神僧傳 1.7

1.7

Zhu Dharmaratna was a native of Central Tianzhu. He said of himself that he had chanted tens of thousands of verses of sūtras and treatises, and was a teacher of scholars in Tianzhu. When Cai Yin had arrived in that country, Dharmaratna made an agreement with Mātanga to travel and convert, and so followed him in coming. Having reached Luoyang, he lodged together with Mātanga. Before long, he became proficient in the Chinese language. The sūtras that Cai Yin obtained in the Western Regions were translated by him: namely, the five works including the Ten Stages for Severing Bonds, the Buddha's Jātaka, the Ocean of the Dharma Treasury, the Deeds of the Buddha, and the [Sūtra of] Forty-two Sections. Owing to the relocation of the capital and bandit uprisings, four of the texts lost their originals and were not transmitted. East of the Yangtze River, only the Sūtra of Forty-two Sections survives today, amounting to some two thousand words. Among the extant sūtras in the land of Han, this is the very first. Cai Yin also obtained in the Western Regions a painted reclining image of Śākyamuni, which was the fourth work of the masters who carved King Udayana's sandalwood image. Once it reached Luoyang, Emperor Ming ordered painters to copy it and place it in the Qingliang Terrace and atop the Xianjie Tomb. The old image no longer survives. Furthermore, in the past, when Emperor Wu of Han excavated the bottom of the Kunming Pool, he found black ash and asked Dongfang Shuo about it. Dongfang Shuo said: 'You can ask a Western Region brahman.' When Dharmaratna arrived, the crowd pursued the question with him. Dharmaratna said: 'When the world comes to an end, the kalpa fire burns completely through; this ash is that.' His words having proof, those who believed him were very numerous. Later he died in Luoyang, his springs and autumns being sixty-odd years.