佛祖統紀 40.28

40.28

In the eighteenth year, Chan Master Lang of Zuoxi expounded the teaching of calming and contemplation (śamatha-vipaśyanā) for Chan Master Zhanran of Jingxi. An edict ordered monasteries and Daoist temples across the empire to establish practice-halls for the Tianzhang Festival to pray for the Emperor's longevity. The monk Zhisheng of Chongfu Monastery in the western capital presented the twenty volumes of the Kaiyuan Buddhist Catalogue that he had compiled, establishing five thousand and forty-eight volumes as the standard count, and an imperial decree ordered it incorporated into the Great Canon. Su Gui, the assistant magistrate of Wugong County, constantly recited the Diamond Sūtra, and his entire household of fifty members ate vegetarian food. His wife, Lady Cui, because of her emaciated condition, secretly ate meat; it turned into a bone stuck in her throat, and her breathing ceased for ten days while she was encoffined. Reviving, she recounted seeing King Yama, who rebuked her, saying, "Your husband is a flesh-body bodhisattva; why did you steal and eat meat? Relying on the merit of his reciting the sūtra, your life is extended by twenty years. You may return and tell this to people." When the Emperor heard of it at that time, he also brought forth the resolve to uphold the sūtra, and those who followed the transformation were very numerous. The monk Haitong carved a Maitreya Buddha statue out of the rock along the bank of the Great River in Jiazhou, three hundred and sixty feet high, covered by a nine-story pavilion, and gave the monastery the plaque name Lingyun.