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English translation of the French language text “History of Pure Land Buddhism”

By Henri de Lubac, translated into English by Amita Bhaka

Chapter Five

Avalokitesvara

Meaning of Name

It is impossible to know Amitabha well without also knowing Avalokitesvara to a slight extent.

This personage, whose name we have already encountered several times, and is still called Lokesvara or, sometimes, Lakanatha, which means the Lord or Protector of the world, is the heavenly Bodhisattva who corresponds to our Buddha. He is one of his two attendants. His link with him is symbolised by the little portrait of Amitabha often to be seen on his coil of hair or on the tiara which he wears as a head-dress. In truth, he is scarcely distinct from him. Sometimes he appears subordinate to him, as a kind of “first minister” or as a kind of “catechist”¹, - as a captain to his King, Nagarjuna would say, for “the Buddha is the King of the Law (dharmaraja), while the Bodhisattvas are only the captains” ² - or again, as the Sukhavatinvyuha expresses it, as a “spiritual son”³. Sometimes he is mystically identified with him, as his visible form, his emanation or manifestation, his “word”, we could almost say. Amitabha, says the legend, produced him one day when he was in ecstasy, by projecting into the world a shining beam from his right eye; this beam, taken into the heart of a lotus flower which was emerging from a lake of pure waters, blossomed into the appearance of the Bodhisattva.

Nevertheless, this is only a second state for Avalokitesvara. Not only in his extra-Buddhist origins, but also in the faith and cult of the Mahayana, he existed prior to the harmonising synthesis which caused him to enter in this way into the system of the five dhyani-Bodhisattvas. It was only belatedly that the Amitabha of his head-dress became his distinctive sign.⁴ Texts and representations decorated with figures show him associated quite as much with Dipamkara, for example or Sakyamuni, or even Maitreya. ⁵ But we have to envisage him above all in his relation with Amidism.

In the Karanadavyuha, “basket of qualities” or “casket of merits” of Avalokitesvara ⁶ a text compiled between the sixth and tenth Centuries, a recension of which we have in prose, and another, more recent, in verse, Emperor Asoka asks why this Bodhisattva bears such a name. Upagupta replies to him that it is because he regards compassionately beings suffering from the evils of existence: his name would be made up of isvara, “Lord”, and avalokita, “who has looked below”. ⁷ This etymological explanation is put by the Lotus of the True Law into Sakyamuni’s mouth.⁸ However, for the Tibetans, the signification of the name would be rather “the Lord with wide open eyes”, almost “staring”, that is, the Lord “whose gaze embraces the whole world”⁹; an idea which they sometimes translate by depicting eyes on the palm of his hands. Albert Grünwedel understood, in the passive: he “who is beheld”, with allusion to Amitabha’s gaze which descends on him. ¹⁰ According to H. Zimmer “Avalokita” should be translated by “perfect illumination”.

His Iconography

In the learned monography which she has recently devoted to our Bodhisattva, Mlle. Marie-Thérèse de Mallman reviews a number of other interpretations, in order to chose one which is close to that of Zimmer: “the shining, sparkling Lord”, or, in a freer translation, “the Master of the light”, an appellation which accords wonderfully, she observes with an “essentially luminous”¹¹ personage. M. Paul Mus had in the first place put forward a different opinion, which recalled in its explicit statement that of Grünwedel. He based (founded) his reliance (confidence) on the little Amitabha of the head-dress, represented in small (miniature) as seated at the base of heaven, as well as on the astrological signification of the name of Avalokita, “a technical term signifying ruled (by a star), born or placed under (a planet).”¹² It is therefore a question, he thought, of the Lord (isvara) whom, like a distant planet, the Buddha of the Pure Land directs. Since then, struck by the alternation of the two roots Lok and Ruc, M. Paul Mus has proposed to retain simultaneously the two principal significations put forward: according to him, the mystic messenger of Amitabha “is undoubtedly the Lord who gazes (Lok), - but he is also and perhaps still more the Lord who shines (Ruc) -, the Master of the light”.¹³ In fact, says an inscription¹⁴, “Shining is Lokesvara, who has placed on his head the Jina Infinite-Light, as if he had seen that the sun and the moon are only a finite light!” However, M. Giuseppe Tucci contests all primitive allusion to some shining or luminous element, in order to retain only the notion of the gaze cast down on the sufferings of the world: this would be the glance which future Buddhas cast down here below, at the moment of descending hence, from the height of the Tusita Heaven. Avalokitesvara would be then the hypostasis of the compassionate gaze of the Buddha.¹⁵

