Duanmu Huai Blocked by Flame Mountain, the Violent Monk Flattened the Road with One Punch

Watching Guanyin's silent departure, Duanmu Huai merely sneered. When he had asked Guanyin what the true scriptures were, he had not simply been picking a fight. He had genuinely wanted to know what exactly the true scriptures were.

Actually, there was something strange about these scriptures from the very beginning.

The Journey to the West recorded it this way: at the Ullambana Assembly, all the bodhisattvas came. Then, in his delight, Tathagata Buddha gave his earlier assessment of the Four Continents and added, "I have the Three Baskets of True Scriptures, which can persuade people to do good."

Then guess how the bodhisattvas reacted.

The bodhisattvas joined their palms and took refuge upon hearing this, then asked before the Buddha, "What are the Three Baskets of True Scriptures that the Tathagata has?"

In other words, after hearing that, their first reaction was, What Three Baskets of True Scriptures? How come we've never heard of them? What are you talking about?

Wasn't that strange? They had all cultivated to become bodhisattvas, yet none of them knew what true scriptures he was talking about. So where had those scriptures come from?

To put it bluntly, Tathagata had written them himself.

It was like a group of people attending a banquet, when one of them got drunk and started proclaiming that he had published a book, saying that anyone who read it could escape the sea of suffering and attain bliss early—hell, if you said you had written the Cyric Bible, I'd believe you. If the Inquisition were here, they'd slap you in the face with a Bolter just for saying that. Who even knew what kind of Evil God Believer you were?

So, in plain terms, the entire Journey to the West was more like Tathagata advertising a book he had written