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Repentance is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] the mind within is stilled.. 慚愧是法明門、内心寂定故. Having finished our discussion of the four seals, we move next to a group of five gates that I suspect is designed to keep us from becoming icchantikas, beings who have so far destroyed their wholesome roots that they have no hope of awakening. (1) I confess that it’s not entirely clear to me that this is the nature of the list because the words have come from Sanskrit through Chinese to Japanese, and there are any number of ways to interpret the translation. (2) However, in any case these five gates have something important to say and are worth our consideration. This week, let’s look first at repentence and then at the relationship with the mind that’s stilled. Repentance is one of a pair of activities; the other is vow. We can’t really talk about one without the other. Our bodhisattva vows say that we’re going to liberate all beings from suffering, end all our delusions, take every possible opportunity to practice and thoroughly experience and understand Buddha’s way, and yet it’s not actually possible to do all this stuff in one human lifetime. Thus at the same moment that we take vows, we have to repent. As fast as we make the promise, we already have to acknowledge that in this limited human form, we’re not up to the task, and as fast as we make repentence, we vow all over again to do all these impossible things! In our tradition, repentence isn’t about saying that we fell off the wagon and asking for absolution. The core meaning of English “repent” is to creep or crawl on the ground, and in the West we immediately get a picture of someone groveling in fear and shame and begging forgiveness. However, when you think about getting down on the ground in our tradition, you might think about full prostrations. When I teach people how to do full bows, I tell them that the Japanese word for prostration is gotai tochi 五体投地, literally casting five parts of the body to the ground: right knee, left knee, right hand, left hand and head, in that order. There’s a sutra (3) that talks about the repentance of the five parts of the body, and it turns out to be these same five, so we might think about how full bows to Buddha and repentance are related. However, in Zen we’re not undertaking seeking absolution from a person or deity. Absolution is made up of the Latin ab (away) and solvere (to loosen) -- in other words, to set free. It usually means to set someone free from blame or responsibility, and in that context, one repents in order to be cleansed of guilt. Our repentance is different. Yes, we acknowledge that we’ve not been perfect bodhisattvas as we’ve gone about our daily human lives. We also acknowledge that this practice is endless and we need to keep at it moment after moment because we’ll never be done. Buddhist repentence changes across time and space. In India, the emphasis was more on confession and asking the forgiveness of the sangha. In China, the emphasis was on repentence as the cause of the confession. There are multiple kinds of repentance activities across Japanese Buddhism, and in Soto Zen today we have two kinds of repentance: formal and formless. The formal kind is where we realize we’ve been unskillful and may have taken some harmful action. Maybe you’ve broken a precept or perpetuated some kind of suffering for yourself or someone else. It’s natural to feel uncomfortable about this. If you’re a healthy person, you realize that others have feelings and they want to live peacefully and happily just like you do. Repentance practice gives us the chance to reflect on our actions, to bear in mind that everything we do is practice and everything we do has consequences for ourselves and others because of the truth of interdependence. When we realize we’ve done something unwholesome, it’s natural to feel some regret. Maybe an apology or other kind of restoration is in order, but maybe we simply need to acknowledge that what we did wasn’t optimal and we need to try not to do it again. This is what we’re doing when we do the ryaku fusatsu ceremony at Sanshin every month. It’s the oldest Buddhist ceremony that we still do. Traditionally, the entire sangha got together to hear from each other how they might have gone off the rails and to recommit to following Buddha’s teaching. Here, we listen to instructions about following the precepts, and then say something if we want to about what we may be practicing with at the time. We do that in the presence of the other practitioners who come and we also invoke a lot of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. In that way, the ceremony is about more than what’s going on for the small self. It’s the whole universe is doing the ceremony together. That brings us to formless repentence. For that, we don’t just repent of our unskillful actions, we repent of all of our actions. Why? As long as there’s a “me” doing an “action,” there is duality. The actual nature of the universe is also non-duality. This is why zazen is an act of repentence. What we’re doing here is noticing where our activity is motivated by some idea about the self. As long as we cling to the delusion of a fixed self-nature and that drives our actions, we’re missing the mark. That doesn’t mean that the action itself is bad; we could certainly do some good action that also has a bit of self-clinging. That doesn’t negate the good, but we do get chance to see what’s happening and vow to do something else next time. Formless repentance doesn’t need to wait for some actual action. It’s the acknowledgement that we carry delusion about the nature of reality, and as human beings, we will always carry that delusion. Thus we need to keep doing repentance practice and renewing our vows. Maybe this turns around our misunderstanding that we do repentence because we’re bad people and need forgiveness. That’s not what’s happening. This is not about feeling guilty. Clinging to guilt can be as much of an ego trip as clinging to doing good deeds because we’re using guilt as a means of writing a story about the self. Since we’re talking about things like absolution, we should also consider the meaning of purification. Repentence is not a means of purification as in getting rid of defilement. We could say that purity is about nonduality. If there is nothing outside the Buddha way, then even those things we might consider defiled are included. Where is the line between purity and defilement? To move toward purity is to deeply realize that samsara and nirvana are already not separate. It’s not about getting rid of anything; it’s about seeing and acknowledging that the universe is already or originally undefiled. Formal repentence deals with our karmic activity, the stuff that happens because causes and conditions resulted in our taking this human form and moving through the world. Formless repentence deals with the point before there is separation and duality and delusion. Formal repentence supports us in our zazen practice because it helps us settle down and let go of wrestling with the unhelpful things we did, including our responses to what others did to us. Formless repentence is zazen itself, being in the space before separation and subject and object so we can see how these things go together and why repentence is essential in a practice style like ours here at Sanshin where zazen is central. One of the elements of Sanshin’s practice vision is to enable the practice of shikantaza in the style of Uchiyama Roshi. What does that mean?
