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Philosophy East & West Volume 63, Number 1 January 2013 3954 39 2013 by University of Hawaii Press

REPENTANCE AS A BODHISATTVA PRACTICE: WNHYO ON GUILT AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

Eun-su ChoDepartment of Philosophy, Seoul National University

The Place of Freedom in a Deterministic Worldview

Determinism and freedom has been a much debated philosophical issue in the Western philosophical tradition. St. Augustines Confessions, for example, estab-lished a long-held Christian theological view on the possession of free will, which concerns the fate of human beings within a universe ruled by God. Given the specific context in which the question arose why sin and human error occur in a world cre-ated by God many have held that Asian philosophies, and especially Buddhism, do not have much relevance to the topic as their doctrines are based on a non-theistic worldview. It may not even be right to ask the question in the context of the Buddhist tradition, which denies the existence of a God or a mighty power controlling human fate. Meanwhile, with the advance of scientific knowledge, the causally determined nature of the physical and psychological world is becoming known. The question has been modified in contemporary Western philosophy so that it now concerns the possibility of freedom when ones psychological states are all causally determined, and whether freedom can be claimed given the deterministic understanding of our experience. Even with its atheistic understanding of the existence of the world and its events, it is still not too clear that a Buddhist perspective could engage in this dis-cussion concerning the compatibility or incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility. This attitude might explain the scarcity of attempts at engaging the Buddhist tradition in contemporary discussions of the issue.

In this light, Buddhism is known to hold a deterministic view of our existence.1 Mental states are considered to be caused by prior events, amidst a broader explana-tion of human existence as the combination of the five elements (skandhas) of body, sensation, feeling, ideations, and consciousness. Buddhism argues that the world, including humans, exists in such a way that things come into being and cease depen-dent on prior causes. The universe and human beings are just a causal series of psy-chophysical elements.

With this nonself doctrine in place, and physical and mental states understood as being the result of prior events, are we really responsible for the actions that we per-form? This has been a frequently asked question not only in early Buddhist texts such as the Questions of King Milinda, but also in modern investigations of Buddhist doctrine. For example, on the recent controversy in Australia over (secular) ethics education being implemented for school children, which aroused heated criticism from Christian churches, an Australian Buddhist progressive leader, Bhante Sujato, commented thus: Our children need to learn ethics, not from any self-appointed

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authority, but by learning to listen to their own voice of conscience, to dialogue with others, to accept different points of view, and to found ethics on a shared humanity, not adherence to any religious dogma. He asserts that moral standards come from the inner voice of conscience, not from an external so-called sacred and religious authority. He seems to hold a view that Buddhism postulates the moral conscience as something inherent in sentient beings. However, in light of the no-self doctrine of Buddhism, namely that there is no soul or permanent self that could be responsible for the actions that the person performs, could it be argued that moral conscience universally and permanently exists, operating independently? This raises a serious question whether the no-self doctrine negates moral responsibility.

However, Buddhists take responsibility seriously, even if they dont think there are persons who are responsible. Not only are there voluminous Buddhist texts on moral discipline delineating moral codes in detail, but the early Buddhist commu-nity conducted frequent uposatha meetings where they confessed their wrongdoings in front of the community, and performed repentance ceremonies, pravra, which took place at the end of summer retreats. Repentance presupposes responsibility. To feel repentance is to feel bad about something that one acknowledges as ones own act, and to resolve not to repeat it.

And the no-self doctrine itself has ethical implications of its own. As some Zen masters put it, one may practice doing without doing, committing actions without postulating a self or being conscious of ones self. Furthermore, when one is not driven by selfish motivations with the knowledge of nonself, it makes selflessness and altruism possible. Thus, these selfless actions are taught and encouraged without im-plicating the question of who is going to be responsible for the actions committed.2

It is in this context that I would like to bring up the matter of guilt and repen-tance, by focusing on the writings of a seventh-century Korean Buddhist monk named Wnhyo, who represents the epitome of East Asian Buddhist scholasticism. His text will provide a way of investigating moral responsibility from an East Asian Buddhist perspective.

