Mather); and the doctrinal puzzle of "emptiness-and-repentance" is set only within Korean texts (Cho, Wŏnhyo). The three lines each hold their own ground, yet no one has set apart the Upāli chapter of Vimalakīrti and read it, within the frame of "a theory of the discipline," as a proof-text for principial repentance and the sign-less precept. In just this seam the present paper takes its stand.

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V. Middle-Way Correction

This chapter sorts common misreadings from the textual facts, under a three-level marking.

❌ Misreading one: "the nature of the offence is empty, therefore one may transgress." This reads Vimalakīrti's breaking as a dispensation—since emptiness has dissolved the offence, transgression no longer matters. It is the most dangerous misreading and the one most in need of a blow to the head. What Vimalakīrti breaks is "the clinging to the mark of the offence" (the principial-repentance dimension), not the precept itself; the text's three guards (remove it directly / this is upholding the Vinaya / doubt and remorse removed) already deny this reading with one voice. And the old commentators ruled against it long ago. The earliest layer, contemporary with Kumārajīva himself (the Annotations on the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, by Kumārajīva and Sengzhao), says:

什曰：罪本無相而橫為生相，是為妄想。妄想自生垢耳，非理之咎也。肇曰：優波離分別罪相欲以除垢，罪本無相而妄生罪相，乃更增〔其垢〕。 "Kumārajīva says: The offence is originally without mark, yet one perversely generates a mark for it—this is deluded thought. It is deluded thought alone that generates the defilement; the fault does not lie in the principle [of the discipline]. Sengzhao says: Upāli, discriminating the mark of the offence, wished thereby to remove the defilement; but the offence being originally without mark, to falsely generate a mark of the offence only adds [further to the defilement]." — Annotations on the Vimalakīrti Sūtra (注維摩詰經), Kumārajīva and Sengzhao, T38n1775《注維摩詰經》T38, No. 1775View on CBETA online reader ↗, p0356a24–a26

"The fault does not lie in the principle"—what is broken is only the falsely generated mark of the offence; the "Vinaya" (the principle) itself is wholly without fault. Sengzhao puts it more pointedly still: Upāli, discriminating the mark of the offence in the hope of removing the defilement, "only adds" to the defilement instead. This corroborates the text's "do not add further to the offence of these two monks" exactly.

Zhiyi, in his Textual Commentary on the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, systematizes the distinction into a framework that correlates a "threefold repentance" with "morality–concentration–wisdom":¹³

一作法懺、二觀相懺、三觀無生懺。作法懺滅違無作罪，〔依毘尼門〕……觀無生懺，滅妄想罪，此依慧門。〔復次〕違無作罪障戒、性罪障定、妄想罪障慧。 "First, repentance-by-procedure; second, repentance-by-contemplating-marks; third, repentance-by-contemplating-non-arising. Repentance-by-procedure eradicates the offence of violating the non-expressive [precept-substance], [relying on the gate of the Vinaya] … repentance-by-contemplating-non-arising eradicates the offence of deluded thought, and this relies on the gate of wisdom. [Further:] the offence of violating the non-expressive obstructs morality; the offence of intrinsic nature obstructs concentration; the offence of deluded thought obstructs wisdom." — Zhiyi, Abridged Commentary on the Vimalakīrti Sūtra (維摩經略疏), T38n1778《維摩經略疏》T38, No. 1778View on CBETA online reader ↗, p0628b22–b25

The decisive point is this: "repentance-by-contemplating-non-arising" (that is, principial repentance, the gate of wisdom, the emptiness-face of prajñā) is what eradicates the "offence of deluded thought," and it presupposes—it does not replace—the tracks of repentance-by-procedure and repentance-by-contemplating-marks (phenomenal repentance, mark-grasping repentance). With his distinction of "sharp and dull faculties," Zhiyi marks the failing of "using the emptiness of the offence's nature to skip phenomenal repentance" plainly as the error of the dull, whose gist may be put as "a light mind cannot remove the offence of a heavy mind": to bring a careless mind against a grave offence cannot remove it, and the dull-faculty person must still repent, honestly, by procedure and by marks, while only the sharp-faculty person can rightly contemplate the nature of mind and "remove it directly."¹⁴ "Empty, therefore one may transgress" is thus not only not Vimalakīrti's meaning; it is the very failing the commentators across the centuries strove to guard against.

