註四十二章經 1.4

1.4

Also according to the Extraordinary Records of the Book of Zhou: on the eighth day of the fourth month in the twenty-fourth year, a jiayin year, of King Zhao of the Zhou, a light came and illuminated the front of the palace hall. The king questioned the Grand Astrologer Su You, who replied: "A great sage will be born in the western regions; after one thousand years, his teaching will flow into this land." Reaching the seventh year of Yongping, on the fifteenth day of the first month, under Emperor Xiaoming of the Later Han, the emperor dreamed at night of a golden man sixteen feet tall, radiant like the sun, who came before the palace hall and said: "The voiced teaching shall circulate to this land." At dawn, the emperor assembled his ministers and ordered them to divine the dream. At that time, the erudite Fu Yi replied: "Your servant has perused the Extraordinary Records of the Book of Zhou, which states: 'A great sage will appear in the western regions; a thousand years after his extinction, his voiced teaching shall circulate to this land.' What Your Majesty dreamed must surely be this!" The emperor thereupon dispatched eighteen men, including Wang Zun, to search for the Buddhist Dharma in the west. Arriving in the country of the Yuezhi, they met the two bodhisattvas [Kāśyapa] Mātanga and Dharmaratna, who had a painted image of Śākyamuni on white fine cotton and one fascicle of the Sūtra in Forty-two Sections, which they loaded onto a white horse and together returned to Luoyang. This was the thirtieth day of the twelfth month in the tenth year of Yongping, a dingmao year. Because of this, the place where Mātanga and Dharmaratna translated the sūtra was named Baima Temple. Six years later, having crushed and subdued heterodox ways, the two bodhisattvas leapt into empty space and spoke a verse for the king, saying: