Repentance looks like just cleansing ourselves from dusty elements, but you cannot tell which was dusty, whether an action was dusty, or you were dusty, so you purify everything, not just wrong actions. In our life experience we do things over and over again which we are not supposed to do. As we do them, we believe this is the way, and say, “I am okay!” Ten or twenty people may say, “That is not good” but when you believe your action is right, you don’t listen to others. Then, finally, with inner understanding, you find out your action was wrong, and maybe twenty, thirty years of your actions are finally seen in the light. It is terrible to find out! The mind of asking forgiveness appears at that time. You have to say to yourself, “I am sorry.” You say it to yourself and to everyone else, and to the thing you have done, you say, “Pardon me.” At that time everyone says, “Oh, you now understand. That’s okay.” After thirty years of misunderstanding, the thing mistakenly done is completely purified. The basic idea of “repentance” is clarification, avowal, a very deep recognition. A better translation of … not to allow that realization ever to slip from the mind is “… forever or always to be mindful toward yourself, not to let your mind separate from yourself.” Repentance means not to do it in your whole lifetime, and regret means to know, to see the former bad activity of yours as a bad thing. This is the Sixth Patriarch’s feeling. For example, when you break something, you may give the reason, “My hand was shaky, so it happened.” When you become very calm, somehow you understand, “That was my mistake, anyway, and my hand shook because I was not ready to take the glass. I was in a very high state, emotionally.” Regret means, not only realization of one’s mistake, but to know the good thing as well as the bad thing. To know reality, to know what happened, that is the most important point. When you repent your feeling, you are not at the level of good or bad. Repentance is your pure mind. Your mind is originally pure. Your pure mind sees your old deed so that you can repent. Pure mind is the zero point, the beginning point to measure things. When you are in zero point you see your negative feeling or your positive feeling. The one who repents, who can see his own mistake, is already free from it. Repentance is like putting yourself in a washing machine. You come out from the washing machine exhausted. Somehow, it is a very nice feeling. You are not destroyed. You returned to your original state, to the base of yourself. Real repentance happens all at once, a very religious activity, a very natural activity. In Section 21, the four vows were written, and now we have repentance. The arrangement of the paragraphs is important. They are two sides of an activity, happening at once. Because of the four vows, your mind repents a previous deed. Or, because of a previous deed, you suffer. Maybe the Sixth Patriarch thought repentance came first and the four vows came next. Both stop the cycle of karma. When you repent there has to be somebody to really hear your voice. That somebody can be God, but repentance does not mean to go in a small box and speak about your problem. When you believe in God and face directly to God, that is repentance. Each word of your repentance increases your purification. To show everything to true nature, that is also repentance. And forgiveness is important. Maybe you can say true nature forgives you. The mind which is repenting has no room to forgive itself. In the Christian sense, forgiveness belongs to God, not to humans. The Buddhist sense is, forgiveness belongs to everybody. It belongs to you to forgive others. Forgiveness means “let it go.” Repentance works in one direction, forgiveness works in the other direction. They happen at once. Also, time is forgiveness. Time is very kind for us. Time drops off every moment. If we keep attaching to the past we cannot die so nicely. When we attach to life, itself, we have to hold onto our past delusion in the present. Ordinarily, we see that the past is behind us, yet things which can be experienced again cannot be called past. When you are concerned with them, they can be experienced at any time. So, in repentance, all of our experiences of ourself don’t disappear, are not cut off. What will be cut off is a wrong view of yourself. When one repents, everything becomes pure. “Pure” doesn’t mean right in the middle between two extremes, either. The extremes show you your limitations. You feel if you went further than this, you would die! Yet, when you are in a high or low state, that is just a momentary conception of yourself, so good and bad, right and wrong, are relative. “Pure” includes both extremes. With birth of the vow, comes the discipline of how to live. At that time a person’s life goes beyond ordinary thinking in the customary way, which is so-called “karma.” In karma, when something happens, a person always reacts in the same way, but, unlike karma, consciousness of karma is not a blind state. It shows the position of everything. With karma consciousness, if you experience your difficulties in silence, maybe silence will explain them to you. There are various angers we experience. My feeling is that sadness and anger always come together. Righteousness is also a type of anger. What is the opposite of anger? Anger is the opposite of anger! Actually, what exists is a sphere of anger. When you come into it, you feel it. Ignorance is the best reason for why anger comes. It means you have no understanding of your true self. Anger has no root. It’s just like a cloud. You don’t understand your true self or the outside situation. Naturally you suffer with it. If a small thing makes you angry, that small thing controls you. When this happens in me I am showing less compassion to someone to whom I want to offer my love and respect. If I know I am getting angry, I don’t reject it. I watch it. I say, “What is this?” I see who is involved in the anger, what are the elements of it. Most of the time we see other people behind our own anger. Sometimes there are no objectives, no person or no thing in the anger. Sometimes the anger is toward yourself. You watch it and think, “What can I learn from this?” To act from anger makes things worse. If you act from anger you hurt yourself. To express it is one solution. This doesn’t mean you act with anger. If someone is listening, naturally your anger will be decreased when you express it. There are many different emotions which, when they get strong, most people say, “This is anger.” It is hard to keep anger in our mind and body. We seek ways to get rid of it. Mostly, when we get angry, we say, “I am right, you are wrong!” If you are truly right and they are truly wrong, you don’t need to get angry. When you get angry, most of the mistake is on your side, the mistake on their side is little! Your anger is really a sign of your weakness. It is the same with righteousness. When you think your view is right and the whole world seems a little crazy, that is righteousness. Many young people think they have a righteous reason to protest. When it appears, they feel separate from the world. Actually, righteousness is an element of the world, part of the world. It’s best to develop one’s own ability within the world. Protesting, turning it into a kind of revolution, looks like a brave and shortcut way, but really it is a violent and short-tempered way. The place that is not extreme is peace. Peace is silent. Sometimes it has a little sound in it, sometimes you are alone, sometimes there are people around. To pay homage to Shakyamuni Buddha is enlightenment, when understanding reaches a perfect state. Paying homage to Buddha doesn’t mean you are expressing your feeling to the historical Buddha. To be as he is, is true homage. To become something is to really “understand” it. To “know” it is extra. Dharma is not like knowledge. Every moment you are new to it. You cannot name it, you cannot call it. When you get it, you laugh and laugh because you thought it was something you hadn’t seen before. Dharma is like breathing, inhalation, exhalation. A very natural thing. When the time comes it happens. Time is always ready and all things are ready to accept this time. Dharma is the closest thing to us. In English it is called “truth.” With the Sixth Patriarch, Zen started to be present in Buddhism.