The World-Honored One was an Yeluo Tribesman of unmistakable identity—the Yeluo Tribe's greatest achiever, and its most renowned existence.
Ksitigarbha was the Buddha who had risen from the World-Honored One's corpse.
In a certain sense, the Yeluo River was also His mother river!
The soaring white stream was the water of His homeland; the roaring wild surges were His road home.
As this heavenly river swept across the sky, splash, splash, splash—
A resplendent Buddha image rose from the river's midst!
He had a pair of compassionate eyes, gazing tenderly upon every person. A fleshy crown atop His head, a white curl between His brows, lashes like those of a bull king, eyes dark blue... the thirty-two marks of Majestic Solemnity, the eighty subsidiary characteristics. Supremely perfect, a dignified aspect of virtue!
The surging river became entirely the Buddha's body.
A hundred zhang, a thousand zhang, ten thousand zhang.
The Buddha-nature scattered across the myriad heavens and worlds, the Chan intent not yet wholly slain, all returned.
Only now did the true [Ksitigarbha] reveal Himself in full, taking the underworld as His Pure Land and the Yeluo Heavenly River as His Brahma body.
After the World-Honored One's death, amid the endless nether soil, with the heavenly river running through it, Ksitigarbha Buddha emerged!
Lowering His gaze upon the underworld, this Buddha image sighed softly. "In a drop of water from the heavenly river, I behold wild surges ten thousand years hence!"
Over the long years, bit by bit, He had sent His power out from Moon in the Fengchan Well. His painstaking arrangements in the deepest reaches of the Central Heavenly Prison, within that lost time and space, only now showed their outline—after Gongsun Xi's death, He had immediately gone to the great world of the Netherworld. While tracing back