佛祖統紀 5.31

5.31

The author remarks: What the Buddha attained was the knowledge of past lives and prophecies of future attainments of bodhi; though spanning countless billions of kalpas, he was inevitably able to know them in advance. How could his prophecy of patriarchs today cease at only twenty-four? Probing the Buddha's intent, two meanings should be applied: first, Āryasiṃha's encountering the mortal calamity was a great adversity for the transmission and maintenance of the Buddha's Dharma; second, as for the patriarchs after this, though there were successors, it was feared they could not compare to the great sages of the four reliances. For this reason, the golden mouth reached this point and stopped, not meaning that there were no successor patriarchs. If people in the world say that because Āryasiṃha met with calamity he did not transmit the Dharma, these are merely the words of fools. Our lineage says the patriarchal transmission stopped with Āryasiṃha, while the Chan forest adds four more persons; thereupon they have ceaselessly vied with one another over right and wrong across successive generations. If we resolve it by the general idea, there is no obstruction: it means that although Āryasiṃha met with a mortal calamity, it was not that he lacked disciples to transmit the Dharma, but merely that they were not among the number predicted in advance by the golden mouth. If so, adding four persons up to Bodhidharma, who then came to the Eastern Land, and calling them twenty-eight persons—what harm is there in this? If Chan practitioners wish to substantiate their affairs, it would suffice simply to say that four persons succeeded one another and transmitted it to Bodhidharma. Yet now they falsely cite the evidence of Chan scriptures, which only succeeds in bringing about their own unreliability. Song Mingjiao composed the Chart Determining the Patriarchs, claiming that the Chan scripture fully records the twenty-eight patriarchs; but when one now examines the scripture, it lists only nine persons, and the names are mostly different. It was entirely fitting that Dharma Master Fang composed Halting Errors to refute it.