宋高僧傳 25.47

25.47

釋行瑫，姓陳氏，湖州長城人也。考曰良，母陶氏，鍾愛之心與諸子異。然其敏利，又於群童傑然而出。父母多途礙其出家之志，終弗能禁。唐天祐二年依光遠師求于剃染。年十有二，誦《法華經》，月奇五辰而畢軸。次《維摩經》盡，如道安朝請經而暮納本焉。尋於餘杭龍興寺受滿足戒，遂往金華雙林寺智新傳南山律鈔，弭節服膺，流輩推揖。常食時至，以不𥽦之米與菜茹投小鼎中，參煮而食，此外斷無重味。義解之心，理棼破木，都無難色。甞謂人曰：「所好甚者，不見他物之可好。吾之好也，樂且無荒也。」後唐天成中，寓于越，樂若耶山水，披覽大藏教，服枲麻之衣。募道俗置看經道場於寺之西北隅，構樓閣堂宇，蔚成別院，供四方僧，曾無匱乏。以顯德三年壬子秋七月示疾，終于此院，報齡六十二，法臘四十四。瑫性剛正，無面諛，無背憎，足不趨豪貴之門，囊不畜盈餘之物，房無閉戶，口無雜言。亦覽群書，旁探經論，慨其郭迻音義疎略，慧琳音義不傳，遂述大藏經音疏五百許卷，今行于江浙左右僧坊。然其短者，不宜稱「疏」——若言「疏」，可以疏通一藏經，瑫便過慈恩百本幾倍矣。其耿介持律，古之高邁也矣。

Shi Xingtao was surnamed Chen and was a native of Changcheng in Huzhou. His father was named Liang, and his mother was of the Tao family; their love for him was different from that for their other children. Moreover, in his acumen and intelligence, he stood out remarkably from the throng of children. His parents obstructed his aspiration to leave the secular world in many ways, but ultimately could not forbid him. In the second year of the Tianyou era of the Tang, he relied on Master Guangyuan to seek tonsure and dyeing of robes. At the age of twelve, he recited the *Lotus Sūtra*, finishing the scrolls in a month and five days. Next, he finished the *Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa*, just as Dao'an requested a scripture in the morning and returned the original in the evening. Soon after, he received the complete precepts at Longxing Temple in Yuhang, and then went to Shuanglin Temple in Jinhua, where he transmitted the *Nanshan lüchao* from Zhixin; halting his wanderings, he took it earnestly to heart, and his peers looked up to him. Whenever mealtime arrived, he would throw unpolished rice and greens into a small tripod kettle, boil them together, and eat them; besides this, he strictly refrained from rich flavours. In his understanding of doctrinal meanings, he disentangled complications like splitting wood, showing no signs of difficulty at all. He once said to people: "When one's love is profound, one does not see other things as lovable. As for my love, I rejoice without negligence." During the Tiancheng era of the Later Tang, he lodged in Yue; delighting in the mountains and waters of Ruoye, he read through the teachings of the Tripiṭaka and wore garments of coarse hemp. He solicited clerics and laity to establish a scripture-reading bodhimaṇḍa in the northwest corner of the temple, erecting pavilions, halls, and buildings that formed a splendid separate cloister, providing for monks from the four quarters without ever lacking anything. In the autumn, the seventh month of the renzi year, the third year of the Xiande era, he manifested illness and passed away in this cloister, at the worldly age of sixty-two and a dharma age of forty-four. Tao was by nature unyielding and upright, without flattery to people's faces or hatred behind their backs; his feet never hastened to the gates of the noble and powerful, his bag never stored surplus goods, his chamber had no closed doors, and his mouth uttered no miscellaneous words. He also read widely among the various books and delved broadly into the scriptures and treatises; lamenting that Guo Yi's pronunciation and meaning (*Yinyi*) was sparse and brief, and that Huilin's *Yinyi* was not circulated, he thereupon authored a phonetic commentary (*Yinshu*) on the Tripiṭaka in some five hundred fascicles, which currently circulates among the monastic quarters of Jiangnan and Zhejiang. However, his shortcoming was that it should not have been called a "commentary" (*shu*)—if one calls it a *shu*, implying that it can elucidate an entire Tripiṭaka of scriptures, then Tao would surpass Ci'en's hundred works several times over! Yet in his upright adherence to the vinaya, he was truly an exalted figure of antiquity.