Original Text
A monk named Tikong once told this story: In Qingzhou, he had seen two foreign monks with strange and peculiar appearances, their ears adorned with rings, their bodies draped in yellow cloth, and their hair and beards all curly. They claimed to have come from the West, having heard that the prefect of Qingzhou revered Buddhism, and thus came to pay their respects. The prefect dispatched two attendants to escort them to a monastery. The monastery's abbot, Lingpei, held them in low regard. However, the monastery's steward, noticing their unusual nature, privately entertained them, and the two foreign monks took up residence there. Someone asked them, "In the West, there are many extraordinary people; do the arhats also possess strange magical arts?" One monk smiled faintly, withdrew his hand from his sleeve, and in his palm held a small pagoda, about a foot tall, exquisitely delicate and lovely. At the highest point of the monastery wall, there was a small niche. The monk cast the pagoda from his palm toward the niche, and it landed perfectly within, neither crooked nor askew. People saw relics on the pagoda shimmering with light, illuminating the entire room. After a moment, the monk beckoned with his hand, and the pagoda returned to his palm. The other monk bared his arm, sometimes extending his left arm to a length of six or seven feet, while his right arm shrank away to nothing. Then he extended his right arm, and it behaved in the same manner as the left.
Commentary
There is a common saying in China: "Monks from afar recite scriptures better." However, achieving this is no easy task, requiring certain subjective and objective conditions—such as truly knowing how to recite scriptures, having a powerful patron, and being adept at self-promotion. In this tale, the two foreign monks failed to recite their scriptures well; they likely possessed only the condition of being monks from afar. The true local power, the abbot of the temple, looked down upon them. More critically, it seemed the two foreign monks were not skilled in their own profession, and what they could show off was merely acrobatics! Thus, despite an introduction from the prefect, they were met with cold neglect.