廣弘明集 11.95

11.95

A gentleman of right faith under the sacred dynasty of the Great Tang argues: The Buddhas, the Great Persons, wander in the wondrous park of nirvāṇa and abide in the true emptiness of prajñā. They cannot be sought through speech and forms, nor can they be measured by discursive thought. Their form is identical to the Dharma-nature, and their lifespan equals the great void; yet they manifest bodies in response to beings, like the moon in the water. Thus did the cowherd see a form three cubits tall, while the arhat beheld an appearance of sixteen feet. At their greatest, they fill the empty sky; at their smallest, they enter a minute fiber. Conforming to conditions and responding to capacities, their transformations have no fixed rule. Investigating the origin of Śākya[muni]: according to the Treatise on the Suburban Sacrifices of the Later Han, the histories of the Jin and Wei, Wang Jian's catalogue of history, and Fei Changfang's Sanbao lu, collated with such sūtras as the Puyang jing and the Benxing jing, all say that the Buddha was [born under] the fifteenth monarch of the Zhou, King Zhuang, in the ninth year, the guisi year (688 BCE), on the eighth day of the fourth month. Riding a sandalwood pavilion and manifesting the form of a white elephant, he descended from Tuṣita to the city of Kapilavastu in Central India, into the womb of Queen Māyā, the principal consort of the great kṣatriya king Śuddhodana. Arriving at the tenth year, the jiawu year, on the eighth day of the fourth month at night, when the Ghost asterism conjoined, he was born from Lady Māyā's right side beneath a tree in the Lumbinī park. He emitted a great radiance illuminating the three-thousandfold world. The Ruiying jing says: 'The Buddha star appeared below, attending the prince's birth.' The Benxing jing also says: 'The sky was cloudless, yet rain naturally fell.' The Zuo zhuan says: 'Stars fell like rain.' Master Du's commentary notes: 'At that time there were probably no clouds.' Thus it tallies with the Buddhist sūtras, proving that it was indeed the time of the Buddha's birth. At nineteen he went forth from household life; at thirty he realized the Way. For forty-nine years he remained in the world preaching the Dharma. In the fourth year of King Kuang of Zhou, the renzi year, on the fifteenth day of the second month, in the latter part of the night, he entered parinirvāṇa in the city of Kuśinagara. From his parinirvāṇa down to the fifth year of Wude of the Great Tang, the renwu year (622 CE), it has been calculated as one thousand two hundred and twenty-one years. One hundred and sixteen years after his extinction, King Aśoka arose in Eastern India. Collecting the Buddha's relics and dispatching spirit troops, he broadly erected eighty-four thousand jewel stupas throughout Jambudvīpa. Here within the nine provinces of our Han land, there were also stupas. When King Aśoka erected the stupas, it corresponded to the twenty-sixth year of King Jing of Zhou, the dingwei year. The stupas arose in the Zhou era and passed through twelve kings until the thirty-fourth year of the First Emperor of Qin, when the canonical records were burnt, and King Aśoka's stupas were thereby submerged and lost. Where the Buddhist scriptures were transmitted became unknown. As the scripture catalogues of Shi Dao'an, Zhu Shixing, and others say, during the time of the First Emperor, eighteen worthy foreign śramaṇas including Shi Lifang and others brought Buddhist scriptures to convert the First Emperor. The First Emperor did not comply and imprisoned Lifang and his companions. At night, a sixteen-foot Vajra man came, smashed the prison, and brought them out. The First Emperor was terrified, prostrated, and apologized. A question asks: 'Although there is this account, the date is unknown. What serves as proof? Please set forth the resolution.' The answer states: 'In the time of Emperor Cheng of the Former Han, the biography of Liu Xiang, Director of Waterways and Grand Master of the Palace, says: Liu Xiang widely surveyed historical records and thoroughly inspected scriptures and books. He often said of himself: "I have surveyed the records everywhere and have frequently seen Buddhist scriptures." And when writing the Liexian zhuan, he said: "I searched through the stored books and sought back into the Grand Astrologer's records, creating the illustrations of the immortals. From the Yellow Emperor down through six dynasties to the present, those who attained the Way of Immortality were over seven hundred people. I examined the true and the false and determined one hundred and forty-six people." He also said: "Seventy-four of them had already appeared in the Buddhist scriptures." Deducing Liu Xiang's mention of "stored books," these were presumably books hidden among the people during the First Emperor's time, or it is said they were the books stored inside the Master's (Confucius's) residence. Judging from this, is it not evident that before the Qin and Han, the Buddha Dharma was already circulating in Cīnasthāna? Searching into the twelve worthies recorded by Dao'an, they are also among the number of the seventy. The Liexian zhuan today still preserves seventy-two of them.'