宋高僧傳 7.20

7.20

Shi Kezhou, whose secular surname was Fu, was a native of Jinling. He went forth from home at Jianyuan Temple in his home commandery. By nature compliant and virtuous, he was diligent in inquiring and learning. A fellow student urged him, saying, "A tree does not grow if the soil is not right. Nowadays, in Yuzhang, the sūtras are said to be like rivers and the treatises like the sea—why do you not go there to seek instruction?" Zhou was moved by his guidance, packed his bags, and arrived there. Encountering the great assembly of Master of Dharma Yunbiao, he thoroughly investigated the great Ci'en commentary on the Lotus Sūtra, making daily and monthly progress and grasping its profound meaning. At the beginning of Emperor Zhaozong's reign, he returned from Jiangxi to the region between Tiantai and Yue, where he was requested to teach and enlighten others. In the second year of Qianhua of the Liang dynasty, he accepted an invitation from Longxing Temple in Hangzhou to preach and expound, with an audience of monastics and laypeople that constantly numbered around five hundred. Qian, King Wusu of the Two Zhe, commanded him to lecture on the sūtras at night in the Tianbao Hall on behalf of the netherworld administration; ghosts and spirits manifested their forms as escorting guards, and people frequently saw them. Once, when a sacrifice was offered to the spirit of the Tongguan Shrine, the medium could not induce the deity to descend after a long invocation. Later, possessing the medium, the spirit said, "I followed the Great Deity to the Tianbao Hall at the Western Pass to listen to the Dharma, and have only just returned." Hearing this, King Wusu treated him with great reverence and bestowed on Zhou a gold ruyi sceptre along with an alms-bowl and a set of purple robes, conferring on him the honorific title "Jingzhi Tongming" (Pure Resolve of Penetrating Luminescence). In the first year of Tiancheng, he died in his own chamber at Guanyin Cloister. Earlier, in the fourth year of Qianning, when Zhou arrived at Songshan Temple in Taizhou to lecture on the commentary, there were no explanatory notes; he thus abridged it according to the commentary into five rolls, titled Pingjing chao (Appraisal of the Sūtra Commentary), along with Yinxun (Phonetics and Glosses) in five booklets, and an explanation of Vinaya Master Xuan's Fahua xu chao (Commentary on the Preface to the Lotus Sūtra) in one roll, which circulated throughout Eastern and Western Zhejiang. His disciples succeeded one another without interruption.