Be it as it may with these scientific etymologies, the traditional etymology, rejoined by M. Tucci, happily translates what is recognised everywhere in the Great Vehicle as the principal characteristic of the helpful Bodhisattva, “whose eyes are moist with compassion”. The classical texts are here in agreement with the popular sentiment.

The images of Avalokitesvara are innumerable and very varied. They often show him with several heads (three or eleven) and several arms (four, six, eight, twelve, forty, or “a thousand”, arranged all around his body in an aureole, or in a peacock’s fan, with an eye on his open palms). He is either standing or sitting, sometimes in the posture called “royal relaxation” (maharajalila), that is, the left leg folded back and the right stretched out or hanging. ¹⁶ Two arms are generally crossed on his chest; the others bear various attributes: a rosary (aksamala), a wheel (cakra), lotus flowers (padma), a book (pustaka), a flask of ambrosia (kalasa) or a vessel. . . This vessel is a holy-water basin; the wretches fallen into the fiery hells are refreshed by the water which he pours from it, or by the nectar which flows from his fingers. In a fresco from Tuan-huan, at present in the Guimet Museum, there can be seen falling from the vessel a few drops, which are greedily collected by a preta. ¹⁷ According to the Karandavyuha, Avalokitesvara had hardly entered the great hell Avici, than the burning heat was changed into a delicious coolness, and in place of the great cauldron in which the damned are cooked like vegetables, appeared a charming pool covered with lotuses. Often, like Amitabha himself, he appears flanked by two genies carrying thunderbolts, the Vajrapanis, who are the executors of his beneficent power. Often also, he is seen on a boat, in the midst of waves, with a certain number of passengers, while, in the upper part of the picture, Amitabha smiles in the light; he is the good pilot, who leads souls, on “the boat of mercy”, across the ocean of suffering and death, so as to land them on the shore of the Western paradise. ¹⁸ We shall see some other images of him further on.

His Tibetan Aura

Avalokitesvara is renowned in the entire area of the Mahayana. He is further called Padmapani, the Lord of the Lotus, he “who holds a lotus in his hand”. The Tibetans call him Chen-re-si (Tchenrézig). In Tibet and Mongolia, it is to him that, at least in a first sense, the famous formula is addressed: “Om Mani Padma Hum”, a formula which has so much intrigued, for several centuries, European travellers. It can be approximately translated: “Hail to thee, Jewel of the Lotus! Amen!” or: “The Jewel of the Lotus! Hm!” ¹⁹ It is held to be one of the most precious gifts made by the Bodhisattva to the suffering world. Through the six syllables which make it up, it acts magically in the six directions of the universe. Everywhere lamaism reigns it is met with, inscribed on doors, walls, columns, posts, rock faces, and the streamers hung at the entrances of dwellings. It is printed thousands of times on the paper rolls of the “prayer mills”. ²⁰ It is this formula whose characters were said to be shown well-formed on each of the leaves of the sacred tree which was planted at the time of the birth of the great Tibetan reformer Tson-kha-pa (1357), and which is claimed to be still preserved in the monastery of Koum-Boum. ²¹

