It is difficult to understand the pain of 'from excess to scarcity' without living in this era of very slow horse-drawn carriages.
In the past few days after Ouyang Rong woke up, he lived an extremely 'self-disciplined' life:
After dinner in the evening, I sat in the room in a daze, contemplating the merit tower. There was nothing in the room except a few Buddhist scriptures that I had borrowed from Xiufa.
Opening the west window, it was dark and windy outside, with only a few Buddhist lamps on the pagoda in the distance.
There was only one clear thing to do: sleep.
He almost couldn't help but call Banxi over and challenge him again.
At this point, if we put it in the previous life, the exciting nightlife has just begun, and the gentlemen and postgraduate entrance examination friends have not yet started racing.
Of course, life might be richer in Luoyang and Chang'an, which were at the heart of the Zhou Empire.
If you can empathize with this, you can understand one percent of the reasons why Ouyang Rong is homesick.
So now, in the middle of the night, Ouyang Rong couldn't sleep and went out...
Ouyang Rong first went to the right wing, dug out a bunch of ropes and a fire folding bag, and took them away. He even brought some pastries and fruits, carried in a cloth bag.
However, when he followed his memory to the Beitian Almshouse again and fumbled his way to the well, he found that the rope was a bit redundant.
Because there are a bunch of soft rope ladders placed next to the wellhead.
Ouyang Rong put down the rope ladder and entered the underground palace again.
It's a familiar location, a familiar time, and the familiar moonlight.
It's just that the slender mute girl and the old Taoist man wearing a crane cloak and fur coat are no longer in the underground palace. But it's not surprising, those two were probably patients of Beitian Hospital and were rescued, and he wasn't here to reminisce.
The moonlight is a little dark tonight.
Chi~
A spark suddenly rose out of thin air, illuminating Ouyang Rong's thin face.
"Good evening, Master I don't know."
The haggard monk, who was dozing and nodding in the darkness, suddenly woke up, chanted a Buddha chant in his mouth, and said sincerely: "Donor, this is the pure land of lotus, and above is the endless hell!"
The monk once again used the familiar compassionate gesture of pointing one finger to the ground and the other to the sky.
Ouyang Rong thought for a while and nodded, "Master is the one who always tells the truth. I misunderstood before."
He walked over, placed the cakes and fruits in front of Monk Xiuzhen, then held up the fire folding bag, walked around the underground palace, and began to look at the place carefully.
This underground palace is a square-like space, about the size of half a football field. The circular lotus seat in the center of the underground palace and the well directly above do not know whether they represent the builder's concept of a round sky and a round earth.
Ouyang Rong walked around the wall of the underground palace, and this time he saw clearly the murals he had ignored before.
The four walls were painted with thick and colorful paints. However, they were in disrepair and were often in a dark underground palace. A lot of the murals fell off, but Ouyang Rong could still recognize them.
The four murals correspond to the four stories of the Buddha's life, namely "Prince Sattva sacrificed his life to feed tigers", "King Shibi cut meat to trade pigeons", "King Kuaimu gave up his eyes" and "Moonlight King gave his head".
The so-called Buddha's life stories actually tell the story of the good deeds and merits performed by Sakyamuni in his previous life before he became a Buddha. The most familiar one is probably the first one, "Sacrificing one's body to feed a tiger", and the other three The connotations that the fables want to express are also the same. They all emphasize the compassion of the Buddha, who endured humiliation and sacrifice in previous lives, saved the world and saved people, and finally became a Buddha.
Ouyang Rong was thoughtful, turned around and walked towards the waist-covered rosette in the center of the underground palace.
If Master Shandao had not lied to him, then Master Zhongma, who became a Buddha in the physical body, was sitting in this position... ascending to the Pure Land.
"After accumulating merit, can I really ascend to the Pure Land here? If I cure the flood or do other great meritorious deeds, can I also ascend to the Pure Land?"
"Also, where is the Pure Land? Is it really going to the West? Or is it different where everyone goes, and I can return to my hometown if I want to?"
Ouyang Rong murmured, lowering his head and thinking deeply.
"In addition, now that the body has become a Buddha and the soul has ascended, I would like to take a look at the lifelike body left behind... Well." Halfway through, someone seemed to think of something and rolled his eyes a little guiltily. Not far away is a half-cut lotus golden lantern, and strange oval beads scattered on the ground.
At first, Ouyang Rong took out this golden lotus lantern from an eight-fold treasure letter. The latter was originally placed on the lotus pedestal, and it was next to him when he woke up.
And the eight-layered treasure letter is very big, like a Russian matryoshka doll, with eight layers of boxes, and the innermost part is the lotus golden lantern.
It's just that when he threw it away as a handy thing, he didn't expect that even the golden lotus lantern was just a storage container, containing more valuable Buddha treasures. Later, he was in a hurry to get out, so he didn't. Pay attention to these beads on the ground.
