宋高僧傳 13.3

13.3

Śramaṇa Yuanshao, whose secular surname was Sun, had ancestors from Fuyang. His grandfather served as an official in Southern Yan, and the family consequently became natives of Baima in Huatai. When his age reached the stage of knowing the jade ring, he was naturally eminent and extraordinary. When neighborhood children played games, he remained calm and tranquil; when his peers followed along, he was serene and quiet. When he reached eighteen, he finally fulfilled his aspiration to leave secular life, serving Dhyāna Master Zhengjue of Mingfu Temple as his teacher. Jue saw him and marveled at him; instructing his disciples, he gave praise solely to Shao, saying: 'He is truly a grand vessel of the gate of emptiness!' When he reached the age of twenty-two, he received full ordination from Vinaya Master Tanxiangdeng in Xiangzhou. He immediately sought teachers and inquired into the Way, emulating the patriarchs in plumbing the profound. Beyond his two robes and one bowl, he possessed absolutely nothing else. His lifelong wish was solely the vow of standing in the snow and transmitting the robe in the Chan tradition. Traversing the three Xiang rivers, the Five Ridges, the two regions of Shu, and the two capitals, wherever there was a monastery, he went and paid homage without exception. Having explored the utmost subtleties and suddenly enlightened to the workings of the mind, he hung up his staff at Yimen, which was Shuinan Temple at Cangyuan, now known as Kaibao. In the tenth year of Dazhong, he happened to meet the Tang prime minister, Lord Pei Xiu, who, having ceased harmonizing the cauldron of state, had come to govern the outskirts of Wei. Like minds seek each other out, and with one word they accorded with the Way; Pei immediately bade him reside at what is now the Eastern Upper Cloister. As Shao was about to assemble Chan followers, he was troubled by the cramped space; he therefore opened up the west of the Upper Cloister, reducing the upper to expand the lower. At that time, lay patrons gathered in abundance, and in no time a grand cloister was completed. Those who came clad in patched robes numbered more than two hundred, sprawling across the steep ridges of Mount Yimen. Shao was the fifth-generation Dharma grandson of the Seventh Patriarch, Dhyāna Master Shenhui of Heze. He expounded his teaching of non-thought and revealed the true mind, fathoming the esoteric transmission of Bodhidharma and reaching the profound import of Nanneng [Huineng]. At that time, the assembly of students came in dense crowds. Meeting Grand Marshal and Prime Minister Lord Wang Duo, the Duke of Jin, Wang Duo, seeing that Shao's cultivation of the Way resonated supernaturally and that divine beings manifested efficacy—sweet dew descending from the dark sky and auspicious signs glistening upon the green cypresses—memorialized Emperor Xizong to bestow the cloister plaque reading 'Shuanglin' and the master title 'Faji'. A separate imperial decree ordered the ordination of seven attendants for him. During that period, the Dharma assemblies flourished, and gentry and commoners turned their hearts to him; for nearly forty years, those he transformed could be counted in the tens of thousands, and his ordained disciples numbered more than five hundred. On the fourth day of the seventh month in the second year of Qianning, the yimao year, he said to the assembly: 'Hasten, hasten to resolve your own liberation; your original purpose was to escape birth and death. If you do not comprehend the profound import, when will you attain release? My daylight draws close to Mount Yanzi; these are my final words.' He passed away in silence in the abbot's quarters. His secular age was eighty-five, and his dharma age was sixty-three. Imperial permission was granted to erect a pagoda in the southwest corner of his cloister. After five years, on the second day of the second month, the pagoda was reopened; his hair had grown half an inch, and his countenance was as if alive. They made offerings of incense and flowers for seven days, and people from near and far came to gaze and pay homage, praising it as rare and extraordinary. Thereafter, they performed the cremation; from within the flames, a five-colored divine light arose far above, and they collected over a hundred relics (śarīra). The fourfold assembly sifted through the ashes according to their wishes and gathered nearly a thousand relics, warm and lustrous like pure jade, brilliant and round like pearls—proving the fumigation of the fivefold dharmakāya, and not merely the accumulation of a single lifetime. The fourfold assembly reverently looked up to them and enshrined them back into the pagoda; this was the wuwu year of Emperor Zhaozong. Prime minister Yuan Xiangxian of Suiyang was administering the Jun outskirts. Disciples such as Hui'ai and others, hoping to fulfill their debt of Dharma-milk, drew up a petition requesting the conferral of a posthumous title. In the third year of Qianhua under the Later Liang, the guiyou year, Taizu issued a decree changing the master's name to Dingjue, and the pagoda was named Linghua. In the ninth month of the fourth year of Zhenming, when Hui'ai and others wished to commemorate the master's virtue with a stele, an imperial decree granted permission; the text was written by Duke Wang Zan, the Prefect of Kaifeng.