宋高僧傳 7.6

7.6

Śramaṇa Xiyuan, surnamed Zhang, was a man from Gusu. His clan was wealthy and powerful, yet he alone renounced home. After receiving the precepts, he roamed among the lecture platforms. Not lingering in a single place, he diligently cultivated the three learnings; through long years of deep study, he became especially comprehensive and thoroughly versed. Acclaimed by contemporaries as exceptionally talented, he was accordingly invited to lecture and instruct. During the Guangqi era, Xu Yue's army rebelled, Sun Ru plundered territory, and the Wu region fell into turmoil. Leaving Tongxuan Temple, Yuan boarded a merchant vessel to take refuge in Yongdong. The merchant, who was from Yue, held Yuan in deep esteem and invited him to reside at Baolinshan Temple in Kuaiji. Though diminutive in stature, he was firm and capable by nature, having little concord with worldly matters and mostly engaging in quiet meditation. When someone questioned him, he replied: 'I wander freely in the realm of the formless, merely disporting as a lion does.' During the Jingfu era, he expounded and unfolded the sūtras and treatises at the mountain temple; voices in harmony responded, and those seeking the Dharma arrived. He then authored the Xuanzhong chao in several scrolls, all consisting of apt meanings and wonderful phrasing. He constantly exhorted people to diligently cultivate the karmic practice for higher rebirth, saying: 'It is not knowledge that is difficult; putting it into practice is what is difficult. Strive on, all of you.' Yuan performed repentance rituals at the six periods of the day, never missing even a little. He resided in a small room at the summit of Mount Langya; this mountain, legend says, flew from the Langya Terrace. As this place had formerly been a slaughterhouse, the mountain was set down to suppress it. By the mountain dwelling there was a well, in which there was an eel; the water swelled and receded, corresponding to the tides of the great river, and it possessed many supernatural wonders. Another account states that Yu here bound dragons and kraken-like monsters of the Zhejiang River, whose name was qu. The qu had a pair of ears, its color was bluish-yellow, and whenever it climbed bamboo or trees, wind and rain would certainly arrive. Nowadays it occasionally emerges from stone crevices and enters the drainage channels of the monks' quarters; seeing people, it is not frightened, but if grabbed, it leaps violently as if angry. Yet it only entered Yuan's room; Yuan would hold it in his hands as it writhed, calmly attending to it, and would administer the refuges and precepts to it, commanding it not to cause the calamities of wind and hail. When Yuan died, violent winds and rain were frequent. In his cultivation, Yuan vowed to see Maitreya. One day during a lecture, he died upright on the Dharma seat. At that time, the assembly smelled a thick, extraordinary fragrance and heard celestial music chiming and clanging, intermittently continuing for seven days before stopping; was this not a genuine proof of his higher rebirth! It was in the fourth month of the second year of Qianning. On the day of his return to the mountain, the monastic assembly set up sacrificial offerings at the temple gate. Soon after, a person wearing a madder robe and holding an ivory tablet bowed and knelt in deep sorrow. In an instant, no trace of him remained, and none in the assembly could fathom it. After the cremation, more than seven hundred grains of relics were gathered and carried off to Silla by a man from Siming.