The Tibetans deliberately give Chen-re-si eleven heads, of various sizes and colours, oddly arranged in a pyramid. According to their explanations, the Bodhisattva one day despaired of aiding a world so attached to its wretchedness, and his head burst into a thousand fragments: then Amitabha gathering up the pieces, formed from them ten new heads, which he crowned with his own head. Nine of these heads have calming features; the tenth is “saivite and threatening, decorated with a frontal eye”. The highest represents Amitabha in fact. ²² We are acquainted with one hundred and eight different forms of Chen-re-si, corresponding to the hundred and eight beads of the Buddhist rosary; but this list is not exhaustive, and the author of the Precious Garland of the Law of the Birds, a popular poem of uncertain date, metamorphoses him into a great Cuckoo, king of birds. ²³ It is he who is supposed reincarnated²⁴ in Tson-kha-pa. It is he again - and not a Buddha, as many Westerners imagine - who is revered in the Dalai-lama, head at once spiritual and temporal, while in the person of the Panchen-lama, a purely spiritual head, Amitabha is revered. It is told that in 1573 there was seen to appear in the Mongol court a great lama provided with four arms, who could be only Chen-re-si. ²⁵ These kinds of belief sink their roots into the Indian conceptions already assumed by ancient Buddhism, which did not hesitate to assimilate in some fashion the faithful kings of the Buddha revered by them. ²⁶ The very name of Po-ta-la, given to the royal palace of Lhasa in the seventeenth Century when the Dalai-lama, assuming the double power, came to install himself there (1640), evokes the holy mountain, localised by Buddhist tradition in the southern Dekkan, where the former existence of the Bodhisattva unfolded, and this same name is found in various sites of the Far East which are consecrated to him as places of pilgrimage. ²⁷

His Siva Form and Sakti, Tara

It was India which had given Chen-re-si to Tibet. In the very first years of the fifth Century, the Chinese pilgrim Fa-hien recorded the splendour of the cult rendered to Avalokitesvara in Mathura, the holy town. But it seems that it was still, at this epoch, only a cult quite locally circumscribed. In the time of Hoei-seng (518), it had spread further. About 620, Hiuan-tsang found it everywhere established, especially in the Magadha. ²⁸ The Indian types of Avalokitesvara are numerous. Schematically, we can distinguish two, one which approximates him to the God Brahma, and the other to the God Siva. They intermingle, as in them Buddhism is mingled with Hinduism. There is what Prince Oukhtomsky, always admiring, named a cult “wonderfully intertwined”. ²⁹ In his saivite form, Avalokitesvara is endowed, as we have said, with a frontal eye; he has a blue neck; he wears in his hair a lunar crescent and above his head-dress, instead of a plume, a skull; in his more or less numerous hands he holds a serpent, a trident, a bow and arrows. In him is manifested the double character, at once benign and terrible, of the divinity. Soon there was derived from him his Sakti, that is, his “energy”, his feminine double, who became a veritable Buddhist Goddess: she is Tara, “the Saviour”, already mentioned by Hiuan-tsang. She sits at his right, and adopts in turn the five sacred colours. For simple souls, this Buddhist couple differed scarcely, or not at all, from the divine couple of saivite Hinduism, Siva and Uma his wife. In the Mahayanist literature, the interpretation is more complex: Tara can be associated with various Bodhisattvas; sometimes, she is magnified to the point of becoming the supreme Wisdom, Prajna-Paramita; sometimes she is the mother-Goddess from whom all the Buddhas proceed, which comes to almost the same, but in a more accentuated mythological form. Her cult has extended beyond India, accompanying everywhere that of her senior partner. ³⁰

