宋高僧傳 23.57

23.57

佛乃為物捐軀，利生損命。與其不拔脛毛為利也，伏、臘殊時；與其惜父母之親體也，參、辰各見。如此乃驗教之深淺，行之是非。譬猶出泉貨而既多，入息利而不少。我世尊因地也初唯減口，次則脫身，車服越共弊之心，象馬過借人之乘。輟食菜之地，判受封之城，用若拂塵，捨猶脫屣。復次，唼膚待飫，剜目副求，或指然一燈，或身均百臠，救羸虛之虎，化長偉之魚。因超劫歸彌勒之前，先成佛享釋迦之位。皆從旋習，始外財而終內財；及熟善根，變難捨而成易捨。夫輟外財，外財難捨；難捨，凡夫也。捐內財，內財易棄；易棄，菩薩也。須知三世諸佛，同讚此門，是真實修，是第一施。豈不見僧崖菩薩安詳陟於柴樓，大志道人慷愷焚其腕骨？人皆難色，彼有易容。蓋累世之曾為，致今生之又捨。捨而復捨，估七寶以非珍；空而又空，以三輪之絕軌。乘茲度岸，是曰真歸；得金剛堅固之身，留玉粒馱都之應。

The Buddha, for the sake of sentient beings, cast away his body and forfeited his life to benefit living beings. Compared with refusing to pull out a single hair on the shin to benefit the world, they are as different as the hot and cold seasons; compared with cherishing the physical body received from one's parents, they are as distant as the constellations Shen and Chen. In this way the depth and shallowness of teachings, and the rightness and wrongness of actions, are verified. It is like spending a large sum of coin and receiving no small return of profit. When our World-Honoured One was on the causal ground, he began merely by reducing his meals, and next by relinquishing his body; his carriages and robes surpassed the thought of sharing worn-out goods, and his elephants and horses exceeded the riding animals lent to others. He gave up lands producing food and parted with cities conferred upon him, treating them like brushing off dust and casting them away like worn shoes. Furthermore, he offered his flesh for [insects] to feed to satiety, gouged out his eyes to meet requests, lit his fingers like lamps, or cut his body into a hundred slices; he saved the emaciated tiger and transformed into a gigantic fish. As a result, he skipped kalpas to arrive before Maitreya, becoming a Buddha first and occupying the seat of Śākyamuni. All this proceeded from gradual cultivation, beginning with external wealth and culminating in internal wealth; when his roots of goodness matured, what had been difficult to relinquish became easy to relinquish. Giving up external wealth—external wealth is difficult to relinquish; those for whom it is difficult to relinquish are ordinary beings. Renouncing internal wealth—internal wealth is easy to discard; those for whom it is easy to discard are bodhisattvas. One must know that the Buddhas of the three periods together praise this gate: it is true cultivation, and it is the supreme giving. Do we not see Bodhisattva Sengya serenely climbing the pyre of firewood, and the Daoist Dazhi courageously burning the bone of his wrist? While others found it difficult, their countenances remained calm. It was because they had practiced it over accumulated lifetimes that they could renounce it again in this life. Renouncing and renouncing again, they appraised the seven jewels as non-precious; void and void again, they cut off the traces of the three wheels [of giving]. Crossing to the other shore by means of this is called true return; they attained a body as firm as adamantine, and left behind the miraculous response of jade-grain dhātus.