On the other hand, studying the meaning of zazen in the context of Buddha’s teachings might be about formless repentence. One of the Buddha’s most basic teachings is that all things are interconnected because of dependent origination. Nothing arises from nothing; everything is dependent on causes and conditions, so there is no separation, and in zazen we get to enact or embody that. It’s the repentence of returning to a point before duality where there’s no “me” taking an action, just activity. This is a good point at which to turn to the second part of the gate statement about stilling the mind. There are two things to point out here. The first is that the statement says “the mind within.” The word here is naishin 内心: deep down in the heart-mind. It’s not a case of doing repentance in order to make ourselves feel better on the surface, or to quiet our guilt or shame. We’re talking about getting down to the deep roots of the origins of our karma and delusion. The second thing to point out is related to last week’s gate: Reflection on stillness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not disturb the mind. We equated the stillness in that statement with nirvana The stillness in today’s statement is the same seijaku 静寂, sometimes translated silence, stillness or quietness. The kanji are 1) silence/stillness/peace/tranquility + 2) silence with connotation of nirvana, blowing out the flames of suffering and affliction that happen when we don’t see reality clearly, or at least, not feeding those flames if we can avoid it. We could reword today’s statement to say that repentance is a dharma gate because it puts us in touch with nirvana. That makes a lot of sense in the context of both formal and formless repentance. In our daily activity we try to understand that samsara and nirvana are not separate. Sometimes we make mistakes because we’re trying to get to some better place or situation for the small self, not understanding that nirvana is already right here. That’s formal repentance. At the same time, sitting zazen and being in that place before duality is the formless repentance; that place before duality is nirvana. If there’s no separation between subject and object, then I don’t need to break precepts to get what I think I need. So how do we actually do repentance and walk through that gate to nirvana? Like so much of Buddhism, it’s not linear; there’s no “do this and then this.” However, as a piece of groundwork, we need to understand that it’s important and why it’s important. Repentance isn’t just a ceremony or ritual. As we’ve seen, it’s not really optional in this tradition. The more we engage with it, the more we understand how necessary it is, and if we can let go of the idea that it’s about humiliating ourselves, then the ego can get out of the way. The traditional words for repentance carry connotations of both disclosure and correction. That means we have to be really honest with ourselves. We start by not hiding our unskillful actions from ourselves, and then perhaps we disclose them to others. It can be easy to rationalize our behavior and not take responsibility for what we do. It’s difficult to accept that we’ve caused suffering or done something unwholesome, but as bodhisattvas we have to accept the suffering of the world and not look away, even when we’re the cause. We can’t sincerely take vows until we first acknowlege where we’ve gotten in our own way and gotten tangled up in hindrances. That’s why we chant the verse of repentence before taking precepts. All my past and harmful karma, born from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. Unless we accept and take responsibility for our previous actions, we can’t promise to do the next one. We’ve got to start by looking closely at our own habits and assumptions. The verse refers to body, speech and mind, the three places where we create karma, so we also have to look at what we’re doing with our thoughts and how skillful we’re being there. That includes understanding why we believe what we believe. Where did those things come from, and are they helping or not? Our thoughts lead to speech and action. If I’m vowing to liberate all beings but on a daily basis I’m acting based on my need to feel important or my anger at the way my life is going, I’m not going to be effective. There’s a fair amount of self-awareness work to do here. We need to deeply investigate Buddha’s and the ancestors’ teachings on interdependence in order to get that what we do has consequences for ourselves and others. Sometimes identifying exactly what we regret doing helps us clear up vague feelings of unease we may have about ourselves. I don’t feel good about myself, but I don’t really know why. We don’t want to look at these things, but eventually we can come to see that there’s a difference between I did something unskillful and I’m a bad or unworthy person. We might be able to explode some ideas we’ve created about ourselves and may have been carrying for years. Once I’ve stopped hiding my unskillful actions from myself, it might be helpful to disclose them to others in appropriate ways. I might need to apologize to someone and explain what was going on for me (which is not the same as making an excuse). I might want to talk to a sangha friend or get some advice from a teacher. There’s much encouragement to be found in participating in ryaku fusatsu with a friendly group of practitioners who are all engaged in the same repentance practice. As part of repentence, we can practice giving up our reliance on the small self alone and turning toward the three treasures and, of course, so much of acknowledging past harmful actions and reversing the course of habituated thinking is about cultivating wisdom. There’s a part of the Lotus Sutra that says: “If one wishes to carry out repentance, sit upright and ponder the true aspect. Then the host of sins, like frost or dew, can be wiped out by the sun of wisdom.” We make mistakes because of our ignorance. We can’t always see clearly the reality of our lives. We can’t see past our ideas about how things are or how they ought to be, and our Buddha nature gets obscured by our deluded thinking. Practicing sincerely and doing our best to deeply understand emptiness and manifest our Buddha nature is real repentance. Questions for reflection and discussion
Notes
(1) We must acknowledge here that the existence of beings classified as icchantika has been controversial within the Mahayana traditions, which hold that all beings have (or are) buddha nature and cannot be excluded from awakening. See this short paper about buddha nature from Sotoshu. (2) The next five gates that I suspect may be the direct antidotes to being an icchantika are repentance, humility, veracity, truth and dharma conduct. Icchantikas are described as refusing to repent or admit wrongdoing because they have no sense of shame; denying both cause and effect and suchness, and thus creating a false view of reality; and selfishly breaking precepts without regard for others. (3) See Ancient Buddhism in Japan: Sutras and ceremonies in use in the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. and their history in later times by M. W. de Visser, Paris, 1928. Comments are closed.
