樂邦文類 3.141

3.141

When I first returned to the east, passing by the so-called Rāhula Bodhimaṇḍa, I arrived at the Hall of Arising Faith. A monk said to me, “The monastery has an extraordinary matter. Do you know of it?” I looked back at the four junipers below the hall and said, “Could it be that their winter appearance is still unharmed?” The monk said, “Not so.” He led me up to the Hall of Repentance and opened a box to show me: it was seven scrolls of the Wondrous Lotus Sutra embroidered by needle. Just as I joined the tips of my ten fingers and marveled at this unprecedented feat, the monk said: “This was made by the wife of Gentleman Xue, the woman of the Way Lady Zhu, whose Dharma name is Ruyi. Lady Zhu is the niece of both Empress Qincheng and the Central Palace Empress Yuansheng over two generations. Ever since she married into the Xue family, she viewed mundane affairs as dust and mire. When she was just over twenty years old, she told her husband that she wished to follow her own inclinations in pure quietude, wearing the plain robes of the Way and observing the purificatory fasts with purity. She once used yellow silk and commissioned a scripture scribe to write this sutra, and with her own hands embroidered upon it with azure floss; the paths of thread and needle holes went back and forth with fine precision without interruption, looking as though newly tested by brush and freshly dried in ink, being completed only after ten years. Furthermore, she embroidered Amitābha and Avalokiteśvara, no different from paintings. From the title at the beginning of the sutra, she reverently made eighty-four thousand prostrations; for each line and each character, she chanted and bowed three times in total. The text of the Lotus Sutra runs to several tens of thousands of words, yet she was able to recite it all within three months. When reading the Avataṃsaka, Prajñā, Śūraṅgama, and Perfect Enlightenment sūtras, she recited a thousand verses as smoothly as flowing water, and other sūtras may be known from this. She once carved woodblocks to make charts, exhorting people to recite ‘Amitābha’, writing them in large characters and stopping only when one hundred thousand recitations were reached; the number of those she transformed reached nearly two hundred thousand people. The woman of the Way recited it every morning and engaged in it every night, without the slightest indolence. She especially delighted in the joy of Chan, and built a hut near the tombs: one room for serving the Buddha, one room for tranquil sitting, and one room for writing sutras. A maidservant served her vegetarian food and shared her joys and hardships. Even a strong man might find this unbearable. At the end of spring this year, she exchanged her old trousseau items to hold a three-day gathering, convening monastics and laity by the tens of thousands, feeding a thousand bhikṣus, and placing the names of those who recited the buddha-name alongside the Lotus Sutra into a jeweled banner to welcome them back to this monastery. Inside and outside the city, people were moved with joy, and the households of scholar-officials emptied out to watch with reverence. In the twelfth month, having a slight illness, she summoned a physician; the physician administered cinnabar, and the woman of the Way ultimately did not recover. When she was about to close her eyes, she rose again to sit in the lotus posture. Gentleman Xue said, ‘Our family does not have such a practice. Please go to bed; the final affairs will be carried out according to the rites.’ The woman of the Way passed away resting on her right side at the age of thirty-seven, which was on the eleventh day of the twelfth month of the fourth year of the Shaoxi reign era.” Hearing the monk’s words, I was deeply moved. The monk entrusted me to record these matters to encourage future generations. I reverently write this in eulogy. The eulogy says: