釋氏稽古略 3.134

3.134

Vajrabodhi: Registered at Guangfu Monastery in Luoyang. His Sanskrit name was Vajrabodhi; here it is translated as Jingangzhi. He was a man of the country of Malaya in southern India. His father was a brāhmaṇa skilled in the five sciences who served as the preceptor of the king of Kāñcī. When Vajrabodhi was a few years old, he could recite ten thousand words a day. At the age of fifteen he awakened to Buddhist principles, and thereupon went forth from household life, following his master to Nālandā Monastery in central India to study the Abhidharma and other subjects. When he ascended the ordination platform according to the monastic law, he studied the vinayas of the eighteen schools. He then went to western India to study various treatises of the Hīnayāna. For more than ten years, he thoroughly mastered the three collections: sūtras, vinayas, and treatises. Hearing that the Buddha Dharma flourished in Cīna (referring to the Eastern Land at that time), he boarded a ship and came. In the seventh year of the Kaiyuan era, he arrived at Guangfu. The following year he arrived at the capital, where he was welcomed by imperial decree to lodge at Da Cien Monastery, broadly promoting the Esoteric [teachings] and establishing maṇḍala practices. Soon afterward he moved to Jianfu Monastery. The two Chan masters Dazhi (Daoyin) and Dahui (Yixing), as well as Tripiṭaka Master Amoghavajra, all served him as their master. In the sūtras translated by Vajrabodhi, Yixing frequently participated. Yixing once received the procedural rules for the maṇḍala practices from him. On the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the twentieth year of the Kaiyuan era, at Guangfu Monastery in Luoyang, he said to his disciples, 'When the white moon is full, I shall depart.' Thereupon he paid homage to Vairocana Buddha, circumambulating him seven times. Returning to his own cloister, he burned incense, made vows, carried the Sanskrit manuscripts on his head, and, having entrusted the newly translated teachings, quietly passed away. His age was seventy-one; his monastic age was fifty-one. On the seventh day of the eleventh month, he was buried to the right of the Yi River south of Longmen. His disciple Amoghavajra submitted a memorial, and an imperial decree posthumously honored him as National Preceptor of Consecration. By imperial order, Vice Director of the Secretariat Du Hongjian composed a stele recording his virtues (Old Tang History and Monk Controller Zanning's Biographies of Monks).