On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India, 629–645 A.D. v1.c10.40

v1.c10.40

A note added to the text here tells us that *Mo-yü* is in Chinese *tou*, a general name for all kinds of pulse. Julien reads the second character of the word as *su* and regards the transcription as representing the sanskrit word Masura which means lentils. But all my texts have *Mo-yu* and this agrees with the Glossary. The native interpretation may be a mistake, and the Chinese characters may represent *Mayū* for Mayūkha, a word which means brightness, *a ray of light*. This suggestion is strengthened by the statement which our pilgrim makes about the Buddha here shedding a bright light which lit up the Mahāvana Monastery. The incident of the Buddha in one of his previous births taking a splinter of one of his bones to write out a Buddhist text is taken from a Jātaka mentioned in several of the Chinese writings. In some versions of the story the P'usa's name is Ai (or Lo)-fa (愛 or 樂法), “Loving or Rejoicing in dharma”¹, but in other versions he is Yü-to-lo (or Yu-to-li), and in the ‘Der Weise u. d. Thor’ he is Udpala.² As the price of hearing a sacred text of Buddhism the P'usa agreed to write the text with a pencil made from one of his bones on paper made from his skin and with his blood for ink. The person who made this hard bargain was a brahmin or the Devil disguised as such.