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On First Meeting the Celestial Bodhisattva of Compassion,
Kwan Yin
Kwan Yin (also called Quan Yin,
Guan shih yin, Kannon and Kwannon-sama), the Buddhist female
embodiment of compassion, is the most revered goddess in Asia. She
is a bodhisattva, one whose practice leads her to full enlightenment
but who then turns back into the world and works to alleviate
suffering by leading others to liberation. She originated in China
and is venerated in Japan, Korea, and throughout Southeast Asia.
Statues of her can be found in many homes, for while she is a
Buddhist embodiment of the highest spiritual attainment, Kwan Yin
also enjoys the wide popularity of a folk goddess.
A lovely, playful figure, Kwan Yin grants the wishes of those
who call upon her, especially women, and exerts particular power
over childbirth. But many men count themselves among her devotees.
Her name means “She Who Harkens to the Cries of the
World,”—the one who arrives to save people from burning
buildings, pluck them from train wrecks and ocean storms (she’s a
particular savior of fishermen) and offer general relief from
suffering. It is Kwan Yin who listens to the voices of the poor and
oppressed.
I first encountered this bodhisattva in the Midwest. During a
1982 book tour, I was staying in Kansas City at the home of a woman
who invited me to go with her downtown to the Nelson Atkins Art
Museum. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said.
In the museum we entered a high-ceilinged room empty except
for a splendid wooden statue of a woman. She was about life size,
with Asian features, dressed in gorgeous loose red trousers, a gold
robe, wearing a jeweled crown, many bracelets, and long dangling
earrings. She sat with one leg up, knee bent, foot on the seat on
which she sat, her arm balanced casually on this upraised knee. She
braced herself with her other arm. (I was later to learn that this
posture is called “royal ease.”) Her eyelids were nearly closed,
as if we had come upon her in some sort of relaxed reverie.
“How beautiful!” I burst out.
“Yes,” my companion said. “This is Kwan Yin.”
“Kwan Yin,” I repeated. I had never heard those words
before, had known nothing of this female figure, even though I had
begun Buddhist meditation the previous year.
“But who is she?” I asked, wanting historical and
cultural background, dates, sutra references.
My companion chuckled. “Just be here with her, and you’ll
find out.”
I gazed at the statue, somewhat annoyed.
“You should have seen this room ten years ago,” my
companion offered. “It was full of hippies sitting on the floor,
and you could smell the weed. They’d sit here all day, just
digging Kwan Yin’s vibes.”
I smiled, and turned to see her eyebrows lifted in amusement.
Then she was gone, wandering off without explanation, and I felt
abandoned. How odd to find myself so disoriented in the Midwest,
where I had grown up and thought I knew the parameters of
consciousness.
Well, apparently I didn’t. I lingered, alone with this
being whose name was—what had she said?—Kwan Yin. There was
nothing to do but look at her. I walked over to stand squarely in
front of her.
She sat before a wall painted in faded swirls of green and
red and yellow and white, with the dim figures of flowers, flowing
cloth, clouds discernible in the colors. Her seat looked like a
rock, uneven, darkly modeled. The luxurious gold and red of her
clothing flowed down over this rock to where her bare foot rested on
a pillow that looked like a blossom. Her body was perfectly upright,
her head high even while she appeared completely relaxed. Her face
with its lowered eyelids, its slightly smiling lips, had been carved
of wood in the eleventh or twelfth century and painted, her robe
gilded. Her posture of upraised leg, outstretched arm balanced on
knee, made a powerfully stable pattern against the swirling of the
wall painting.
Kwan Yin’s serenity and power gradually reached out to me,
engaged my senses until they filled me with something like happiness
and sorrow all mixed together. Mysteriously the space between us had
become palpable; indeed the whole cavernous room seemed vibrant with
her presence.
Eventually I gave up examining the gold buckle that held
together her robe, the earrings that I now realized were long
pendulous earlobes, the lines like successive smiles on the skin of
her throat, and just took in her whole figure. The feelings in me
settled, and a stillness opened in and around me.
Now I understood why the flower children had come to spend
whole days in her presence. I imagined her smiling just this way, so
tenderly, as the smoke of their cannabis wafted up around her.
Indeed it must have reminded her of the incense burned for her in
her native temple in China, the obeisance offered up to her by
centuries of worshippers. She had come from that distant past on the
other side of the world to sit, tranquil as a lake on a windless
day, here in a museum on the Great Plains of America.
As I drove east the next day, leaving the expanse of the
Missouri River behind and entering the more densely populated
industrial part of the Midwest, I kept a postcard of Kwan Yin,
bought at the museum, on the car seat next to me. Sometimes I
glanced at her, and without understanding why or how, I knew that I
had set out upon a relationship with a being who embodied something
profound, at once deeply female and universally human.
Excerpted
from Opening the Lotus: A
Woman’s Guide to Spirituality by Sandy Boucher. More about
Kwan Yin can be found in Boucher’s Discovering
Kwan Yin: Buddhist Goddess of Compassion.
Reproduced with permission from Sandy
Boucher. Copyright @2002. All Rights Reserved. |