Wnhyo and His Text on Repentance

Wnhyo (617686) is probably the most seminal Buddhist scholiast in Korea. As a monk-scholar, he is renowned for not only his scholarly work but also his adventurous and dramatic life path. He is known to have composed eighty treatises and com-mentaries, among which twenty works are extant, comprising the wide spectrum of doctrinal development in East Asian Buddhism in the seventh century. This was the most exciting period of Buddhist doctrinal development in East Asia, with Yogcra, Madhyamaka, Tathgatagarbha, Huayen, Pure Land, and Precepts interpretations all represented. His writings represent the culmination of a flourishing theoretical and soteriological understanding of Buddhist thought in India and its adaptation in East Asia.

The short text that we are analyzing, titled the Mahyna Repentance of the Six Senses (Taesng yukchng chamhoe),3 composed of 1,073 Chinese characters in

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seventy verse lines, provides a useful example for our discussion of guilt and moral responsibility in Buddhist philosophy. The text discusses the non-substantiality of sentient beings and the actions or offenses they commit. Further, the text deals with the consequences of wrongdoings: Wnhyo states that if you do not feel remorse or shame, or repent your actions, even though the crimes you have committed are not substantial, this will cause you to fall into hell. He calls up the metaphor of an illu-sory tiger created by magic that in turn swallows the magician. He also states the need for repentance, and assures that repentance is related to staying mindful of ones senses. Practicing being mindful of the senses will enable one to realize the dharma-knti, a state of the non-arising of mental entities. The content of the text delineates a bodhisattvas practice in terms of repentance.

Metaphysics and ethics are usually considered two separate areas of philosophy. For Wnhyo, however, the two are deeply intertwined around the central concept of the mind and the world that it creates. His ethics are based on the Madhyamaka theory of the non- substantiality of entities, a metaphysical foundation and basis of a theory of knowledge. Wnhyos ethics differs from ethics in the dimension of the mundane world; his ethics are concerned with the realm of enlightenment, closely related to metaphysical theories. According to him, metaphysical understanding is another word for enlightenment and the act of repentance is nothing but the way of religious practice geared toward enlightenment. The moral responsibility that Wnhyo expresses in terms of remorse and guilt is to be achieved through under-standing the metaphysical outlook on the world that he proposes.

For Wnhyo the practice of morality is not first and foremost a matter of behaving in a moral manner. His life story, which is full of surprises and adventures, might provide a backdrop to his differentiation of morality and moral actions. His biogra-phies state that he had an enlightenment experience on his journey to China. He took refuge from a storm in a sanctuary, but awoke thirsty in the middle of the night and looked in the dark for water. Finding a bowl of water, he drank from it and, satis-fied, went back to sleep. The next morning when he awoke, he found to his disgust that the place where he had slept was in fact a crypt and that what he had taken to be a bowl of water was actually stagnant water in a human skull. What he thought was thirst-quenching the night before was disgusting now.

Wnhyo turned back from his journey to China, proclaiming that there was no need to search for truth outside ones mind. Later, he was involved in an affair with a widowed princess; the union produced a son, Sl Chong, one of the most famous literati in Korean history, and this helped to seal his reputation as someone who tran-scended such conventional distinctions as secular and sacred. Although a man of erudition, Wnhyo was notorious in his time for being a monk who frequented broth-els and wine shops. After an illustrious career as a writer and Buddhist thinker, he lived primarily as a mendicant, wandering the cities and markets as a street prosely-tizer. After the affair just mentioned he withdrew from being a monk and devoted himself to proselytizing rather than taking on students or finding disciples who would inherit his teachings. His later life as a mendicant is a performative interpretation of Buddhist truth.

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Non-substantiality of Actions

Wnhyo begins the text by stating that sentient beings construct external objects; with ego-minded thoughts of me and mine, they commit various actions due to ignorance and erroneous views. Hindered by self-inflicted delusion, they do not see or hear properly, just like hungry ghosts who, approaching a river, see fire (verses 1016). The actions we commit and the external objects we see are conceptual con-structions. They do not really exist. Wnhyo uses Madhyamaka logic to establish the non-substantiality and non-production of actions in the following verses.

22Yet these offences do not really exist.

The clusters of conditions occurring together are provisionally named as action.

23The actions are found neither in the conditions nor apart from the conditions.

Neither within nor outside, there is no third possibility.

24Anything in the past no longer exists (whatever in the past is already gone).

Things existing in the future have not come forth; the present does not abide (what has been produced does not abide).

25Due to its not abiding, there is no production.

If it were existent previously, it cannot be [regarded as] being produced; if it were previ-ously non-existent, what caused it to come forth?

26If you say it was once non-existent and now became existent,

These two meanings are put together and called production.

