大宋僧史略 1.68

1.68

Alas! Though Zhang Qian and Ban Chao made their expeditions, it was only to open up frontier lands in obedience to orders. Once [Kāśyapa] Mātaṅga and Dharmaratna arrived, we do not hear of anyone who set his mind on going to seek scriptures. It is like breaching a single dyke: once the inner water pours out, the outer water also flows in; only after one goes out and the other comes in is an equilibrium known. Zhu Shixing of Luoyang under the Wei vowed to go to the Western Heaven in search of the Prajñā[pāramitā]. Sengyou considered this the beginning of eastern monks going west. Yet he stopped in Khotan north of the Congling Mountains. Faxian of the Jin recruited dozens of like-minded companions, traveled to India, and climbed Vulture Peak; this was the beginning of reaching Central India. Thereafter, they followed shoulder to shoulder and heel to toe, to the point that there were Han monasteries where monks from the Eastern Land resided separately; the analogy of breaching the dyke is thus proven. If we consider the translators, most were skilled in only one language, and one rarely heard of any with comprehensive understanding. Only Tripiṭaka Master [Xuan]zang thoroughly investigated the pronunciations and glosses of both lands and surveyed the streams and headwaters of all doctrines, rendering the meaning completely as if hearing it directly from the Buddha. Next was Yijing, who traveled to those lands in person, possessed an exquisite mastery of the vinaya, corrected erroneous confusions in the monastic codes, and annotated the parallels of esoteric mantras; thus reception and practice became efficacious, and their dissemination was free of doubt. Originally, from the Later Han onwards, translators succeeded one another, but after the translation of the Shidi guan jing (Ben sheng xindi guan jing) during the Yuanhe reign period of the Tang, there was absolute silence for one hundred and sixty years. Emperor Taizu of the Song once dispatched over a hundred monks to the West to seek the Dharma. In the seventh year of the Taiping Xingguo reign period of the Great Song (982), an imperial edict was issued to establish the Institute for the Translation of Scriptures to the west of the Taiping Xingguo Temple in the Eastern Capital. They gathered several foreign monks, including the Tripiṭaka Master Tianxizai and others, and selected monks of the Left and Right Streets who understood doctrinal learning to translate new scriptures together. The enterprise of scripture translation has thus been revived under the Great Song.