佛祖統紀 29.6

29.6

The First Patriarch, Bodhidharma, was a prince of the Fragrant Supreme [King] in South India. After leaving household life, he met the Twenty-seventh Patriarch, Prajñātāra, who entrusted him with the Great Dharma, telling him: "Sixty years after my extinction, you should go to Cīnasthāna to carry out transformation." After Prajñātāra passed away, the Master expounded the Way in his own country. After a long time, considering that the conditions in Cīnasthāna had matured, he went to the seashore, boarded a merchant ship, and in the first year of the Datong era of the Liang arrived in the Southern Sea (formerly said to be the eighth year of Putong, which is mistaken; the Southern Sea is Guangzhou). The Inspector Xiao Ang reported this to the court in a memorial, and an imperial decree summoned him for an audience. The Emperor asked: "What merit have I gained from building temples, copying sūtras, and ordaining monks?" The Master said: "These are merely small fruits of the human and heavenly realms." The Emperor said: "What is Great Vehicle merit?" The Master said: "Pure wisdom, wondrous and bright, its essence inherently empty and tranquil. Merit such as this is not sought in the mundane world." The Emperor asked: "What is the highest meaning of the noble truth?" The Master said: "Vast and empty, with nothing noble." The Emperor asked: "Who is facing Us?" The Master said: "I do not know." The Emperor did not grasp it. The Master then crossed the Yangtze River. The Emperor later asked Master Zhi about this. Master Zhi said: "Does Your Majesty recognise this person or not?" The Emperor said: "I do not know him." Master Zhi said: "This is the Mahāsattva Avalokiteśvara, transmitting the Buddha's mind-seal." The Emperor wished to send an envoy to summon him back, but Master Zhi said: "Even if the whole nation went, he would not return." (Yuanwu says: "Master Zhi had already passed away; Bodhidharma only arrived more than ten years later. How could they be contemporaneous? Now one need only know the general outline.") After the Master entered Wei, he stayed at Shaolin Temple on Mount Song, practicing wall-contemplation all day long (the first year of the Wutai era of Emperor Xiaoming of the Wei). The Emperor, hearing of the Master's extraordinary traces, summoned him three times, but he did not go; he then bestowed upon him a patched kāṣāya, a golden bowl, and a silver water bottle. The Master faced the wall for nine years, and when he was about to manifest extinction, he said to his disciples: "The time has come. Why does each of you not speak of what you have attained?" Daofu said: "Neither clinging to words nor parting from words, using them for the function of the Way." The Master said: "You have attained my skin." The nun Zongchi said: "My understanding now is like Ānanda beholding the land of Akṣobhya Buddha: once seen, it is never seen again." The Master said: "You have attained my flesh." Daoyu said: "The four great elements are fundamentally empty, and the five aggregates do not exist. Not a single dharma can be attained." The Master said: "You have attained my bones." Huike bowed three times and stood in his place. The Master said: "You have attained my marrow." Turning to Huike, he further said: "The World-Honoured One entrusted the treasury of the true Dharma eye to Mahākāśyapa, and it was transmitted successively until it reached me. I now entrust it to you. You should protect and maintain it." He also conferred the kāṣāya as a token of the Dharma, saying: "After two hundred years, the robe will cease to be transmitted, but the Dharma will pervade the sandy worlds. Listen to my verse: / I originally came to this land / To transmit the Dharma and save deluded beings. / A single flower opens into five petals; / The fruit will naturally mature." He also said: "I have the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra; it is the Tathāgata's essential gate to the mind-ground, with which one can illuminate the mind." He then went to Qiansheng Temple at Yumen, sat upright, and manifested nirvana; this was on the fifth day of the tenth month in the first year of the Datong era. His disciples enshrined his whole body and buried it at Dinglin Temple on Mount Xiong'er. The next year, the envoy Song Yun was returning from the Western Regions and met the Master, carrying a single shoe in hand and walking briskly and solitary. When Yun returned and spoke of it, the disciples opened the tomb and looked: there was only an empty coffin and a single shoe. The Master always taught students using the two gates of entering the path of the Great Vehicle: principle and practice (the two gates appear in the Record of the Transmission of the Lamp).