Pāli RootsRemorse in the ĀgamasThe Sevenfold Worship and SamantabhadraThe Death-and-Rebirth BridgeThe Three RepentancesThe Chinese Repentance LiturgiesThe Repentance of Non-Arising: Transgression Has No Own-BeingThe Modern Diagnosis, and Daily Use
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Part 3 · The Sevenfold Worship and Samantabhadra
Repentance · 2 papers
In the two parts before this, the scene of remorse was a plain one: a monk saying his fault aloud to the Saṅgha; a king disclosing his remorse to a Buddha living in the world. The [ from the book's part intro ]
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06The Confession Limb of the Sevenfold WorshipThe sevenfold worship (saptāṅga-pūjā) lists confession as one limb, set after homage and offering and before rejoicing, requesting, and dedication. The question this paper asks is not why repent but a finer one: why is confession a limb in a liturgy of worship rather than a free-standing act of atonement — and where, and why, does it sit? The paper first dissects the order of the seven limbs and shows that confession is the sole subtractive limb among them, lodged at the hinge of a purify-then-increase logic. It then traces three historical strata — the Vinaya's disclosure (deśanā), the "three events" / triskandhaka, and the full sevenfold worship — to argue that the confession limb is no Mahāyāna invention but the same act the Vinaya already operated, re-contextualized within worship: all that changes is the witness, exchanged from the purified saṅgha for the present Buddhas of the ten directions (the bridge text being the "three events" of the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, fascicle 7). Drawing on the Śikṣāsamuccaya for the doctrinal necessity of why confession precedes practice, and on the Thirty-Five-Buddha confession as the limb's lived liturgical instance, the paper concludes: at the sevenfold worship, phenomenal repentance reaches its devotional high-water mark, yet it remains phenomenal repentance — the deed stands as a deed, disclosure is made to the Buddhas, removal is sought. The emptiness-side — the principle-repentance that beholds the fault as unarisen — is reserved for this volume's Part VII; here the paper plants only a signpost.07Samantabhadra's Confession of Karmic ObstaclesAt the fourth of Samantabhadra's Ten Great Vows, confession reaches the high-water mark of its aspirational form: it rises from a limb of the sevenfold worship (saptāṅga-pūjā, 七支供) — a single, completed liturgical act — to a vow (praṇidhāna, 願) among the Ten, loaded onto the vow-form chassis of fourfold inexhaustibility (四喻無盡) plus moment-to-moment continuity without interruption (念念相續無有間斷). Reading the long-prose of the fourth vow in the Bhadracarī ("Chapter of Samantabhadra's Conduct and Vows," forty-fascicle Avataṃsaka, fascicle 40), the paper turns on a structural asymmetry between the saptāṅga source-verses and the long-prose vow: the verses halt at a completed act and carry no inexhaustibility clause, whereas only the long-prose vow carries the four exhaustion-similes. Once confession is posited as a vow, it inherits the vow-form's inexhaustible chassis; so phenomenal repentance (事懺) turns from "a single point of disclosure" into "a line stretching to the end of future time, unbroken, without weariness." The paper then argues: the four exhaustion-similes are a logical construction (they set a termination-condition that can never obtain); moment-to-moment continuity is a continuity established by Samantabhadra's contemplative practice (觀行), not the grinding of willpower; the object of the karmic obstacle is a cause→manifestation→effect generative chain ("from greed, hatred, and delusion arising in body, speech, and mind"), not a substance; and the mechanism of confession is a redirect ("henceforth not committing it again, abiding ever in pure precepts"), not an erasure. Setting the matter beside Kant, Levinas, the myth of Sisyphus, and religious scrupulosity, the paper shows that the inexhaustibility of this vow rests on the boundlessness of the object aspired to, not on "I am never enough"; the text's "without weariness" (無有疲厭) positively refutes the futility-and-anxiety reading. Throughout, the paper keeps strictly to phenomenal repentance; the principial side — beholding the very nature of sin as empty — is reserved, on Zongmi's own statement that the fourth vow "omits the contemplation of sin's emptiness" because emptiness is its presupposed ground, for the end of this volume.Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.