My plain white cassock is stained with the sand of the Ganges River and the snow of Chang'an, and the folds of the clam leaf sutra in the palm of my hand hide the ninth life and death. The world calls me the Sandalwood Buddha of Merit, but they don't know that I am still a river boy counting cobwebs under the eaves of Jinshan Temple. When Taizong's fingertips traced the map of the Western Regions, I saw the still-bloody reflection of the Xuanwu Gate in his pupils.
The westbound road was originally not a horse's hoof track. The bones of the nine generations at the bottom of the quicksand river are the inscriptions of karma and reincarnation. The fragments of swaddling clothes burned under the Flame Mountain point to Jin Chanzi's fate of being demoted. The face overlapping that of the mother in the bronze mirror of the Daughter's Kingdom reveals the vanity of emotional obsession. When Wukong's golden hoop was thrust into the stone body, the faint sound of five hundred spring grasses breaking through the ground under the Five Elements Mountain penetrated the five hundred years of loneliness; on the night when Bajie was drunk at Gao Laozhuang, a rake with a broken canopy emerged from the starlight of the inverted Milky Way. Lingyun Ferry is the most painful: the bottomless boat carries ten generations of cicadas down the river, and the skin bag called "Xuan Zang" is filled with the moonlight of the golden cicada's reincarnation.
Nineteen years of wind and dust have condensed into copper bells on the eaves of the wild goose pagoda, and the wet "Heart Sutra" on the translation table is stained with blood. When the emperor caressed the Beiye Sutra, his fingertips came to rest on the passage from the Kingdom of Lion and Camel: "The true sutra is not in Sanskrit, but in the gravel seeping from the seam of your bones." On the eve of my death, I buried my mother's embroidered handkerchief and Wukong's severed hair in the underground palace. I suddenly realized that the Eighty-one Tribulation had never ended - when the snow fell in Chang'an, the blood and tears on my cassock for years were turning into a new solitary smoke in the desert.
This book is not a collection of scriptures, but a book for ordinary monks to open their minds and attain enlightenment. The moonlight shines through the old bones at the bottom of the quicksand river, revealing that every grain of gravel is the relic of the ego. If you open the yellowed scroll and hear the camel bell whimpering, it is the sigh of Jiang Liuer who will always be eighteen years old in the long river of time.