27At the time of non-existence this existence could not have been existing,

At the time of this present existence, there is no original non-existence existing.

28Before and after cannot reach out to each other, and existence and non-existence cannot meet.

If the two notions cannot be joined, how could there be production?

29When the meaning of combining has already been disputed, its disintegration cannot be established.

[They] cannot be put together or fallen apart, [thus they are] neither existent nor non- existent.

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30At the time of non-existence there is no existence, so in contrast to what could there be non-existence?

At the time of existence, there is no non-existence, so for whom do we say that there is existence?

31Neither before nor after, neither existence nor non-existence can be posited.

32You should know that actions are by nature originally not produced.

From the beginning, they could not have been produced,

33Hence on which grounds can production be found?

Both production and non-production cannot be possible.

34Moreover, saying that they cannot be possible is not possible.

Actions are of such nature, and likewise the Buddhas.

Wnhyo expounds that actions do not really exist: what we call actions are just provisionally named concepts. Actions are not enduring, actions are not produced because those events in the past, present, and the future do not abide. There are no such things that can be called producings; actions are just conceptual construc-tions built up out of what occurs earlier and later.

He then, in verses 3538, argues that events are created neither from existence nor from non-existence nor from both; nor do they occur without cause, so there is no lack of causal production. Therefore, there is no such thing as actions being committed. In the same manner, there is no such thing as receiving the result of the actions. At the same time, there is no one who commits the transgressions, no one to receive the result of the actions. There is no transgressor, no object that was violated, nor the action of transgression; only by the confluence of the various factors do the fruits, that is, actions, occur. Both person and action are negated. The persons and the actions that they had committed are just a causal series of psychophysical elements. Ones psychological states are all causally determined, commensurate with a deterministic point of view. However, even though there is no self, when these elements are arranged in certain ways, it is conventionally true that this is a person who committed the crime. This is how nonself works by use of the idea of a causal series of psychophysical elements. Here Wnhyos argument could be inter-preted as allowing a kind of compatibilist position accepting the validity of moral responsibility and guilt while adhering to the nonself of persons and nonself of elements.

Entities, or, in Buddhist terminology, dharmas, are devoid of inherent nature, or svabhva in Madhyamaka Buddhism. In the earlier Abhidharma Buddhist develop-

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ment, the scholiast held that the entities we find in the ordinary world are composed of parts, and so as wholes are devoid of intrinsic nature; like a chariot that consists of its parts, a person does not have a self-nature. This was an attempt to explain the nonself doctrine that the Buddha had expounded. However, the bhidharmakas held that the atomic parts, the dharmas of which the whole consists and to which the whole is to be reduced, do have intrinsic nature. For them the dharmas are ultimately real, even though the whole, such as a chariot or a person, is not real but a mere conceptual construction. Human existence is no more than a result of the combina-tion of the five skandhas. This theory of the bhidharmakas was to be criticized by Mdhyamikas, such as Ngrjuna in his Mlamadhyamakakrik.

Here Wnhyo not only negates the actions and substantial essence of persons, he negates intrinsic nature and causal relations as well. He follows the Mahyna doctrine of the emptiness of existence understood in the Madhyamaka way, as both pudgala-nairtmya (selflessness of persons) and dharma-nairtmya (dharmas lack of intrinsic nature). There is no inherent nature of dharmas: the causal relation lacks substantiality; it, too, is devoid of self-nature. Wnhyo uses the first kind of emptiness when he points out that persons are only to be found at the conventional level, not at the ultimate level, so moral properties such as responsibility cannot be ultimately real.

He goes further, however. The argument at verse 28, for instance, is to the effect that the causal relation is itself conceptually constructed and so not ultimately real. The argument is that since cause and effect could only exist at two different times, they could never come into any kind of relation with one another, which is what would be needed for a real causal connection. This is what makes what Wnhyo is doing so radical. He is not just asserting the nonsubstantiality of the persons; he is asserting the nonsubstantiality of everything whatever. It is mere conceptual con-struction all the way down. This means that determinism is not ultimately true either. If it is true at all this is only because it is useful for us to think that way. There arent any causal connections in the world apart from our ways of thinking about it. But an action is something I cause (or these skandhas cause). So there really arent any actions.

Transgressions are specifically defined as follows.

18Having been confused by ignorance (), I and other sentient beings committed count-less transgressions ().

19Those five heinous transgressions and the ten evil wrongdoings, there is nothing we havent done.

