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Hwuy-king came to his end in the monastery of Buddha's alms-bowl, and on this Fâ-hien went forward alone towards the place of the flat-bone of Buddha's skull. Under Buddha's teaching, Ânanda became an Arhat, and is famous for his strong and accurate memory; and he played an important part at the first council for the formation of the Buddhist canon.
When they bring forth their divine alms-bowl we feel we cannot help giving, and we find that in giving is our truest joy and liberation, for it is uniting ourselves to that extent with the infinite. Man is not complete; he is yet to be. In what he is he is small, and if we could conceive him stopping there for eternity we should have an idea of the most awful hell that man can imagine.
There is in the country a spittoon which belonged to Buddha, made of stone, and in color like his alms-bowl. There is also a tooth of Buddha, for which the people have reared a tope, connected with which there are more than a thousand monks and their disciples, all students of the hînayâna.
We have seen that he had been preceded: Kumarajiva had come to China a century before; but experimentally, leaving the Center of the Movement in India; there must have been thousands of disciples in the Middle Kingdom in 520 when Bodhidharma came, bringing with him the Buddha's alms-bowl, the symbol of the Patriarchate, to make in China his headquarters and that of his successors.
The regular business of the monks is to perform acts of meritorious virtue, and to recite their Sûtras and sit wrapped in meditation. When stranger monks arrive at any monastery, the old residents meet and receive them, carry for them their clothes and alms-bowl, give them water to wash their feet, oil with which to anoint them, and the liquid food permitted out of the regular hours.
When poor people throw into it a few flowers, it becomes immediately full, while some very rich people, wishing to make offering of many flowers, might not stop till they had thrown in hundreds, thousands, and myriads of bushels, and yet would not be able to fill it. Pâo-yun and Sang-king here merely made their offerings to the alms-bowl, and then resolved to go back.
Going from this to the southeast for twelve yojanas, they came to the place where the Lichchhavis wished to follow Buddha to the place of his pari-nirvâna, and where, when he would not listen to them and they kept cleaving to him, unwilling to go away, he made to appear a large and deep ditch which they could not cross over, and gave them his alms-bowl, as a pledge of his regard, thus sending them back to their families.
It has been handed down, that, near the time when these things occurred, around the Jetavana vihara there were ninety-eight monasteries, in all of which there were monks residing, excepting only in one place which was vacant. Each had its multitude of followers, and they all beg their food: only they do not carry the alms-bowl.
'And for food? Lamas, as a rule, have good store of money somewhere about them, but the Curator wished to make sure. 'For the journey, I take up the Master's begging-bowl. Yes. Even as He went so go I, forsaking the ease of my monastery. I have now no chela, but I will take the alms-bowl and thus enable the charitable to acquire merit. He nodded his head valiantly.
There is in the country a spitoon which belonged to Buddha, made of stone, and in colour like his alms-bowl. There is also a tooth of Buddha, for which the people have reared a tope, connected with which there are more than a thousand monks and their disciples, all students of the hinayana.
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