高僧傳 8.23

8.23

He had a penetrating comprehension of the sūtras and vinaya, penetrated deeply into the essentials of dhyāna, and when he made divinations of good and ill fortune, none failed to prove true. As for the ancient classics and the philosophers, he had extensively mastered them. Regarding worldly arts and miscellaneous skills, there were few that he did not possess. Earlier, the great text of the Avataṃsaka had vast and profound literary purports, and from antiquity to that time, no one had yet expounded and explicated it. Chang then exhausted his thoughts in researching and probing it, bringing out chapters and comparing sentences. From that time down to the present, Chang was the first to transmit and lecture upon it. He was also skilled in the Three Treatises, becoming the leader of scholars. Emperor Wen of the Song held him in deep esteem and praise, and requested him to be the tutor to the Crown Prince, but he firmly declined again and again. A disciple said to him: "The Dharma master is about to propagate the Way and save sentient beings, broadly proclaiming the famous teachings. Now the sovereign of the empire empties himself to invite you, and the imperial heir stores up propriety and cherishes respect. If the Way is promoted to the sagely lord, then the four seas will submit to his virtue. If you now loftily and proudly decline, might that not be [acting as] a śrāvaka?" Chang said: "This may be spoken to the wise, but is difficult to discuss with worldly people." Only when the event of Taichu occurred did they realize his foreknowledge. From then on, he moved to rest in Jingzhou, residing at Changsha Temple. At that time, the śramaṇa Gongdezhe produced the Nianfo sanmei jing and other texts; Chang corrected the phrasing, rendering the style and purport gentle and precise. Moreover, he could stretch out his hand and produce incense, or water would flow from his palm, and no one could fathom how it was done. Toward the final years of the Song, he took a flying boat on a distant journey and went west to Chengdu. At first he resided at Dashi Temple, where he painted with his own hand sixteen images of deities including Guhyapada-vajra. In the third year of the Shengming reign era, he travelled again to the western borders, gazing out at the Min Mountains; then, at Mount Qihou on the borders of Guangyang County in northern Minshan Commandery, he conceived the wish to spend the rest of his days there. Relying on the crags and bordering the valley, he thatched grass to make a hermitage. His disciple Faqi saw a divine being riding a horse, wearing an unlined blue-green robe, who circled the mountain once and returned to indicate the site for building a stūpa. On the twenty-third day of the fourth month in the first year of the Jianyuan reign era of the Qi, he erected the stūpa pillar and established a monastery, naming it Qixing; this was precisely the day when Emperor Taizu of the Qi received the imperial mandates of abdication. The timing of Heaven and the affairs of men coincided across ten thousand li.