法苑珠林 4.42

4.42

When questioned by imperial decree, he replied: 'It was food for dragons; two dragons fought over it, and so it fell down looking like a stone.' Judging by this, why must anything falling from the sky be declared a star? Indeed, matters of the distant heavens are beyond the estimation of ordinary people; there is nothing more difficult for people to understand than heaven and earth. Worldly tradition says: heaven is refined qi, the sun is the solar essence, and stars are the essence of the myriad things—this is what the Confucian teaching maintains. When stars fall, they become stones. Yet if essence were stone, it could not have light; and its nature being heavy and dense, to what would it be attached? The diameter of a single large star is a hundred li; the head and tail of a single mansion are separated by tens of thousands of li. If objects of a hundred li are linked across tens of thousands of li, their breadth, width, incline, and skew never expand or contract. Furthermore, stars are of the same light and color as the sun and moon, differing only in size; yet could the sun and moon also be stones? If stones were so dense and solid, how could the Crow and the Hare find room within them? And if stone were within qi, how could it revolve on its own? If the sun, moon, and asterisms were all qi, the body of qi being light and floating should merge with heaven; in moving back and forth in their orbital rotation, they could not diverge from it, so how could their slowness and swiftness fail to be uniform? Why is it that the sun, moon, five planets, and twenty-eight lunar mansions each have their distinct degrees and move unevenly? How could qi suddenly fall and turn into stone? Since the earth is dross and turbid, its nature ought to sink and be heavy; yet when one digs into the soil one strikes springs, so it floats upon water. Beneath the accumulated waters, what else is there? From whence do the great rivers and hundred valleys arise? Flowing eastward to the sea, why does it not overflow? Where do the Returning Pool and the Weilu drain to? What manner of qi kindles the stones of the Burning Shoal? Who regulates the retreat and return of the ocean tides? When the Heavenly River points overhead, why does it not scatter and fall? The nature of water is to seek the low; why then does it surge upward? When heaven and earth first opened, stars and constellations were already there. When the Nine Provinces had not yet been marked and the various states had not yet been divided, how were territories demarcated and assigned to the celestial paths? Who made these divisions since the beginning of feudal investiture? States have waxed and waned, but the stars do not advance or retreat; yet portents, calamities, and blessings do not err in their midst. With heavenly images so immense and the aligned stars so numerous, why should their astrological fields be tethered solely to the Central Kingdom? Mao is the Mao-tou (Banner Head), the celestial sector of the Xiongnu; are the Western Hu, Eastern Yi, tattooed tribes, and Jiaozhi alone cast aside? Seeking by such means, in the end no one understands. How could one use ordinary human affairs to constrain what must lie beyond the cosmos?