佛祖統紀 5.26

5.26

The nineteenth patriarch, the Venerable Jayata, was a native of Northern India. Traveling and converting the world, he was most praised as a skillful expounder. There was a monk who transgressed through desire and repented. Jayata said to him, 'If you can comply with my words, your sin can be extinguished.' He then miraculously created a pit of fire and made him throw himself into it. The monk, mindful of extinguishing his sin, cast his entire body into it, and the fire turned into a clear stream. Jayata said, 'Because you repented with utmost sincerity, your sin is now extinguished.' He then expounded the Dharma for him, and he became an arhat. Once, leading his disciples into the city of Śīla, he frowned sorrowfully; moving forward a little further, he saw a bird on the road and smiled with delight. A disciple addressed the master, 'We pray you speak of the cause of this.' The master said, 'When I reached the city gate, I saw the child of a hungry ghost, who said: "My mother gave birth to me and went into the city to seek food; five hundred full years have passed, and up to now she has not returned. I am always starved and cannot sustain myself." When I entered the city, I indeed saw that mother. She came forward and said to me: "Since I entered the city, five hundred years have passed, and only today did I obtain a person's spittle. I wish to carry it to my child, but I fear the mighty spirits beneath the gate will seize it. I pray the Venerable One will carry me out of the city." I then carried the mother out of the city and asked her how long it had been since she was born. She answered: "I have seen this city form and disintegrate seven times." Deeply sighing over the long duration of suffering received in birth and death, I was sorrowful. Ninety-one kalpas ago, when Vipaśyin Buddha was in the world converting beings, I was an elder's son who constantly thought of leaving the household life. My parents would not permit it and forcibly betrothed a wife to me, who bore a boy. When he was six years old, I wished to leave the household life again. The parents instructed the child: "If your father wishes to become a śramaṇa, embrace his feet and weep." Out of love, I did not leave the household life again. On account of that child, I drifted through birth and death for ninety-one kalpas, never seeing him in the five destinies. Now, observing with the eye of the Way, that bird is none other than the child born of me in that former life. Pitying his childish ignorance and long stay in birth and death, I therefore smiled.' When the Venerable One's conditions for conversion concluded, he entered nirvāṇa. The assembly gathered his relics, enshrined them in a stupa, and made offerings to them (Fu fazang jing).