淨土論 3.11

3.11

Dharma Master Sengyan was a native of Wenshui in Bingzhou. He went forth in his youth and listened and studied with diligent mind, lecturing on four scriptures and treatises: the Nirvāṇa, the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, the Daśabhūmika, and the Bodhisattvabhūmi, being thoroughly proficient in all of them. He lived to the age of ninety-six. For five or six years before his passing in the sixteenth year of Zhenguan, he focused exclusively on mindfulness of Amitābha Buddha. When he first turned his mind, in a single day and night he bowed to Amitābha Buddha with a quota of five hundred bows, gradually increasing them later on. Near his end, he bowed a thousand times day and night, and recited the name of Amitābha Buddha seventy to eighty thousand times day and night, never slacking. On the day of his death, he said to his disciples: 'Amitābha Buddha has come to bestow robes and incense upon me. The holy assemblies of Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, Bodhisattva Mahāsthāmaprāpta, and others fill the empty sky. From here westward, it is purely the Pure Land.' Thereupon, his life ended. Previously, the Dharma Master had had no inclination toward this at all; only when he was over ninety did he encounter Master Daochuo lecturing on the Guan wuliangshou jing, and upon hearing it did he first turn his mind. During those four or five years, the visions near his death were roughly as recounted above.