PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

Willams: Seeing through Images 65
phenomenal repentance was for those who were “foolish and stupid”
(yudun, ), the practice of repentance at the level of principle was for
those of “keen faculties” (ligen, ). 118
It is not at all clear, however, that this distinction between shichan and
lichan is one that Lingyu and Tanqian, and perhaps their colleagues, would
have known, although it may have been one that they might have appreciated.
The coordination of shichan and lichan with practitioners of dull and
keen faculties was probably also unknown to them, and, equally probably,
might have been a distinction they (and Zhiyi) may not have appreciated.
For them, and for the elite southern liturgical tradition that Zhiyi would
have been familiar with, repentance removed both karma and kleśa and
was a soteriologically efficacious technique. Coupled with the traditional
soteriological techniques of meditation, especially meditative visualization,
these repentance techniques must have seemed to their practitioners to have
been quite formidable. Judging by the testimony of Daoshi and Daoxuan,
as well as the Tiantai tradition, Zhiyi’s resolution of the proper function
of ritual repentance and meditation was generally accepted by the mid- to
late seventh century.
7. SUMMARIES OF RATNAMATI’S “METHOD FOR
VENERATING THE BUDDHAS” (“LIFO FA,” )
A noticeable anomaly in the “Buddha Names in Seven Registers” is
that there are never just seven registers. There are no known exceptions to
this. Even the earliest form of the ritual inscribed at Mt. Bao has (at least)
eight registers. Our suspicions should be further aroused by the use of
the word jie (), translated as “register” in the title of this ritual. It does
not mean a (vertical) “register,” “roster,” or “array.” Rather it means a
(horizontal) “step,” “stage,” or “level.” Although it is true that Zhisheng’s
Ji zhujing lichanyi and a number of Dunhuang manuscripts include a short
phrase that indicates that the “previous seven [sic] registers are presented
in sequence based on the text of the Sutra of the King of Healing and Supreme
Healer” (yishang qijie yi Yaowang Yaoshang jing wen cidi,
), 119 it is not clear who may have added this phrase or when.
It is possible that this phrase was not original to this ritual. If it were not
original to this ritual—this is, after all, only a modest proposal—there may
be other plausible interpretations of the term jie. This issue has, in fact,
already been broached, first by Yabuki Keiki in 1927 and most recently by
Hirokawa Gyōbin in his 1982 study of the Dunhuang manuscripts of the
“Buddha Names in Seven Registers.” Since both assumed that the ritual
complex as a whole was the creation of the Three Stages school, they
interpreted the phrase “seven registers” to refer to the “seven teachings”