Kuan Yin Chronicles

“Kuan Shi Yin first arrived in China sometime between 200 and 400 AD as Avalokitesvara, a Buddhist male bodhisattva. Bodhisattvas are those who, through countless lives of virtue, have accrued so much merit that they could enter Nirvana. However they decide not to but instead to use their vast store of merit to help suffering beings escape the wheel of reincarnation. Avalokitesvara is one of the most famous bodhisattvas and became a favorite amongst Buddhists in China from the sixth century AD onwards, known by his Chinese name Kuan Shi Yin—a translation of the original Sanskrit name Avalokitesvara.

Sometime around the end of the Tang dynasty (early tenth century AD), Kuan Yin changed sex and became a woman—the form in which she is revered and venerated to this day. We explore how and why and through that exploration encounter the pluralism and diversity of China's religious history. The religious pluralism of Kuan Yin is of course one of her major features, and we have now discovered that although she arrives as a Buddhist male deity, she has by the twelfth century become an official Chinese Imperial and Daoist deity.

While visiting the White Cloud Temple in Beijing, the headquarters of Daoism in China, I noticed a temple dedicated to Kuan Yin but with a title which was unknown to me. It appears that in the year 1119 AD, the Emperor Huizong decreed that Kuan Yin was now appointed as the Goddess Chang Pudu Yuantong Zizai—the goddess whose raft of salvation will carry you to safety. As such, she has her place within the great semi-imperial Daoist temple and headquarters of the China Daoist Association, and also appears at major pilgrimage centers such as Mao Shan near Nanjing, one of Daoism's most sacred mountains. In one of his roles, the Emperor could appoint people to heavenly positions, and he was simply confirming what was already happening amongst the population at large. The male Buddhist bodhisattva had become a Chinese folk religion/Daoist goddess…

Even her name—Kuan Shi Yin—has a dramatic story. She is normally only known as Kuan Yin. This is because in the mid-seventh century, it became a capital offence to utter the word “shi.” This was because it formed part of the original name of the founder of the Tang dynasty, Li Shi Ning. Eager to forget his poverty-stricken and working-class origins, mention of his original name was banned on penalty of death. Thus any name containing the name “shi,” especially in the same position as in the Emperor's former name, was dangerous beyond belief. The old habit has never died, even though the tyrannical Emperor is long dead and his dynasty, history. Thus she is rarely spoken of as Kuan Shi Yin but instead as Kuan Yin. It is as Kuan Yin that she is known outside China.

Her fame and compassion spread with Buddhism to both Korea and Japan. In those two countries she is known as Kannon or Kwannon and is revered. However, while she is very popular in both Japan and Korea, it is in China that she has really risen to be the most popular of all deities. Linked to this popularity are the prophetic utterances associated with her. One of the most common of Chinese religious practices is divination. The usual method for doing this is with fortune sticks. Wooden sticks, numbered usually up to 64 or 100, are placed in a wooden (usually bamboo) shaker and after mindfully thinking of the question or concern for which you seek guidance, you shake the shaker until one of the numbered sticks falls out. This number then takes you to a specific reading which is then interpreted as guidance or inspiration for answering your question.

In every Kuan Yin temple in China and beyond, you will find little books, printed by devout Buddhists as an act of charity, which contain the traditional divination poems of Kuan Yin. Divination in China is not about asking the deities for an answer but about asking for divine help in understanding the real choices before you…

In both the case of the prophetic utterances and the myths and legends it is important to stress how Kuan Yin is seen and understood. She can help you, but you have to work with her. This is crucial to understanding the compassion of Kuan Yin. She cannot dig you out of a hole from which you don't want to escape. Nor can she work miracles with you unless you are willing to work with the possibility of the miracle yourself. In Chinese divination, nothing tells you what to do. What divination does is offer you a third voice which can awaken within you the latent answers or response for which you have been searching. Likewise, in all the myths and legends of Kuan Yin, those who were helped, saved, or rescued have to have contributed something to this happening. Kuan Yin asks us to be dynamic partners with her with the Divine, in finding our own paths through the storms and squalls of life. It is this which I believe is the key to understanding why she moved beyond any one faith system to become the goddess that she is.

Her rise within and then beyond Buddhism is perhaps most tellingly illustrated by the layout of a classical Kuan Yin temple. One of the oldest and least disturbed by wars, revolutions, and dynastic changes is the Kuan Yin temple in Macau. For a supposed Buddhist deity, she occupies an unusual place within the theological layout of the temple. On entering the temple, the first deity you encounter is the historical Buddha, Prince Gautama Siddhartha, also known as Sakyamuni. From him you pass to the next temple hall where you encounter the Buddha of the Past, the Present (this is again the historical Buddha), and the Buddha of the Future. Only then do you pass beyond to the final great hall and here encounter Kuan Yin herself. The theological feng shui of the temple tells you that while Buddhism is good and useful, it is but a doorway to the greater worthiness and significance of Kuan Yin herself. This captures very precisely the way in which Kuan Yin is related to Buddhism in most ordinary people's minds. And this is why she has now begun to attract such interest in the West. Precisely because she cannot be pinned down to any one tradition, but instead, floats above them all, embodying not a specific faith but the principle of the Divine Feminine itself…

When we first wrote this book in the mid 1990s, we put forward tentative suggestions that the transformation of the male Kuan Yin into the goddess of Compassion Kuan Yin may have been in part as a result of interaction with the most famous female deity—or saint—the Virgin Mary. While others had suggested this in the past, we were prepared to explore the psychological and iconographic reasons why this might be the case. We looked at how the figure of the Virgin Mary was itself taken from Egyptian statues of the goddess Isis and her baby son Horus…We noted that when the Portuguese first arrived in China in the 1530s, they believed that the statues they saw of Kuan Yin were of the Virgin Mary.