Whether doing it oneself, getting someone else to do it, or finding joy in someone else doing it,

20Innumerable transgressions such as these, are beyond counting,

Are fully known by all the holy ones.4

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Thus,

21Arousing profound shame and remorse for our past transgressions that we have committed,

We dare not repeat them in the future.

To feel guilt or shame is to accept responsibility. As such, for Wnhyo, the feeling of shame is a reflection of moral consciousness, and why one must repent. Sentient beings, with profound shame, should arise to the mind of enlightenment (bodhi-citta) and sincerely practice repentance (kama) for the wrongdoings they had committed from beginningless time. One should feel profound shame for the actions that had been committed before, and they should not be repeated in the future.

Non-substantiality of Transgressions or Transgressors

Although transgressions do not have their own substantiality, they can make one fallen; thus one has to repent. The following verses argue this.

39If practitioners can contemplate reality in this way with a repentant attitude,

40It is not possible to commit the four grave offenses and five heinous acts,

Just as empty space cannot be burnt by fire.

41However, if you are not careful/mindful (, apramda), lack remorse and shame, and are not able to know the true nature of the actions,

42Even though transgressions lack the nature (svabhva) of criminality, you will still go to hell (niraya),

Just like a magical tiger who in turn swallows up the magician who conjured him.

43Therefore, before the Buddhas in the ten directions,You should feel profound shame and remorse and perform this repentance.

Having said that there is no one to commit offenses and that no transgressions really exist, then, would it be justifiable to feel guilty, remorseful, or repentant toward ones own actions in this regard? Wnhyo says there is still a need to practice repentance. In his language, repentance is nothing but knowing that the events and actions are not really produced. Repentance is defined as understanding the absence of self-nature in the things and actions of the universe as understanding their nonsubstan-tiality or, in other words, their emptiness.

In light of the Buddhist no-self doctrine, is feeling guilty or remorseful justi-fied? His answer would be this: we practice repentance not because I or this

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person has committed any transgressions; there is really no one who commits the transgression. There is no one who is a criminal, nor is there a criminal attitude. However, out of ignorance, one who still does not understand commits transgres-sions; for that person the transgression exists; the transgressor, the person, exists. Such transgressions are what one is guilty of, should feel remorse for, for which repentance should be made.

One has to make sure that that repentance is done in a way that conforms with nonself because ultimately there is no transgression or transgressor. Wnhyo says:5

44When you do practice repentance, do it without [ego-involvement].Just know the very nature of repentance.

45When the wrongdoings you repent do not really exist,Where could there exist a repenter?

46Both repenter and what is to be repented of are not found,

Where can the action of repentance be found?

Based on the nature of non-substantiality of transgressions, the repentance that is argued for in this section is not about repenting ones own wrongdoings. Wnhyo argues that repentance should not be just about being remorseful about your past actions. It requires a more profound understanding of the nature of actions and the actor. He prescribes a philosophical and religious realization about the non-substantiality of persons and events.

Dream-like Existence

With this deluded mind caused by ignorance we misconceive the outer world as existing, when it is merely a construction of our own mind. The second type of repen-tance involves seeing things correctly. That correct understanding presupposes the perspective of ultimate truth.

47Once you have repented of all these karmic obstructions caused by your past actions,

You should also repent of your lack of mindfulness concerning the six senses.

48I and other sentient beings, having misunderstood from beginningless time that the ele-ments have never been produced,

49Deluded and erroneous, I imagine me and mine,

Within, six sense faculties are established, depending on which [six kinds of ] conscious-ness arise respectively.

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50The six kinds of sense objects, to which we adhere as existing, are constructed externally.

We do not know these are all creations of our own mind.

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Like a dream, or an illusion, they have never existed.

Wnhyos views on ultimate truth and conventional truth are illustrated by the example of dreams. Life experiences are like dreams: while one is in a dream one is affected by it. Like someone who is terrified by the dream of a flood, deluded we see ourselves as being carried away in a great river without realizing that it is actually a dream. Feeling like we are really drowning, we are scared to death. Then, not yet awake, we have another dream, and say, What I saw was a dream, which was not real. Because of the minds intelligence, one is aware of the dream within a dream, and thus is not afraid of drowning. Yet we are still unable to realize that we are lying in bed. Head shaking and hands trembling, we struggle to really wake up. When we are finally awake and reflect back on the previous dream, neither the river nor our drowning selves had a place in existence. We see nothing but ourselves quietly lying in bed (verses 5460).

