Seeking the Crossing with Two Scriptures

Synopsis of Two Sutras, One Crossing In the early Tang dynasty, the physician Dong Cheng, later known by the assumed name Shuang Jingdu, was descended from the renowned healer Dong Cheng. He inherited his family’s medical tradition and devoted himself to studying the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon. But after seeing that “the powerful can easily cure bodily illness, yet heartache is hard to heal,” he set out west with his grandfather’s annotated medical texts and a copy of the Diamond Sutra. In Guozhou, he used the medical principles of the Plain Questions to quell a malaria outbreak, then drew on the Diamond Sutra’s teaching of “abiding nowhere” to help an old woman let go of her grief over her son’s death. From then on, he went by the name Shuang Jingdu, using medicine as his boat and Buddhist teachings as his oars, and left behind a legend of “healing the body and ferrying the heart” along the Hexi Corridor. Centuries later, during the Kangxi era of the Qing dynasty, Dong Yantang, a descendant of Shuang Jingdu, unexpectedly discovered his ancestor’s handwritten notes on the two sutras. Jiangnan was then beset by frequent epidemics. The people suffered from illness and were also left fearful and unsettled by the lingering trauma of war. Carrying on his ancestor’s mission, Dong Yantang prepared medicines and administered acupuncture according to the Inner Canon’s principle of balancing yin and yang, then used the Diamond Sutra’s teaching that “all conditioned things are impermanent” to soothe the people. He revived Shuang Jingdu’s way of helping the world, allowing the wisdom of the two sutras, spanning a thousand years, to continue ferrying people through hardship and bringing peace to the human world.