Both deities share many of the same attributes—a baby, a vase, a willow branch, a rosary, and so forth. In 1997, as a farewell gesture to China, the Portuguese, who were to leave their centuries-old colony of Macau on the coast of China in 1999, decided to bequeath a statue to the city. They chose a Portuguese artist by the name of Cristina Leiria who decided after reading our book to create a twenty-meter high statue of Kuan Yin/Virgin Mary as a symbol of the fusion of East and West that is Macau at its best. This beautiful statue sits on her own little island and appears to be floating across the water to the mainland. At the base of the statue is an interfaith center, a touching symbol itself of the religious pluralism that is Kuan Yin—goddess, virgin, and bodhisattva.

We knew that Christianity formally arrived in China in 635 AD and that according to both Chinese official records and the records of the Church itself from that period, the monks who arrived brought icons and statues with them. Without doubt this would have included Mary, the mother of Jesus, the God-bearer, to give her but a few of her titles. A central part of Christian traditional worship is focused upon the compassion of Mary, the child bearer who understands the plight of ordinary people, especially women. We now know that this early Christianity spread throughout China and that it became an influential religious source of inspiration during the Tang dynasty. The arrival of and spread of Christianity, with the statues of the Virgin Mary, coincides with the beginning of the shift from the male Kuan Yin to the female and, in particular, the rise of specific iconographic representations of her holding a baby and often also seated within a cave.

Then in 1998, we made a startling discovery. Following a Japanese spy map of the early 1930s, we discovered the oldest surviving church site in China. Situated some forty miles southwest of the ancient capital Xi'an, are the remains of a church first built in 650 AD by imperial command. The most impressive physical remains are the seven-story pagoda if the church, built in 781 AD. The site is known as Da Qin, which is the Chinese term for Syria or the Roman Empire. As a result of our discoveries (covered in The Jesus Sutras), the Chinese authorities moved in to restore the pagoda and to open a small museum on the site. Six months later, I was invited back to help them identify a strange statue found on the first floor. This floor, thirty feet up, had been sealed after an earthquake in 1556 and virtually no-one had been in since.

What we found when we climbed in through the window has become one of the most famous and discussed statues in China. Molded in mud and wood is a twelve-foot-high grotto-style statue. This depicts a mountain, topped with the symbolic five sacred mountains of Daoism. Set into the heart of this is a cave and within the cave, the broken remains of a statue. The reason I was asked to come and help was that the statue was seated in a very distinctive way—unlike any Chinese statue of a deity. Clearly female from the clothes, it was immediately obvious that this was a depiction of the classic orthodox Christian icon of the Nativity. In the Orthodox version (and the Church which reached China in the seventh century derived from the same stock as the Orthodox), Mary gives birth to Jesus in a cave in a mountain, miles away from Bethlehem. The similarities between this early ninth-century statue and statues of Kuan Yin have led some to claim it is Kuan Yin.

However, the physical posture and the date preclude this. The date because no statue of Kuan Yin prior to the eleventh century depicts her in a cave, but from that period onwards, it becomes one of the most popular. The posture because although Kuan Yin does have a couple of seated positions, the one in the pagoda is not one of them, but it does introduce the idea of such a setting for a powerful and compassionate deity.

It is now possible to speculate that the representation of a female, child-holding goddess, seated in a cave—which becomes one of the most popular images of Kuan Yin from the twelfth century onwards—has its roots in the statues of the Virgin Mary. Prior to the discovery of the Da Qin statue, there was no iconographic evidence of how the Chinese Christians portrayed Mary. With the discovery of the Da Qin Nativity, we can begin to trace the artistic influences which flowed through Christianity and into the melting pot of tenth- to twelfth-century China to help produce this most religiously promiscuous of all deities. If this is the case, then Kuan Yin has her roots in three of the most influential religions of all time: Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity. It would also explain why she has become one of the most popular deities in the West. The fact of the matter is that there are very few examples of the Divine Feminine. And amongst those, only a few are considered deities of compassion—the Virgin Mary and Kuan Yin are just about it! As the quest for less patriarchal manifestations of the Divine grows in the light of feminism and other social forces which have challenged the hegemony of the male deities, Kuan Yin has arisen as a model of the generous, caring Divine. This interest in the Divine Feminine is also one of the reasons for the growth of the worship of Kuan Yin in ancient China.

The dearth of female deities and the total absence of any with compassion or child-giving powers until the emergence of Kuan Yin the goddess sometime in the tenth century AD, is a topic of considerable debate within scholarly writings. Was this a reaction to the masculinity of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism? Was it triggered by the growth of hard line Neo-Confucianism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? Was it linked to anti-establishment movements who fused feminism with revolution as in the White Lotus Buddhist-inspired revolts of the same period? Or was it simply yet profoundly the need for half the population of China to feel that there was a deity who understood their lot, understood the trials and tribulations of being a woman, expected to produce not just children but specifically a son and heir for the family?”

~ Martin Palmer, The Kuan Yin Chronicles: The Myths and Prophecies of the Chinese Goddess of Compassion