⚠️ Correction two: "the precept that breaks precepts" is not a term of the sūtra. A search of the whole sūtra yields no such phrase; the text's wording is the redefinition of "upholding the Vinaya / understanding well." The phrases this paper employs—"the precept that breaks precepts," "the formal precept," "the checklist of prohibitions"—are all Shi Huijing's analytic tags, set up for the convenience of argument; the reader must not mistake them for canonical terms of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa.

⚠️ Correction three: "directly remove it" is not "skip the repentance." Huiyuan's Commentary on the Meaning of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra clarifies this best, with a contrasting pair, "crooked removal / direct removal":

說有罪相方教纖治名為曲滅，說罪體空破離罪相名直除滅。 "To say that there is a mark of the offence and only then teach its meticulous treatment is called crooked removal; to say that the substance of the offence is empty and so break free of the mark of the offence is called direct removal." — Huiyuan, Commentary on the Meaning of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra (維摩義記), T38n1776《維摩義記》T38, No. 1776View on CBETA online reader ↗, p0456c03–c05

"Direct" is said in contrast to "crooked": "crooked removal" first grants that there is a mark of the offence and then treats it, windingly, item by item; "direct removal" goes straight to the emptiness of the offence's substance and so breaks its mark. But both alike are removals of the offence—the directness of "direct" lies in the directness of the path, not in any "need not be removed." To read "remove it directly" as "go straight past it, no repentance needed" is a misreading of the plain words.

⚠️ Correction four: the emptiness of the offence's nature (a single axis, the offence alone) is not the emptiness of the three circles. What this chapter of the sūtra breaks is the single-axis unobtainability of "offence / mind / all dharmas not departing from suchness"; it does not contain the threefold structure of "the one who transgresses / the precept transgressed / the being affected." This paper stops at "the nature of the offence is unobtainable" and points forward to the later paper; it does not deploy the vocabulary of the three circles. (Zhiyi has, separately, a breaking of the three natures—self, other, and both—which, though near in sense, is likewise not the three circles and should not be borrowed for it.)

⚠️ Correction five: the red line of the translation-stratum. This paper's citations follow Kumārajīva's recension throughout—罪 / 罪性 / 犯律行 / 奉律 / 優波離—and never admit the variant renderings of Xuanzang's Sūtra Spoken by Vimalakīrti (無垢稱 / 鄔波離) into a Kumārajīva citation.¹⁵ Further, the six-graph contraction "mind pure, then the buddha-field pure" is not the text's wording; Kumārajīva's original is "as the mind is purified, so the buddha-field is purified," and any anchor citation must use the full text.

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VI. Conclusion

In brief. Vimalakīrti, rebuking Upāli, breaks "grasping at marks," not "the Vinaya." To reify precept and offence into a checklist of prohibitions and a roster of measurable marks of guilt is the disease of the formal precept; "the nature of the offence is neither inside, nor outside, nor in between" breaks only the clinging to the mark of the offence (the principial-repentance dimension), while "remove it directly" and "this is what is meant by upholding the Vinaya" explicitly preserve phenomenal repentance and the upholding of the discipline themselves. So, after this deconstruction, the sign-less keeping and repentance grow not slacker but more binding than the sign-grasping kind—this is what this paper calls "the precept that breaks precepts": the precept that survives the deconstruction of the formal precept and goes one layer deeper. The paper carries forward P21's doctrinal exposition through a single clinical case of transgression-and-repentance, told with a narrative and dramatic hand; the two papers are complementary within Part VII.

Place within the Six Practice Gates. The Upāli chapter of Vimalakīrti is a standard proof-text for the canonical "principial / true-reality repentance," and its paired sūtra is the Samantabhadra Contemplation Sūtra:

眾罪如霜露，慧日能消除 "The host of offences is like frost and dew; the sun of wisdom can dispel them." — Samantabhadra Contemplation Sūtra (觀普賢菩薩行法經), 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 ↗, p0393b12

That same sūtra names its own practice "the repentance that is without the mark of offence."¹⁶ Vimalakīrti and the Samantabhadra Contemplation are the canonical pair for principial repentance in the Sinitic tradition. This is precisely the living display, in the flesh, of the prajñā face of the "repentance equals emptiness" gate that the overall research program sets out (principial repentance: contemplating that the nature of the offence is empty; phenomenal repentance forming its own separate line). The Upāli chapter is therefore not only a paper of the discipline but one of the earliest and most dramatic proof-texts for the principial-repentance face of "repentance equals emptiness"—though the paper's own home ground remains the sign-less precept, on which it touches and no more, so as not to upstage the host theme.

