Becoming Kuan Yin

“When I first met Kuan Yin in a back street curio shop the owner described her as “she who hears the cries of the world.” I was immediately drawn to her. Kuan Yin was the merciful guardian, the healer and protector of the suffering and disenfranchised. At that time I was working with the terminally ill, and I closely identified with her. She opened my heart. Taking her home with me that afternoon, I trusted so much what I felt that I never considered I'd need a book about her. Some people told me who she was thought to be, and that was enough.

Sometime later, I read John Blofeld's The Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin and realized that her presence in the world had a profound resonance. So when Stephen told me he was going to work on a book about Kuan Yin and the emissaries of her compassion a few years ago, I was delighted. It was the natural expression of his decades of spiritual practice. It was going to be a doozy! Once Stephen started writing, the words came as though delivered from the heavens. He was excited as he learned from the remarkable transmission, and it symbiotically affected our practice. Kuan Yin was the Mother of Mercy we had known for so long at the bedside of the dying, offering us an initiation into the universe of her heart.

Late every afternoon Stephen would read the day's work to me, and we both received it as our next teaching. We began to recite the Kuan shih yin pusa mantra, the locomotive for Kuan Yin's train, on which we were grateful passengers. As Stephen continued his work of attempting to receive Kuan Yin's pure essence, imagining what it must have taken to bring the whole world into her heart, it opened our path of service even wider. Kuan Yin taught us to rehabilitate the word “mercy,” to bring it back from the shadows of “have mercy on me a miserable sinner” and offer it as a cipher for the longing hearts we knew so well. He included none of the miracle stories gathered around her image. Her struggle to become what she became was miracle enough. Her presence was sorely needed in this sick and injured, this weeping, world. We are honored to be counted among her students.”

—ONDREA LEVINE

“Behind most Asian temple great Buddhas, there is a curtain where a small Kuan Yin figure and an incense burner rest, and a comfortable place to sit in the dharma-field connects the supplicants' heart to the edgeless presence of her loving-kindness. And behind it all, the Buddha-nature—the foundation of our potential for liberation and the liberating of all sentient beings from suffering. Opening the gate of Kuan Yin, we discover parts of ourselves almost too beautiful for words. The yearning for the direct experience of our luminescent nature. Most who recognize her name consider Kuan Yin a celestial bodhisattva in the later Buddhist pantheon, and perhaps even its muse. Some consider her an immortal in the Taoist tradition. She responds to many sacred names: Avalokiteshvara, Tara, Chenrize, Mother Mary, the angelic Bernice, Isis perhaps, Krishna of course, and generically (and even genetically) as the Beloved. The essence that reveals our undifferentiated Oneness, which is the unconditioned mind, is not other than unconditional love.”

~ Stephen Levine, Becoming Kuan Yin: The Evolution of Compassion