佛祖統紀 1.18

1.18

After Śākyamuni Tathāgata first attained Buddhahood, through great compassion he benefited living beings without ceasing into the future. For this reason, after attaining the fruit he manifested expedient means, appearing in the world again and again, such that his beginning and end cannot be sought within the three times. How much less so in the lands of the ten directions, where proclaiming birth and proclaiming extinction differ from place to place! How could he have completed his activities solely in this one quarter of the southern continent? Yet what is recorded now merely selects the essential assemblies where teachings were handed down in this land; if one penetrates it, then the ten directions are not apart from this very place, and the three times are solely within the single mind. What difference or sameness could there still be? Now, summarizing from the Tathāgata's causal practices when as an ordinary being down to his present arising as the King of the Great Dharma, clarifying the origin and traces, narrating the sacred source, listing the eight phases according to both the Great and Small [Vehicles], dividing the two beginnings of sudden and gradual, passing through the five periods, and setting forth his lifetime of teaching, I have composed the Basic Annals of the Teaching Lord Buddha Śākyamuni in four fascicles. From Mahākāśyapa down to Āryasiṃha, all were able reverently to receive the Buddha's prediction and transmit and propagate the Great Dharma; this is called the patriarchal transmission from the golden mouth. Relying on the *Fu fazang*, I have composed the Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Patriarchs of the Western Lands in one fascicle.