釋迦譜 1.75

1.75

'Now this Śākya clan flourishes; the five grains are abundant and ripe, and joy is limitless. The people are prosperous and multiply, planting numerous roots of virtue. In Kapilavastu, the multitudes are harmonious, superiors and inferiors mutually supporting one another, and all the Śākyas thirst for and look up to the One Vehicle. Its King Śuddhodana is benevolent and worthy in nature and conduct; the Queen is of wondrous beauty, gentle, chaste, and good in nature, like a divine jade-maiden of heaven, guarding her body, speech, and mind as firmly as adamantine (vajra). For the past five hundred lifetimes, she has been the Bodhisattva's mother. It is proper to go and descend my spirit there, entering her womb.' At that time, the Bodhisattva asked the devaputras: 'In what form should I descend my spirit into the mother's womb?' Some said in the form of a young brāhmaṇa; some said in the form of Śakra or Brahmā; some said in the form of the Sun and Moon King; some said in the form of a Garuḍa. There was a Brahmā-god named Qiangwei (Great Might) who arrived from the path of the ṛṣis and told the devas: 'The form of an elephant is supreme: a white elephant with six tusks, majestic and towering, as recorded in the Vedic scriptures. Why is this so? In the world there are three beasts: the first is the hare, the second the horse, and the third the white elephant. When a hare crosses the water, it merely manages to ferry itself across. Although a horse is skilled and fierce, it still does not know the depth or shallowness of the water. When a white elephant crosses, it reaches the very source and bottom. The śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas are like the hare and the horse: although they cross birth-and-death, they do not penetrate the root of dharmas. The Bodhisattva of the Great Vehicle is like the white elephant: comprehending the twelve links of dependent origination across the three realms, realizing their fundamental non-existence, rescuing and protecting all beings so that none fail to receive deliverance.' When the severe cold of winter had passed, at the end of spring and beginning of summer, when the trees first blossomed and flourished, neither cold nor hot and precisely in season, under the constellation Tiṣya when it was fitting to descend, the Bodhisattva from the Tuṣita heaven transformed into a white elephant with six tusks in its mouth, his sense-faculties tranquil and still, his light and complexion towering and magnificent. Manifesting from the sun's rays, he descended his spirit into his mother's womb, entering her right flank. That he entered the right was because his actions do not lean to the left. The pure and wondrous Queen, resting in sleep, suddenly awoke: the king of white elephants had come to reside in her womb. Her body and mind were tranquil and at ease, as though attaining dhyāna.