Now that you, the assembly, have completed taking refuge in the Three Treasures, you should, in accordance with the wondrous practice, repent of your sinful karma.
Practitioners today obscure their own innate knowledge of the good and deceive their own original nature; they see only the faults of others and do not know their own wrongs. In not knowing their own wrongs alone, their sin is already deep and their karma already heavy. How can one who deceives his own heart and conscience enter the Tao? Repentance must be made with a true heart, painfully correcting past wrongs; only then can one advance.
I will not scold you now, but will explain clearly how people in the world deceive their hearts and conscience. Listen, all of you, and you will understand for yourselves. What, then, is deceiving one’s heart? It is acting in filth while speaking of purity, being bright of mouth yet dark of heart. It is receiving the precepts without observing them—outwardly a precept disciple, inwardly a wicked person. It is making vows without carrying them out, speaking words that win no trust. It is hearing the Tao without practicing it, yet claiming to have practiced it. It is knowingly breaking the law: using cunning to deceive the ignorant, passing off ignorance as a fiery temperament and anger as vigor; taking the false for the true and nothing for something; calling a deer a horse, hanging up a sheep’s head to sell dog meat; wronging one’s conscience in a dark room and scheming in secret. Of all these unwholesome things, there is none that one does not know oneself. Those who do not know are called fools, the deluded, the ignorant. Those who know yet deliberately offend—is that not deceiving one’s heart and conscience? Such people are called treacherous, evil, wicked, and petty, and their sin is not the same as that of the ignorant fools just mentioned. Why? Foolish and ignorant people have no wisdom; they err through ignorance and can harm only themselves, not others, and even if they harm others, in the end they are harmed by others. Only treacherous and evil people are sinister and cunning: they harm others to benefit themselves and then deceive themselves to cover up their hearts, wishing that heaven and earth not know their treachery and that ghosts and spirits not know their evil. They devise clever schemes to conceal it and flaunt their cleverness to patch it over. They set nets for others, and people do not know from where the net was cast; they push people down a well, and people do not know who dug the well. There are a great many such people in the world, but in spiritual practice this will never do. If you had such a heart before taking refuge in the Three Treasures, quickly seek repentance. Among those who have recently received the precepts, many have broken the rules and violated the articles, cast off their robes and ruined the Tao; they must quickly repent for themselves and sweep the thoughts hidden in their hearts clean. Every improper deluded mind and every subtle deluded thought must be repented of for past wrongs and regretted for later faults; only then is one a true precept disciple. Otherwise, with sinful karma piled up like a mountain, how can one attain liberation? To seek the Great Tao that way is like covering one’s ears to steal a bell. Now, out of compassion for you all, I have composed a text of repentance: kneel before the sages morning and evening, pleading for pardon. Listen and receive it, all of you.