The Buddhist account of the path to enlightenment is equated with removing defilements. Defilements are mental habits that perpetuate the sense of an I. Wnhyo explains that defilements or deluded thoughts are not real, having no onto-logical grounds, and only appear due to ignorance. Wnhyo claims that they only seem to be real, appearing as such only because of a mind shaken by ignorance. Thus the practitioners task is not to remove or eliminate defilements but rather to know that the defilements that we experience as reality are in fact nothing but illusion. The point of the task is to free oneself from ignorance.

This task is realized by grasping the nonsubstantiality of the thought at the mo-ment of inception in which the thought arises. Among the four phases of the evolu-tion of thoughts (arising, sustaining, changing, ceasing), Wnhyo states that the stage of arising is the subtlest and hardest to grasp. Once the practitioner grasps and penetrates the moment of inception in which arising occurs and becomes aware of their nonsubstantiality, these thoughts will thereafter cease to arise. Being aware and knowing this is being free from ignorance.6 As repentance is defined as understand-ing the nonsubstantiality of thoughts and actions, this process becomes a way of meditation, a way of practice.

Repentance as a Means of Bodhisattva Practice

59The long dream [of sasra] is also thus.

Ignorance covers the mind, falsely creating the six destinies wherein we flow among all the eight sufferings.

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60Internally depending on the inconceivable pervading influence (vsan) of all the Buddhas,

And externally relying on the great compassion and the power of the vows of all the Bud-dhas, we come to have some semblance of faith and understanding (raddhdhimoka).

63That I and all sentient beings are only asleep in a long dream, falsely positing it to be real.

64The agreeable and disagreeable objects in the six sense fields and the two characteristics of male and female are also just our dream. They have never been real.

So what is it that makes us unhappy or happy? What is there to crave and hate?

This conceptual framework serves as a unique cognitive tool in East Asian Buddhist practice. Elsewhere, in a different text, Wnhyo speaks about non-substantiality as follows:

Sasra itself does not have its own substantiality. Because it is devoid of substantiality, there are no distinctions in appearance such as changing and evolving. If appearances do not change, how can substance, that is, the mind itself, change? Thus, I would say that the four phases in the appearance of thought are actually the same as one mind, and non-enlightenment is the same as original enlightenment; that is how it is said that these enlightenments are all identical to one enlightenment.7

Wnhyo concludes the text by delineating the way of conducting the practice of repentance.

66Repeatedly contemplate it all being a dream,

And gradually you will perfect the cultivation of the samdhi in which everything is like a dream ().

67Due to this samdhi, you will gain quiescence in the non-production of dharmas (, anuttpatikadharmaknti ).

68In a flash you will awaken from this long dream,And will immediately know that originally you have never flowed back and forth.

But that this has all been just the One Mind lying on the bed of the one suchness.

69If you leave behind [this dream] and are able to contemplate it repeatedly,

Even though the sensory objects and the six sense fields are not to be regarded as real,

70With shame for your afflictions, you cannot be mindless ().

This is called the Mahyna Repentance of the Six Senses.

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Once you awaken from a dream you understand that it is not real. Realizing this is called obtaining the dharma-knti, and this practice is called meditation based on the perception of the world as a dream. Repentance is knowing and understand-ing the true nature of events and the world, by practicing the samdhi that concen-trates on the dream-like nature of our cognitive existence. This samdhi will enable one to realize the dharma-knti or anutpattika-dharma-knti (), literally patient acceptance based on awareness of the non-arising of phenomena. This is a distinctive level of enlightenment, a special realization of the non-production of dharmas, and a doctrinal conception found in certain Mahyna Buddhist texts; Wnhyo expounds this term with great emphasis in his Treatise on the Vajrasamdhi-stra. This is a patience, tolerance, or acceptance based on the clear cognition of the unproduced nature of all existences, to realize that all things are beyond birth and decay. Because one is removed from the deluded thoughts of objects of the senses, the mind can be at rest in its awakening to the reality of the non-arising of all existences.8

Awareness comes out of fundamentally understanding the nature of moral ac-tions, moral agents, the external world, and objects to which ones moral concerns are directed, which make up the foundation of morality. This awareness involves real-izing that there is no such thing as a permanent, independent nature of morality or immorality, and that understanding this will lead to ones practice of morality. There is no self-nature (svabhva) in moral actions. There are no actions that are intrinsi-cally good or bad; they are just occurrences at the confluence of bodily and mental elements. This understanding and insight on actions and wrongdoings make up the foundation on which morally conscientious action takes place. This knowledge enables one to become morally responsible and become the foundation for ones own morality, as well as for the practice of morality toward others.

