佛祖統紀 1.32

1.32

The Great Dharma flowed east, and sages and worthies succeeded one another, thereby maintaining the Three Jewels and not letting them be severed. Yet as the years grew long, there was prosperity and decline; this is merely the impermanent vicissitude of worldly affairs, for how could this Dao suffer completion or deficit? Investigating antiquity and the present, setting forth their deeds in full, one thereby sees the signs of the prosperity and decline of the Dharma's fortune. As for the worldly teachings of the Confucian school and Daoist currents, though elevated or suppressed according to the times, their traces are all clearly visible as instructions and warnings. I have composed the Treatise on the Prosperity and Decline of the Dharma in fifteen fascicles.