歷代三寶紀 1.4

1.4

The Aśokāvadāna says: One hundred and sixteen years after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa, the king of Jambudvīpa named Aśoka arose in Eastern Tianzhu and ruled from the city of Pāṭaliputra. He collected the Buddha's relics and dispersed them to erect eighty-four thousand stūpas throughout Jambudvīpa, wishing to make them completely ubiquitous. Those recorded in the Indian accounts may be stated in brief; within Cīnasthāna, in its capitals, cities, around the Yangzi and Han rivers, and east and west of the Guanlong region, they exist everywhere. That time corresponded to the twenty-sixth year, dingwei, of the reign of King Jing of the Zhou. From King Wu to King Nan, there were thirty-nine kings over 884 years, with capitals at Feng, Hao, Luoyi, and Chengzhou, totaling four different locations. King Zhaoxiang of the Ying [clan of Qin], in his fifty-second year of reign, destroyed the Zhou and proclaimed the Qin dynasty. He renamed the Hao capital Xianyang and established his capital there. Reaching the fourth ruler, the First Emperor (Zheng), in his twenty-sixth year, he swept away and eliminated the Six States; in his twenty-seventh year, he abolished the Nine Provinces and divided the world into thirty-six commanderies; in his thirty-fourth year, all classic texts were burned, with only medical, divinatory, and agricultural arts exempt from the burning; everything else was reduced to ashes. For this reason, the sacred teachings and wondrous traces of the Zhou dynasty, as well as the relic stūpas erected by King Aśoka, were cut off from transmission, and none know what became of them. Moreover, during the time of the First Emperor, there were eighteen worthies including the śramaṇas Shi Lifang and others who brought scriptures to propagate the transformation. The First Emperor would not comply and consequently imprisoned Lifang and the others. In the night, a sixteen-foot-tall vajra-being came, broke open the prison, and released them; the First Emperor was terrified and bowed his head in apology. Across four rulers and forty-nine years, it was destroyed by the Han. Beginning with the first year of King Wu of Zhou, yimao, and ending with the year of the downfall of the Second Emperor of Qin, jiawu, during this period there were 933 years and forty-two rulers. Sixteen kings of the Zhou spanned 453 years before the Buddha's appearance, which are named but not recorded. Beginning from King Zhuang when the Tathāgata was born in the world down to the beginning of the Han, the years are recorded chronologically: twenty-six rulers across 481 years. These are gathered together as the Records of the Zhou and Qin Eras, making clear how the Buddhist vehicle responded to conditions and its teachings reached the East.