What is the karmic retribution for committing an unpardonable offense?

Question: Does an unconfessable offense (不可悔罪) mean that if a person commits such an offense, the karmic offense cannot be eliminated through confession, and can only be eliminated after undergoing the karmic retribution? But if this person successfully attains rebirth in the land of bliss (Sukhāvatī) through the practice of recollection of the Buddha (buddhānusmṛti), and if he keeps cultivating in the land of bliss until reaching the stage of one more birth (to buddhahood), would he then have no opportunity to undergo the retribution? In that case, would the karmic seeds of the unconfessable offense wither away?

Answer: After a person commits an unconfessable offense, the obscuration of his mind becomes very great, and the resistance to cultivation is extraordinarily strong. For such a person to attain rebirth in the land of bliss through recollection of the Buddha, and to keep cultivating there all the way to the fruition of a bodhisattva of equal enlightenment and wondrous enlightenment—all such claims are mere suppositions; the possibility is extremely small, and there is no evidence that such things have ever occurred.

Since it is called an unconfessable offense, it means the karmic offense is very great and severe—so great that even confession cannot eliminate it. Such an offense creates a great obscuration for cultivating the Path, obstructing practice, and of course obstructing recollection of the Buddha and rebirth in the land of bliss. Most of all, it obstructs the arising of meditative concentration (samādhi) and wisdom, obstructs the elimination of self-view (ātma-dṛṣṭi), and obstructs seeing one's true mind and awakening to one's true nature. Of course, if the offense is not one of slandering the Three Jewels, or killing one's father or mother, or other offenses among the five deeds of immediate retribution, then rebirth in the land of bliss is still possible.

As for rebirth in the land of bliss, the so-called stage of one more birth does not mean that once one goes to the land of bliss, one never leaves again—cultivation is not done that way. For a person to achieve great accomplishment, one does not follow only a single Buddha in cultivation; rather, one forms affinities with all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the ten directions and cultivates under them. Moreover, one must also form affinities with the sentient beings of the worlds of the ten directions, make great vows and strive to deliver sentient beings, strive to accumulate the greatest and most abundant merit, and continually advance on the Path. If one stayed in the land of bliss the whole time, how could one deliver sentient beings?

The accomplishment of a great bodhisattva requires every kind of experience, mundane and supramundane: one must go to every kind of land, form every kind of affinity, deliver every kind of sentient being, undergo every kind of hardship, and also enjoy every kind of wealth and honor. Only through being tempered by all favorable and adverse circumstances can a bodhisattva be forged into one who is perfect in every respect. How rich the experience of a great bodhisattva must be, and how vast his virtues and abilities! He has seen everything, possesses every kind of wisdom, and can handle every kind of situation—only through a thousand hammerings and a hundred temperings does steel become steel. He has been a king, a wheel-turning sage king, a lord of the heavens, a king of ghosts; he has tamed demons; neither favorable nor adverse circumstances can become an obstruction to his progress on the Path. Only thus is a bodhisattva's character perfected and flawless, his virtue and conduct truly first-rate, so that he can become the guide and model for all sentient beings and lead the multitude unceasingly toward the Buddha Way.

Why is it so difficult for sentient beings to study Buddhism and cultivate? Is it not precisely the obscuration of karmic obstructions? What karmic obstructions? All kinds of karmic obstructions—most of them unconfessable offenses committed in the past. If sentient beings were not blocked by the major karmic obstructions of unconfessable offenses, seeing one's true mind and awakening to one's true nature would be quite easy, and each subsequent barrier would hardly count as a barrier at all—one could stride over it with a single step. Would becoming a Buddha be so difficult then? But clearly, reality is not like this. Therefore, as for the practice of confessing through the wisdom of suchness/true reality, such cases do exist, but the vast majority of people cannot even dream of it. When the Buddha was in the world, only extremely rare individuals could accomplish the confession of true reality; in the present age and hereafter, such things will be extremely difficult to occur, because sentient beings are ever further removed from the Buddha's era, their spiritual faculties increasingly disappointing, their merit and wisdom ever declining. How could they accomplish the confession of true reality and step in one leap into the ranks of true bodhisattvas?