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About the text The Ippyakuhachi Homyomon, or 108 Gates of Dharma Illumination, appears as the 11th fascicle of the 12 fascicle version of Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo. Dogen didn't compile the list himself; it's mostly a long quote from another text called the Sutra of Collected Past Deeds of the Buddha. Dogen wrote a final paragraph recommending that we investigate these gates thoroughly. Hoko has been talking about the gates one by one since 2016. She provides material here that can be used by weekly dharma discussion groups as well as for individual study. The 108 Gates of Dharma Illumination
[1] Right belief [2] Pure mind [3] Delight [4] Love and cheerfulness The three forms of behavior [5] Right conduct of the actions of the body [6] Pure conduct of the actions of the mouth [7] Pure conduct of the actions of the mind The six kinds of mindfulness [8] Mindfulness of Buddha [9] Mindfulness of Dharma [10] Mindfulness of Sangha [11] Mindfulness of generosity [12] Mindfulness of precepts [13] Mindfulness of the heavens The four Brahmaviharas [14] Benevolence [15] Compassion [16] Joy [17] Abandonment The four dharma seals [18] Reflection on inconstancy [19] Reflection on suffering [20] Reflection on there being no self [21] Reflection on stillness [22] Repentance [23] Humility [24] Veracity [25] Truth [26] Dharma conduct [27] The Three Devotions [28] Recognition of kindness [29] Repayment of kindness [30] No self-deception [31] To work for living beings [32] To work for the Dharma [33] Awareness of time [34] Inhibition of self-conceit [35] The nonarising of ill-will [36] Being without hindrances [37] Belief and understanding [38] Reflection on impurity [39] Not to quarrel [40] Not being foolish [41] Enjoyment of the meaning of the Dharma [42] Love of Dharma illumination [43] Pursuit of abundant knowledge [44] Right means [45] Knowledge of names and forms [46] The view to expiate causes [47] The mind without enmity and intimacy [48] Hidden expedient means [49] Equality of all elements [50] The sense organs [51] Realization of nonappearance The elements of bodhi: The four abodes of mindfulness [52] The body as an abode of mindfulness [53] Feeling as an abode of mindfulness [54] Mind as an abode of mindfulness [55] The Dharma as an abode of mindfulness [56] The four right exertions [57] The four bases of mystical power The five faculties [58] The faculty of belief [59] The faculty of effort [60] The faculty of mindfulness [61] The faculty of balance [62] The faculty of wisdom The five powers [63] The power of belief [64] The power of effort [65] The power of mindfulness [66] The power of balance [67] The power of wisdom [68] Mindfulness, as a part of the state of truth [69] Examination of Dharma, as a part of the state of truth [70] Effort, as a part of the state of truth [71] Enjoyment, as a part of the state of truth [72] Entrustment as a part of the state of truth [73] The balanced state, as a part of the state of truth [74] Abandonment, as a part of the state of truth The Eightfold Path [75] Right view [76] Right discrimination [77] Right speech [78] Right action [79] Right livelihood [80] Right practice [81] Right mindfulness [82] Right balanced state [83] The bodhi-mind [84] Reliance [85] Right belief [86] Development The six paramitas [87] The dāna pāramitā [88] The precepts pāramitā [89] The forbearance pāramitā. [90] The diligence pāramitā [91] The dhyāna pāramitā [92] The wisdom pāramitā [93] Expedient means [94] The four elements of sociability [95] To teach and guide living beings [96] Acceptance of the right Dharma [97] Accretion of happiness [98] The practice of the balanced state of dhyāna [99] Stillness [100] The wisdom view [101] Entry into the state of unrestricted speech [102] Entry into all conduct [103] Accomplishment of the state of dhāraṇī [104] Attainment of the state of unrestricted speech [105] Endurance of obedient following [106] Attainment of realization of the Dharma of nonappearance [107] The state beyond regressing and straying [108] The wisdom that leads us from one state to another state and, somehow, one more: [109] The state in which water is sprinkled on the head Archives
December 2024
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