The direction of practice. The "direction" meant here is no secret technique and no checklist of items, but the dedication of a single line of scripture: one who knows the nature of the offence to be empty "is what is meant by upholding the Vinaya." The sign-less keeping is not a lesser constraint but a deeper upholding of the Vinaya—it moves the leverage-point of precept-keeping from the items on a list to the very mind that is always ready to go and grasp at marks and at a self. Only one who guards that mind comes to know why "direct removal" is harder than "crooked removal," and more real.

Open questions. This paper halts at the single axis of "the nature of the offence is unobtainable," and here sets a forward-pointer: the later paper (P23) will follow the emptiness of the three circles and extend this unobtainability into its application to "the one who transgresses / the precept transgressed / the being affected," all three empty. If the nature of the offence is unobtainable, then what of the one who transgresses, the thing transgressed, the one affected? That question is left to the next paper.

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Series Cross-References

• Continuing from (within Part VII) — SĪLA P21 The Diamond Sūtra and Sign-less Sīla — from the Mahāprajñāpāramitā's sustained, doctrinal sign-less precept to a single living case of transgression-and-repentance; P22 opens by taking up P21's closing forward-pointer (which names "Vimalakīrti's precept that breaks precepts" as the next paper) and mirrors, on the offence-and-repentance axis, P21's thesis that the sign-less keeping binds more tightly than sign-grasping keeping.
• Foundation within the volume — SĪLA P01 What Sīla Actually Means — the diagnosis of the "checklist of prohibitions" reading of the precept (the three doors); P22 is its Mahāyāna wing, turning the same critique against that reading with the weapon of prajñā's sign-lessness (taking up the forward-pointer at P01:266; cf. P19's structural pickup of DĀNA-P31).
• Method — SĪLA P18 Precept-Substance and Manas — the own-it voicing discipline (distinguishing what the text says from what this paper reads); P22 keeps the same discipline, separating "the offence is neither inside nor outside" (text) from "the disease of the formal precept is grasping at marks" (this paper's reading).
• Paired sūtra for principial repentance — Samantabhadra Contemplation Sūtra (觀普賢菩薩行法經) — Vimalakīrti's Upāli passage and the Samantabhadra Contemplation Sūtra's "the host of offences is like frost and dew" form the canonical pair for principial repentance in the Sinitic tradition.
• Looking ahead — SĪLA P23 Three-Circle Emptiness Applied to Sīla — extending "the nature of the offence is unobtainable" to the emptiness of the agent, the precept, and the being (the single-axis boundary P22 stops at, taken up by the following paper).

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正法眼藏，不立文字——The value of the Dharma lies in the Dharma itself, not in the identity of the one who expounds it.

Pointing at the Moon ｜ Six Practice Gates · SĪLA 戒 ｜ CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Scriptural citations collated against the CBETA Electronic Tripiṭaka ｜ github.com/pointing-at-the-moon/six-practice-gates

Pointing at the Moon · The Six Practice Gates · Volume IV SĪLA · Paper 22 · Part VII #2 · May 2026

Footnotes

1. Cf. SILA-P01, What Sīla Actually Means (Part I of this volume), §I, for the diagnosis of the "checklist of prohibitions" reading of the precept, together with its forward-pointer (P01:266). P22 is the Mahāyāna-side counterpart of that critique, parallel to P19's pickup of the D1 discipline from DĀNA-P31. ↩

2. Cf. SILA-P21, The Diamond Sūtra and Sign-less Sīla (the opening paper of Part VII), on the Mahāprajñāpāramitā's "doctrinal exposition" of the perfection of pure precepts and its "corpus-silence" structure. On the register-distinction between P21 and P22, see the close of §I above. ↩

3. The core corpus of this paper is the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa, trans. Kumārajīva (Later Qin), T14n0475《維摩詰所說經》Vimalakīrti-nirdeśaT14, No. 475Kumārajīva (Later Qin, 406 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗, the principal citations being from the Upāli passage of the third ("Disciples") chapter, p0541b10–c06. Line-references are given inline; collated against the CBETA Electronic Tripiṭaka 2024. ↩

4. The word-for-word parallel of the locating syntax within the "Disciples" chapter: the Upāli passage's "neither inside, nor outside, nor in between" (p0541b17) and the Rāhula passage on going-forth, "neither this nor that, nor in between" (cf. around p0541c). This is adduced only to show that Upāli is one link in the sūtra's whole series of breaking the grasping at marks (a single token on the side of the discipline); the full roster of the ten great disciples is not unfolded. ↩