Wnhyos conclusion is that it is shameful to suffer by your own afflictions, so one must practice to not be mindless or unthinkingly invested in what ones senses seem to convey. As the title of this text, Mahyna Repentance of the Six Senses indicates, Wnhyo specifies repentance as repentance of the six senses, which, according to what he said above, requires being mindful of ones senses. The six senses serve as a means for repentance, as it is through ones six senses that one is going to contemplate the nature of the actions and events one experiences. The six senses are the six sense faculties, which collectively can be called life (). The six senses originate from ones mind, which rushes to grasp the respective objects of the senses.9

Being mindful (apramda)10 is a key term worth further investigation here. Being mindful of the six senses has also been emphasized on many other occa-sions. The being mindful found in his Commentary on the Awakening of Faith stretches our understanding of the practice of repentance in an interesting direction:

All the myriad practices from beginning to end are comprised of two types of actions a practice according to reality (, yathvad-bhvikat) and being mindful (). The former corresponds to the vow of producing wisdom; the latter corresponds to the vow of fulfilling wisdom. The former is like practicing the [virtue] of giving, while the latter is like not seeking its reward.

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Thus, by keeping the pure precepts, one does not revert to previous stages of practice. By practicing dharma-knti, the seal of non-arising is attained. While seeking all roots of goodness tirelessly, all constructed affairs are abandoned. Meditation is practiced without abiding in meditation. In accomplishing wisdom, the conceptual play (prapca) of dharmas is not indulged in.11

Wnhyo associates this being mindful (, apramda) with subsequently at-tained cognition (, pha-labdha-jna), or knowledge attained as a result of enlightenment, which bodhisattvas use for the task of liberating other sentient beings. This cognition is also called discerning cognition (). Here Wnhyo distin-guishes two levels of moral practice; one is the practicing of moral deeds as ordinar-ily defined, like giving (dna). The other level is not seeking the reward, an action committed with the perspective of ultimate truth. The former is seeking to attain wis-dom for enlightenment; the latter is seeking to fulfill the cognition or wisdom ob-tained after the clear understanding of the non-substantiality of the world.

Once the former wisdom is acquired one should move on to apply the wisdom to be connected with the world, that is, the ordinary world of sentient beings. This cognition will be used to liberate other sentient beings, and for that purpose one needs to use the cognition of discernment. Guilt and remorse are necessary moral qualities in this world for one to move forward along the path to enlightenment. In this stage, Wnhyos postulating moral ethics can be compared to something Straw-son says of what he calls reactive attitudes such as anger and resentment. He says that parents will deploy a mixture of participatory and objective stances toward their child as a strategy to deal with reactive attitudes in their children. To fully engage the reactive attitudes one must fully participate in them. Wnhyo encourages practitio-ners to be fully engaged in the participant attitude, in which guilt and repentance are useful tools for the training of sentient beings, while objectively understanding that no such things really exist nor are necessary for a bodhisattva. Even though there was no wrongdoing, one is encouraged repentence over the actions sentient beings commit. By letting oneself know that one is guilty, one can have the opportunity of investigating the nature of transgressions and moral responsibility.

In his Mahyna position, not only do persons have no self, but also things have no independent reality. Nor do causal relations. However, Wnhyo argues further, because nothing has intrinsic nature, it could not be ultimately true that the psycho-physical elements are causally determined. It isnt even true that there are psycho-physical elements, let alone that there are ultimately real causal connections.

On the other hand, in spite of the absence of intrinsic nature both in a transgres-sor and in the transgressions committed by that person, repentance is still useful when done without ego-involvement. For Wnhyo it is still true that persons are mor-ally responsible for their actions, and it is still true that the wrongdoings you have committed in the past bring a result, just as the conjured tiger, even though it does not exist, can inflict injury. The ultimate truth does not negate conventional practice. They both have currency, because repentance for him is nothing but understanding the emptiness of existence, and the conventional understanding about the good and

Eun-su Cho 51

the bad is still useful in that regard. Thus, repentance is to be done in both dimen-sions. Wnhyos position fluctuates between two extremes, playing with the two di-mensions. He encourages us not to cling to any so-called accepted truths and instead transcend such truths. For him truth is not hierarchical. The ultimate is not something higher or more truthful than the conventional truth.

