道宣律師感通錄 1.4

1.4

"Coming down to the Jin dynasty, a monk saw a mound of earth swelling up from the ground; though he repeatedly leveled it, it could never be made flat. Later, seeing it split open, he marvelled even more at the occurrence. Digging more than a zhang deep, he found the image and human bones inside a boat. The skull, arm, and shin bones were all thick and large, several times larger than those of modern humans. That was indeed from the era of Kāśyapa Buddha, when the lifespan of humans in Jambudvīpa was twenty thousand years. In present times, life is short and physical stature small, which is naturally as expected. When the image was first unearthed, it was difficult to drag out; this disciple transformed into an old man and directed the expedient means, so that in a short moment it was brought out. During the Zhou persecution of the Dharma, it was temporarily hidden, but when the religion revived, it was brought out again. The people of Shu only knew that it miraculously welled forth from the earth, but could not fathom its origin. Seeing the characters 'Duo Bao' (Prabhūtaratna) on its lotus pedestal, they consequently named it Prabhūtaratna Buddha, and called the temple Duobao Temple." / I asked: "The clerical script for 'Duo Bao' originated during the era of the Three Qin dynasties. How could this divine script have already existed during the time of Kāśyapa Buddha?" / He answered: "The clerical script of Li Si of the Qin merely inherited traditions from distant antiquity. The emergence of clerical script actually began in the era of ancient Buddhas. If you look at the more than one thousand provinces on the four sides of the southern continent today, and the more than ten thousand and one hundred kingdoms that adorn Jambudvīpa, their written characters and spoken sounds are identical. Today, the Tang empire is separated by distant sea routes, often extending hundreds of thousands of li, and translators have not transmitted them; this has caused people in this region to remain stubbornly stuck to their old ways, which is hardly surprising. Have you not heard, Master? Gu Yewang of the Liang was a Great Erudite of the Imperial Academy. He investigated the origins of characters thoroughly, finding their emergence and disappearance to be unfixed. Thus the preface to the Yupian states that someone opened the tomb of Lord Chunshen and obtained inscriptions from it, all of which were in clerical script. When one examines Lord Chunshen, he lived in the Zhou era when the six states were contemporaneous with Qin; that was the era of the annexation. If this country's seal script, clerical script, and various writings are still obscure, how could one comprehend matters from the era of Kāśyapa Buddha? It is simply not something their ears and eyes have heard and seen."