Ahem, couldn't it be the relics of Master Zhongma or other eminent monks? That would be equivalent to ashes. So the lotus golden lantern is someone's urn... Well, it's really a bit sinful. I think your merits are so deducted. Light.
Ouyang Rong sighed, lowered his eyes and looked at the relics on the ground:
There are about seventeen of them, the smallest is no more than a marble, the largest is no more than a pigeon egg, there are all kinds of colors, and there is even one that is round and clear, like a white diamond... Didn't you say that the relic is actually a kidney stone? Do you call this a kidney stone?
As expected of the eminent monks, you can really burn anything by going to the stove, just like opening a blind box... No, stop laughing.
Ouyang Rong showed the level of a senior expression management master. He bent down and picked up the relics on the ground one by one as if nothing had happened. However, doing this did not increase his merit.
However, Ouyang Rong has now figured out some of the rules of the Merit Tower: it is okay to be a fun person, but you can only "think" and not "do".
Listening to hell jokes and having a smile on your face is a kind of "action", and the Buddha will give you a thumbs up.
But when he picked up the round and clear relic, he found that it could slowly glow in the moonlight, like a night pearl. He suddenly felt a little strange, thought about it, and put it into his sleeve with a sigh. , it cannot be left to gather dust in this underground palace, he kept it for the eminent monks.
Maybe someone is sincere, maybe these relics are really ownerless things that have been forgotten by everyone, but his merits are not deducted...
Then Ouyang Rong caught a glimpse of a line of writing.
It was discovered when Huo Zhezi looked at the relic.
It is located at the foot of this stone corseted rosette, on the southeast side covered by the shadow of the rosette. It was engraved on the floor tiles, so it’s no wonder it had never been discovered before—it was always located in the blind spot between sunlight and moonlight at the mouth of the well.
"Come back?"
Ouyang Rong knelt down and took a look, and immediately remembered something.
Isn't this what Master Shandao mentioned, the words left by his great uncle before he "ascends to the Pure Land"? It turned out to be still here... I thought it was ink stains or blood writing, but it had been cleaned away long ago.
As for the meaning of this four-character idiom, it is also very simple: Go back!
Ouyang Rong's eyes were slightly stern. The marble tiles under his feet were already cold and solid, but the four regular characters of "Go back, come here" were carved into the wood, as if they were carved with a sharp awl sharpened like iron.
Subconsciously, he stretched out his hand to touch this dark moment. In an instant, his whole body trembled. It was not that his fingertips were electrocuted, but that he heard the faint ringing of a shocking bell behind his ears.
Before Ouyang Rong's brain had time to react to this sudden change, his consciousness was suddenly thrust into the Tower of Merit located in the clouds thousands of miles away.
"This is……"
Ouyang Rong staggered to sit on the ground and saw the blessing bell above, which had been eternally silent, now trembling slightly, with purple energy overflowing from the bell body.
Like an old man in a bamboo hat fishing alone on a cold river, he stood up and shook off the snowflakes.
It seemed as if the car had been started by the ignition.
At the same time, the green-gold font on the small wooden fish that recorded the merits glowed brightly, and finally turned into a cluster of light, like a living thing, with a shape similar to "a swimming carp" in the pond.
It suddenly rushed towards the fortune clock!
Then... it bounced back after being hit, returned to the wooden fish, and turned into a line of lapis lazuli font: [merits: one hundred]
But the fortune bell still trembled slightly, safe and sound, without any change. It seemed that the "one swimming carp" just now was too weak to shake at all, so it didn't even ring.
Witnessing this scene, Ouyang Rong was stunned, slowly digesting the shock, "Isn't the merit enough..."
The "one swimming carp" that Ouyang Rong had just accumulated and transformed into seemed to have some kind of connection with him. After being knocked back to his original state, a mysterious message appeared in his mind and he was laughed at.
"It takes 10,000 merit points to ring the bronze bell and obtain the fruit of good fortune... But I only have 100 points now, and I'm still 9,900 points short of that. Damn it."
Ouyang Rong fell into deep thought.
But in reality, because his hand has been removed from the four-character inscription, the Bell of Fortune has long since returned to silence, and the Tower of Merit has once again disappeared into the clouds.
There is no doubt that this four-character inscription and lotus pedestal hide a secret blessing.
And this blessing is obviously not small. It requires such a huge merit value. This is estimated... enough for him to watch hell jokes for a lifetime.
Ouyang Rong lowered his head and stared at the four-character inscription in the shadow.
"The Palace of the Pure Land...the story of the Buddha's life...the monk who attained enlightenment and ascended to heaven...returning to receive blessings...are these coincidences, or are they real...the way home."
The light and shadow on his face flickered.
…
