大唐內典錄 10.4

10.4

序曰。自佛經之流東夏也。六百餘載。三被誅除。值弘護者觀機而作。先隱巖穴固守至真。雲霧霑漬又被淹爛。及後興法方事拾遺。百不存一。且存綱領。賴值江表五代奉信無虧。遂使傳度法本周流寰宇。而西晉之末天下分崩。譯人遭難寄死無地焉。使經本獨得安全。又漢靈栖遑東西臨幸。佛經俗典於此淪亡。故致目本俱遺其數不少。今總會群錄鳩聚結之。勘本則無。挍目便有。恐後獲者據現錄無。便委棄之同於疑偽。是以尋閱古今諸錄。挍定經本有無。有則依而入藏。無則題目擬訪。庶有同舟之士。懷斯而廣集云。

Preface: Since Buddhist sūtras flowed into the Eastern Xia over six hundred years ago, they have three times suffered suppression and eradication. When protectors of the Dharma arose seeing the opportune moment, they first concealed [the texts] in crags and caves, steadfastly preserving the ultimate truth. But drenching mists and moisture caused them to rot and decay. Only when the Dharma flourished later did [people] take up the task of collecting the remnants. Not one in a hundred survived; only the broad outlines were preserved. Fortunately, across the five dynasties south of the Yangtze, faith remained unflagging, thereby allowing the transmitted Dharma texts to circulate throughout the realm. Yet at the end of the Western Jin, the empire fell into ruin; the translators suffered calamities and had nowhere even to die, so how could the texts of the sūtras alone remain secure? Furthermore, Emperor Ling of the Han fled anxiously back and forth between east and west, and at that time Buddhist sūtras and secular classics were lost together. Consequently, cases where both title and text are lost are not few. Now, bringing together the various catalogues and assembling them into a whole, one finds that while the texts are absent upon collating, the titles are present upon checking the catalogues. Fearing that later finders, seeing they are not in the current catalogue, might cast them aside as apocrypha, I have therefore perused various ancient and modern catalogues, collating whether texts of the sūtras exist or not. If they exist, they are entered into the canon accordingly; if they do not, their titles are recorded in anticipation of future search. May those who share this path hold this in mind and gather them extensively.