Compatibilists of the Buddhist Reductionist Paleocompatibilist sort think in terms of the two truths, with freedom and responsibility being something useful in conven-tional practice and determinism being the ultimate truth. So conventional truth goes with the reactive attitudes and participatory stance, while ultimate truth goes with the objective stance. Wnhyo reverses this. Because fully enlightened beings know the ultimate truth (not that everything is causally determined, but that everything is empty), they take up the participant stance. So the situation is this: ordinary people just have conventional truth and reactive attitudes; arhats have what they think is ultimate truth (that things like persons or actions are devoid of self [antman] and causally determined), take the objective stance, and see the participant stance as no more than a useful device that is less than ultimately true. Wnhyos position here goes further. He negates both, not wanting to remain in one position, methodologi-cally and ontologically, but wanting instead to keep moving up. Bodhisattvas know the real ultimate truth (that there is none) and so are able to fully engage those they try to help, since for them the reactive attitudes are not mere useful fictions. For if all is conceptually constructed, nothing useful is merely anything. Those bo dhi satt-vas who take the participatory stance know not only ultimate truth that the worldly affairs that they are engaged in fact do not have intrinsic nature, and there is no good or bad deed, or even helpful deeds but also that there is no such truth as ultimate truth. The bodhisattva should be able to desist from thinking that that is ultimate truth. The notion of emptiness should be empty. Those who are acting based on the subsequent cognition must know that this world is ultimately empty, acting skill-fully enough to follow conventional reality.

Wnhyo is in fact suggesting that we leave both positions in place. He is affirm-ing both, after negating both. As a practitioner, the place one arrives at must be the same as the place that one had departed after practice; this is in line with the famous Mahyna saying that nirva is nothing but sasra, but the perspectives must be different. Wnhyo teaches us to take both a reactive participant attitude and an ob-jective attitude. In fact, what Wnhyo is teaching us is to not take this world too seri-ously or make a big deal out of this world; playful pretense should be practiced. While affirming that one is originally free of guilt, he argues that it is still necessary for people to accept moral responsibility by observing moral behaviors and repenting of their wrongdoings. Even an attitude of who cares or why bother also implies that there is an ultimate truth. However, ultimately there is no ultimate truth. Still the thought that this is the ultimate truth can give rise to a subtle form of clinging that may prove quite difficult to extirpate. Even though one appreciates the doctrine of nonself, still this subtle yet insidious form of clinging that there is ultimate truth may thus prove an impediment to complete liberation. Ultimate truth is another dharma, and it is empty as well. You have to get rid of this idea that there is

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a substantive ultimate truth out there. Emptiness is meant to cure us of any residual clinging to ideas of ultimacy, something difficult to extirpate.12 Wnhyo accepts both levels of perception that there is crime, which needs to be repented, and guilt, which needs to be removed, and that there is neither crime nor guilt. He delineates the Mahyna bodhisattvas stance toward moral judgment as part of a strategy for getting them to stop taking normative ethics so seriously.

Wnhyos Way of Taking Morality Seriously

Wnhyo talks about being responsible, or at least feeling guilty about the actions one has committed, while seeing and taking the objective stance that these actions are not really real and have not been produced they have arisen through causal powers of psychophysical elements. Wnhyo seems to say that we can repent without remorse. We are responsible for our actions but not really responsible, because they have not really been produced and we have not really committed them. Then could it be said that they are caused, that is, in the deterministic sense? What he would say is that nothing is really caused. The notion that everything is determined is not an ultimate truth that can explain everything. However, this does not mean that it is true that things are not determined. Ultimately, causal relation or causation does not really make any sense. As we have seen earlier, this is shown by his explanation of the non- production of the dharmas in the past, present, and future. Moral responsibility can be claimed when there is an agent and there are consequences, so in the conventional sense persons are responsible for their actions. However, ultimate view is that bodhisattvas should be watchful of their actions, so in that way determinism is compatible with being morally responsible. A bodhisattva would accept moral responsibility while taking a deterministic worldview, and would even say that they are compatible; but at the truly ultimate level no view can be maintained. At this point the modern de-bate over compatibilism is left behind, as no truth is ultimately true either.

Notes

I would like to thank Mark Siderits for his introduction to this issue on determinism and moral responsibility. However, any shortcomings are mine alone.

