傳法正宗記 3.15

3.15

Appraisal: The two works Baolin [zhuan] and Chuandeng [lu] both record the times when the various Indian patriarchs entered extinction, correlating them with the sexagenary calendar years of China's Zhou and Qin dynasties. However, in the Zhou before King Xuan, there was originally no recorded chronology. Moreover, China and India are separated by more than tens of thousands of li, and some of those individuals passed away more than a thousand years apart. These matters are vague, remote, and disconnected; I fear that by cross-checking through multiple translations, it is not easy to attain the truth. Thus I have summarily omitted their year numbers and sexagenary cycles, and merely preserved their imperial reigns. Only regarding the years and sexagenary dates of the passing into extinction from Śākyamuni Buddha and Bodhidharma down to the sixth-generation patriarch in China can they be somewhat deduced and verified, and thus they are fully recorded.