5. The own-it discipline—distinguishing "what the text says directly" from "what this paper reads out"—is the voicing norm established for this volume from SILA-P18 onward, meant to keep the line between analytic phrasing and scriptural evidence sharp, lest the reader take a metalevel tag for a canonical term. ↩

6. "The nature of the offence is empty" is this paper's summary of Vimalakīrti's own words, "the nature of the offence is neither inside, nor outside, nor in between"; it is not a ready-made set phrase. The popular eight-graph repentance line "the nature of the offence is empty, made by mind alone" (as in the common penitential liturgies) is a sense-paraphrase belonging to the repentance liturgies, not the text of the Samantabhadra Contemplation Sūtra, and this paper does not treat it as a proof-text. ↩

7. The thesis "the sign-less keeping is more binding than the sign-grasping keeping" was already established in SILA-P21; this paper confirms it mirror-wise on the offence-and-repentance axis, without re-proving it for precept-keeping in general. ↩

8. The three pairs on "offence and merit are not-two" in the "Entering the Gate of Non-duality" chapter: the bodhisattva Siṃha (p0550c24–c26); the bodhisattva Puṣya, "the good and the not-good … enter the limit of marklessness" (p0550c22–c23); the bodhisattva Field-of-Merit, "the offending deed, the unmoving deed … the true nature of the three deeds is just emptiness" (p0551b22–b24). All three are spoken before Mañjuśrī enters the scene, and are adduced here as corroborating evidence. The discourse after Mañjuśrī's entrance, together with the "silence" passage of that chapter, is left to a later paper. ↩

9. Eun-su Cho, two essays on Wŏnhyo's repentance and moral responsibility (respectively in the Journal of Korean Religions, 2017, and Philosophy East and West 63.1, 2013). Her evidence is drawn chiefly from the Wŏnhyo-line "Repentance of the Six Faculties" (六根懺) texts of Korea, which for this paper serve as a cross-traditional comparandum. ↩

10. John R. McRae's English translation of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra (BDK English Tripiṭaka, 2004), rendered directly from Kumārajīva's Chinese stratum, but placing the Upāli passage within the philosophical frame of non-duality. ↩

11. Richard B. Mather, "Vimalakīrti and Gentry Buddhism," History of Religions 8.1 (1968). ↩

12. Morten Schlütter, on the transformation of the "sign-less precept" (無相戒) in the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch (Hamburg Buddhist Studies series, c. 2017/18). Cited here as a warrant for the scholarly gap, not as an interlocutor of this paper. ↩

13. Zhiyi, Textual Commentary on the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, T38n1778《維摩經略疏》T38, No. 1778View on CBETA online reader ↗, around p0628b22–b25. The framework correlating the threefold repentance with the three trainings and the three gates (the gate of the Vinaya / the gate of concentration / the gate of wisdom) is taken up here only to support the anti-antinomian reading; no full Tiantai doctrinal exposition is attempted, so as not to stray from the theme of the sign-less precept of prajñā. ↩

14. Ibid., p0628c11–c15: "Persons have sharp and dull faculties; the dull person, in committing the offence, is heavy of mind but, in repenting the offence, light of mind, and a light mind cannot remove the offence of a heavy mind; one therefore makes him generate a grave shame, fear, and a changed and guarded mind, and he must perform the procedure and contemplate the marks. As for the person of sharp faculties, rightly contemplating the nature of mind … this is to remove it directly without perturbing the mind" (personally collated). The gist: the dull must repent by procedure and by marks; only the sharp-faculty person, rightly contemplating the nature of mind, removes it directly. ↩

15. Xuanzang's Sūtra Spoken by Vimalakīrti (說無垢稱經, T14n0476《說無垢稱經》(玄奘譯)Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa (Xuanzang tr.)T14, No. 476View on CBETA online reader ↗) uses variant renderings (無垢稱 Wúgòuchēng for the protagonist's name, 鄔波離 for Upāli) differing from Kumārajīva's, and constitutes a contrastive stratum that is nowhere admitted into the body text of this paper. The "無垢稱" forms found in the CBETA collation apparatus are editorial variants, not the text of Kumārajīva's sūtra itself. ↩

16. Samantabhadra Contemplation Sūtra (觀普賢菩薩行法經), 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 ↗: the verse "the host of offences is like frost and dew; the sun of wisdom can dispel them" (p0393b12); the prose "my own mind is of itself empty; offence and merit have no owner" (p0392c26); the sūtra names this practice "the repentance that is without the mark of offence" (p0392c29)—all three personally collated. Vimalakīrti and the Samantabhadra Contemplation are the canonical pair for principial / true-reality repentance in the Sinitic tradition. ↩