1 For example, Nicholas F. Gier and Paul Kjellberg assert the position in Bud-dhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist Responses, in Freedom and Determinism: Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. by J. K. Campbell, D. Shier, and M. ORourke, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 277304.

2 Taking a hard deterministic position, Charles Goodman claims that just as it is irrational to feel anger at something impersonal such as bile when it causes one pain, it is equally irrational to feel anger at transgressors, since they are really just a causal series of impersonal psychophysical elements. Because everything

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about the person is caused, no one is really responsible for their actions; no one really deserves praise or blame, reward or punishment, for their good and bad deeds. Thus, he says that if we take a Buddhist reductionist position seriously, no one is responsible for the actions that they commit. It is irrational to feel guilt over ones past. He says that perfected people (i.e., bodhisattvas) do not ascribe moral responsibility. See his Resentment and Reality: Buddhism on Moral Re-sponsibility, American Philosophical Quarterly 39, no. 4 (October 2002): 359.

3 The text Taesng yukchng chamhoe (Mahyna repentance of the six senses) contained in the Hanguk Pulgyo chns (Collection of Korean Buddhist writings) (hereafter HPC ), vol. 1, 842843, is in prose form, but must be read as a narrative verse. I have reformatted it as poetry and inserted line numbers, and the quotations from the text in this article reflect it. It consists of seventy-one verses, in most cases four lines of four characters apiece. The theoretical framework of repentance presented in this text resonates much with the views presented in his Kisillon-so (Commentary to the Awakening of Mhyana Faith) or Kmgang sammaegyng-ron (Treatise on the Vajrasamdhi-stra). He composed three works related to Buddhist discipline, proclaiming moral behavior and discipline, based on the scripture of the Fanwang-jing, an important East Asian Buddhist book of morality, called either Fanwang-jing pre-cepts or more generally Bodhisattva precepts. The other two are mainly com-mentarial works on the Fanwang-jing, with a list of the precepts along with detailed explanations of the individual precepts to observe and the crimes that are warded off.

4 In early Buddhism, transgressions are regarded as ethical matters, immoral ac-tions in violation of socially defined morality. Transgressions or offenses (kama) are the causes of suffering, klea, or defilements, which is a collective term for the so-called three poisons, namely greed, anger, and ignorance. These three poisons were also called avajja, meaning something to be blamed. When these three poisons are removed, no more transgressions are committed; the mind is purified to attain enlightenment. In contrast, in Mahyna Buddhism the mean-ing of transgressions is expanded to take on religious implications. Transgres-sions do not just violate social Dharma, but are related to the metaphysical working of karma. In the East Asian Buddhist tradition, for example, the Awak-ening of Faith preaches an underlying power for the arising of klea called the fundamental force of karma, the equivalent of the eighth consciousness. The transgressions are not just performed at the level of sense organs or conscious-ness, but come into existence due to this beginningless unidentifiable force. This power is too subtle to be removed; thus, Pure Land Buddhism describes its removal as requiring blessings or power from the Buddhas, and therefore one needs to arouse faith in those external powers. See Hynjun Kim, Wnhyo i chamhoe sasang (Wnhyos theory of repentance), Pulgyo yngu (Buddhist studies) (Seoul: Hanguk Pulgyo Ynguwn [Korean Institute for Buddhist Studies]) 2 (1986).

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5 A similar argument about repentance is found in his Commentary on the Awak-ening of Faith, section on Encouragement of the Practice of Repentance () (HPC 731c), and in the Treatise of the Vajrasamdhi-stra, section on circulation () (HPC 676c677a).

6 See Eun-su Cho, Reconciling the Actual with the Potential: Wnhyos Theory of Buddhahood and Enlightenment, International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture 5 (2005).

7 Separate Commentary on the Awakening of Faith, HPC 1763a.

8 A similar explanation of dharma-knti is also found in his other work, Treatise on the Vajrasamdhi-stra.

9 Commentary on the Awakening of Faith, HPC 1.735b0102.

10 Apramda means non-negligence, carefulness, diligence. It is one of the ten virtues-producing mental-function dharmas listed in the Abhidharma-koa-bhya.

11 Commentary on the Awakening of Faith, HPC 1.736b0917.

12 Mark Siderits, On the Soteriological Significance of Emptiness, Contemporary Buddhism 4, no. 1 (2003): 17.