On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India, 629–645 A.D. v1.c7.s9.13

v1.c7.s9.13

The term which the Records and the Life use for the Buddhist establishment to the south-west of the New Monastery is, it will be observed, Ching-lü. This phrase means "the cottage of the essential," and it is perhaps a synonym of Ching-shê, an old and common term with a similar meaning. Our pilgrim may have taken it over from a previous writer who used it in the sense of Vihāra, as Julien translates it here. It is to be observed that the Life does not know anything of the invidious distinction in the treatment given to the relics of the arhats of this temple who died after miraculous exhibitions, and that of the relics of those arhats who passed away without such exhibitions. The pilgrim, as we have seen, describes the 100 Brethren in the establishment at his time as "day and night assiduous at their duties." The words within inverted commas are a quotation with the alteration of one character from a wellknown passage in the Shih-ching and they are a stock literary phrase.¹ He adds that one cannot distinguish among them the ordinary Brother from the arhat. Instead of this last clause Julien has—"Il est difficile de scruter le cœur des hommes vulgaires et des saints," but this platitude cannot be forced out of the text. This simply tells us that all the Brethren were so zealous in the observances of their religion that one could not tell which was common monk and which was arhat.