Pāli RootsThe Precept in the ĀgamasThree Vinaya LineagesThe Mahāyāna TurnThe Precept-SubstanceBhaiṣajyaguru's Twelve VowsPrajñā's Sign-less PreceptThe Complete PreceptThe Modern Diagnosis
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Part 7 · Prajñā's Sign-less Precept
Discipline · 3 papers
Six parts of this book have made the precept ever more solid: a definition, a position, a Vinaya canon, three clusters, a precept-substance, a seed, conditions, a road home. Part S[ from the book's part intro ]
論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
21The Diamond Sūtra and Sign-less SīlaThe Prajñāpāramitā corpus dissolves all grasping through "non-abiding in marks" and "departure from every mark." When this dissolving edge is turned upon the precept (śīla), an old worry surfaces: does emptying the mark of the precept amount to emptying the precept itself, collapsing into antinomianism? This paper first notes a textual fact rarely faced head-on: in the entire Diamond Sūtra the word "precept" (戒) occurs exactly once, and only within a passive subordinate clause describing latter-age believers — named, never analyzed — while the same sūtra applies the three-phrase formula and the logic of mark-departure in full to giving (non-abiding generosity) and to patience (the Kaliṅga-king episode). The paper argues that this silence is not an oversight but a division of doctrinal labor internal to a single Prajñāpāramitā corpus. The Diamond Sūtra is itself the ninth assembly of the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra; the sustained treatment of the precept lies in the first division of that same scripture: the "armor" passage of fascicle 48 ("toward pure precepts neither relying nor clinging, toward the evil of breakage neither loathing nor seizing, because keeping and breaking are by nature empty"), the genuine-versus-counterfeit perfection of pure precepts of fascicles 142–159, the application of the "is-not / is" syntax to the pure precepts in fascicle 159, and fascicle 9's "by ultimate emptiness, not raising a mind of keeping-or-breaking the precept." Reading these passages canonical-internally, the paper hears in the Mahāprajñāpāramitā itself a native doctrine of the sign-less precept: the precept is kept while its mark is empty, and the genuine (sign-less) keeping binds more tightly, not less, than counterfeit (mark-clinging) keeping.22Vimalakīrti's Deconstructive Moves on Conventional SīlaThis paper takes the Upāli episode in the third ("Disciples") chapter of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa (T475, Kumārajīva) as its core text and argues that when Vimalakīrti rebukes Upāli, "foremost in the Vinaya," what he dismantles is the grasping at marks—the reification of precepts and offences into a checklist of prohibitions and measurable signs of guilt—not the moral discipline itself. The line "the nature of the offence is neither inside, nor outside, nor in between" breaks only the clinging to the mark of the offence (the dimension of principial repentance), while three guards built into the text—"directly remove it" (the retention of phenomenal repentance), "this is what is meant by upholding the Vinaya" (a redefinition rather than an abolition of discipline), and the narrative's successful purification (the monks' doubt and remorse are then and there removed)—explicitly preserve both the actual eradication of the offence and the upholding of discipline. The sign-less mode of keeping precepts therefore turns out to be more binding than the sign-grasping mode, mirroring the companion paper P21. Three layers of traditional commentary (Kumārajīva and Sengzhao; Huiyuan's "crooked versus direct removal"; Zhiyi's threefold repentance correlated with morality–concentration–wisdom and his sharp/dull-faculty distinction) are shown to confirm this anti-antinomian reading, and the Upāli passage is paired with the Samantabhadra Contemplation Sūtra ("the host of offences is like frost and dew") as a canonical proof-text for principial repentance—the prajñā face of the "repentance equals emptiness" gate. The paper closes by pointing forward to the threefold emptiness of the agent, the precept, and the being, to be treated in P23.23Three-Circle Emptiness Applied to SīlaThe preceding paper, treating Vimalakīrti's dismantling of the formal precept, halted at a single axis—"the nature of the offence is unobtainable"—and left a question hanging: if the nature of the offence is unobtainable, what then of the one who transgresses, the precept transgressed, and the being affected? The present paper takes up that question and, following the prajñā path of "three-circle emptiness" (三輪體空, Skt. trimaṇḍala-pariśuddhi), argues that the three wheels of the precept—the agent who keeps it (or breaks it), the precept that is kept (or the offence committed), and the being who is protected (or wronged)—are all three unobtainable, and that this "unobtainable" is in no way an abolition of the precept. The paper's central finding is that the three-wheel purity of the precept is not an analytic structure carried over from the gate of giving but is stated outright in two translation strata of the prajñā corpus: Xuanzang enumerates "when one keeps the precept, the three wheels are pure" in three clauses, Kumārajīva renders it as the dual axis "one does not obtain the precept, the precept-keeper, or the precept-breaker," and Nāgārjuna goes further still—setting his own objection and answering it, and himself transposing the giving-formula "no giver, no recipient, no gift" onto the precept. What is emptied is only the grasping at these three marks; Nāgārjuna states plainly that "such precept-keeping is itself a cause that gives rise to offence," so that sign-grasping keeping is itself an act that produces offence—whence sign-less keeping is not looser than sign-grasping keeping but more exacting, more binding. As the closing paper of the prajñā sign-less-precept triad (the one that "completes the three"), it ends by turning the precept toward its sense as "the basis for concentration," handing off to the next part.Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.