Like Amitabha himself, a little like every Buddha, and more, Avalokitesvara also reminds one of the Mahapurusha, the “Great Man” of the old Brahman mythology. “From between his shoulders, says the Karandavyuha, emerged Brahma, from his two eyes the Sun and Moon, from his mouth Air, from his teeth Sarasvati, from his belly Varuna, from his knees Laksmi, from his feet Earth, from his navel Water, from the roots of his hair Indra and the Devatas . . . In each of the pores of his skin rise mountains and stretch forests where thousands of beings are living: in one, thousands of devas; in another, thousands of Heavenly choristers; in another, thousands of rishis . . .” According to the Amitayur-dhyana-sutra, the halo around his head contains five hundred Buddhas, each attended by five hundred Bodhisattvas, and each of these is surrounded by an immense number of Gods. In his form as Sumhavuada-Lokesvara, “he irradiates the five Tathagatas”. A Nepalese bronze renders this system of emanations palpable; pliant stems extend from five different parts of Avalokita’s body as from a trunk, and each opens out as a lotus flower supporting a seated figure. Certain Khmer statues, analogous to certain Buddhas of Central Asia, show the Bodhisattva covered with a crowd of little figures who seem to clothe him in a coat of mail, each link of which is a personage; there are some as far as the toes, like stones set in rings. They are the statues called “irradiating Bodhisattvas”. ³¹

As can be seen from these last examples, Avalokita was also known in Indo-China. His cult prospered there for a long time. At the time that the Khmers make their appearance in history, in the third Century, they are seen honouring him, along with Siva and Vishnu. In Champa, he entered a special mythological system, different from the system of the five Buddhas and the five Bodhisattvas. In Cambodia, there are images of him prior to the ninth Century. In 875, a monastery was dedicated to him at Dong-duong by Indravarman II. He became the patron of the hospitals founded in 1186 by Jayavarman VII, and on a stelae engraved by the monarch in this same year, he is celebrated as “him from whom the desired fruits of the three worlds derive their one only origin, him whose fingers like twigs adorn his arms like branches, and whose Brahmanic cord of gold like a creeper surrounds his body: victorious Lokesvara, living incarnation of the Tree of Paradise”. In Angkor, it was he whom people invoked while taking the curative waters. Doubtless it is he again, as M.M. Louis Finot and Alfred Foucher have explained, who is represented by “the gigantic and pensive faces which decorate the towers of the Bayon like those (towers) of the gates of the town” in Angkor-Tham; in any case, the Bayon was dedicated to him before being appropriate to saivism. ³²

In China, where we shall soon find him again, Dharmaraksa had preached him fervently in Lo-yang, between 266 and 317, and later Bodhiruci transmitted devotion to him, at the same time as to Amitabha, to his disciple T’an-luan.

Envisaged in his better aspect, which prevails altogether in Amidism, Avalokitesvara is so to speak the model Bodhisattva, as the Mahayana has conceived such. While his companion Mahasthama represents above all wisdom (prajna), he is pre-eminently the being endowed with compassion (karuna). At the end of a long series of outstandingly virtuous existences, “as he was about to enter the supreme repose of Nirvana, a powerful clamour, like the sound of universal thunder, arose in all the worlds. The great being recognised that it was a cry of lamentation uttered by all creatures - rocks and stones just as much as trees, insects, Gods, animals, demons and human beings from every zone of the universe - at the prospect of his imminent departure outside the kingdoms of becoming. It was then that he renounced Nirvana for himself until all beings without exception were ready to enter it before him - like the divine shepherd who lets his flock first of all pass the gate, then passes it himself, afterwards shutting it again behind him”. ³³

In this wholly heavenly personage, who is ever born, an infinite number of times, only in the heart of a lotus, the Buddhism of the Great Vehicle has projected its dream - nearly the same dream that St. Bernard showed one day realised on earth “in all the Churches by those who perfume them by spreading the fragrance of compassion in them”; this same dream again which, in the sixteenth Century, the inhabitants of Kyoto were able to believe once more come to pass before their eyes, in the small monastery of the Jesuits, for - an adversary bears witness to it - “they treated these as veritable Bodhisattvas, appeared in this world to succour and save it”.³⁴

In this spiritual son of Amitabha, as in the humble but real imitators of Christ, we see indeed a being wholly “pervaded by the dew of compassion, in a heart overflowing with pity, who does not cease becoming all things to all men”. Moreover, in conformity, with the laws of the dream and the propensity of all the Buddhist literature, he is thus in a tremendous, immeasurable way: he is “the ocean of compassion”. ³⁵ The twenty-fourth chapter of the Lotus of the True Law is completely devoted to singing the praises of “Him whose face looks to every side” or “Him who faces all” (samantamukha). It is lengthy enumeration of his helpful merits, followed by a long litany, in which his name recurs in each paragraph, in each verse. As Burnouf foreshadowed, and Kern has demonstrated, this chapter, entitled “the perfectly happy narrative”, does not belong to the primitive composition of the Lotus. It appears in it as an annexe. It is an interpolation which doubtless dates from the epoch when the cult of Avalokitesvara, after quite a long rivalry, supplanted that of Manjusri. ³⁶

Right at the beginning of the work, in fact, Manjusri is named first among the Bodhisattvas who surround Sakyamuni, and it is he again, a bit further on, who is charged to instruct the assembly on the radiating of the Buddha. Moreover, our chapter always kept its individuality. Perhaps it had had in the first place an independent existence. It was often printed separately, under the name of “Sutra of Avalokitesvara” (Japanese: Kwannon-gyo). Devotees of the great Bodhisattva like to re-read it, certain among them make a daily recitation of it. ³⁷ These few verses will give an idea of it:

“If man were cast headlong into a pit full of fire by a wicked being,

he would have only to remember Avalokita, and the fire would be

quenched as if doused with water.

“If a man happened to fall in the formidable ocean, abode of Nagas,

sea monsters and Asuras, let him remember Avalokita, who is the

King of inhabitants of the sea, and he would never sink in the water.

“If a man were cast headlong from the top of Meru by a wicked being,

let him remember Avalokita who is like the sun, and he would be

upheld, without falling, in the middle of the sky.

“If he is surrounded by a band of enemies armed with their swords,

he has only to remember Avalokita, for his enemies to conceive in an

instant thoughts of goodwill for him.

“If he is chained by iron or wooden links, he has only to remember

Avalokita, for his chains to fall off at once.

“If he is surrounded by ferocious beasts, let him remember Avalokita,

and these beasts will be at once scattered in the ten points of space.

“If a heavy rain happens to fall from clouds furrowed by thunder and

lightening, one has only to remember Avalokita, and the storm will be

stilled in a moment . . .

“Avalokita sees all beings enclosed in the universes situated in the

ten points of space . . .” ³⁸

The most earnest men have believed in this protection and have entrusted themselves to this protector in the time of peril. Some of them have insisted on recording it in their memoirs. When Fa-hien returned from his pilgrimage to the holy places of India, finding himself caught in a storm, he invoked the aid of Avalokitesvara, who saved him from shipwreck, him and his precious cargo of sacred books. When Hiuan-tsang, making in his turn, but by land, the same pilgrimage, found himself assailed by all kinds of demon forms while crossing the Gobi desert, he at last repulsed them by calling Avalokita to his aid and reciting the “Sutra of the Heart of the Perfect Wisdom” which he had formerly learnt. ³⁹

In the litany which follows the panegyric, we find again the same characteristic of fervent devotion and loving admiration as in the hymns to Amitabha, a specimen of which was seen in the preceding chapter. The Christian reader perceives in it too an accent which, notwithstanding the difference in spiritual climate, recalls to him in some degree the tone of a St. Bernard extolling the Virgin Mary:

“O thou whose eyes are beautiful, full of kindness, full of compassion

love and purity, thou whose face is so lovable!

“O thou who art spotless, thou who spreadest about the splendour of

a sun of knowledge freed from all darkness, thou whose light is

obstructed by no cloud, thou dost shine full of majesty above the

worlds.

“Like a great cloud of mercy, thou quenchest the fire of unhappiness

which devours beings by causing the rain of the ambrosia of the Law

to fall on them . . .

“Remember, remember Avalokita, this pure Being! In the time of

misery, at the time of death, he is the protector, refuge, haven.

“Attained to the perfection of every virtue, expressing by his glances

his love for all beings, this great Ocean of virtues is worthy of all

homage.” ⁴⁰

Through the thousand forms of corporeal mercy which it exalts in its hero, the Sutra of Avalokita gives a glimpse of his spiritual mercy. Indulgent, as ever, to the spontaneous desires and terrors of the carnal being, Buddhism forgets no more here than elsewhere that it is only a single evil, that of the passions. This is expressed more clearly by an Indian poem of the ninth century, the Lokesvarasataka (“A Hundred Verses in honour of the Lord of the World”). The elephants, it says, which Lokesvara causes to quake, are the vices whose uneasy and fugitive glance dare not settle on him. In contemplating his face, meritorious beings complete their ripening, but those who continue to open themselves to the excitation of covetous desire find their ruin. The flawless lotus which rests in his hand, “like a parasol, revives creatures with faces shrivelled by the scorching sun of the passions”: “Let this lotus rise unsullied, above all the worlds, like a marvellous awning!”

In this poem, due to Vajradatta, it is the ideal of beauty, even more than the ideal of compassionate kindness, which shows through: “O noble face, which we never tire of contemplating! . . . Your face is the ocean of grace, in which fades the pride of all beauty in this world!” Moreover, hyperbole attains in it a degree to which the interpolator of the Lotus did not rise. The Buddhas themselves are seen benefiting from the helpful influence of the Bodhisattva:

The ocean of rebirths trembles, dreading to be drained,

The caravans of the passions disappear,

The Bodhisattvas rest, and even the Buddhas, who enjoy enviable

Nirvana, are lighted up

When, rolling up the skirts of your garment, you spread in every part

your efforts in order to work for the salvation of all creatures!

This same Lokesvarasataka allows us also to grasp, curiously redoubled, the process of personification which begets new beings beginning with an attribute more robustly considered. We saw above how Avalokita owed his existence to this process; our poem recalls it to us: “O universal Lamp! Having transferred his burden to you, the Buddha was relieved; for heavy was his compassion.” But it does not stop there. As Avalokita was Amitabha’s compassion, Avalokita’s compassion is now hypostasized again in Tara. The attribute, become substantive, receives anew the attribute, which blossoms in its turn into a new substantive, and there is no reason for this engendering of hypostases to come to a stop:

“. . . O you who hold the lotus! The knitting of your brows, under the

sway of anger, fissures your formidable forehead with a broad groove,

from which the goddess comes forth . . .

“O Tara! you are the incarnation of this marvellous power of saving

all humanity, acquired after numerous kalpas.

“You who, in order to cut away the miseries of the world, manifest

yourself as if you were the incomparable compassion itself of him

who holds the lotus.” ⁴¹

But no more than Tara is fully detached from Avalokita, is the latter really detached from Amitabha. Yes indeed, it is in all sincerity that his power is sung. It is enough, the twenty-fourth chapter of the Lotus says again, for his name to be pronounced for the various kinds of evil-doing genies at once “to lose the faculty of seeing clearly in their schemes”; he heals sicknesses, he thrusts fate aside, he leads towards liberation; but he does not do all this by himself, and his name is powerful only because he invokes another by it. In every situation, against every adversary, he deserves that people evince a reckless reliance on him; but this reliance does not cause his still modest condition of Bodhisattva to be forgotten. It can well be said with regard to him: “The mass of merits to be gathered by sons of good family who honour a number of Buddhas equal to the number of grains of sand of sixty-two Ganges, and the mass of merits gathered by him who honours, be it only once, the Bodhisattva Mahasattva Avalokitesvara, are equal, the one not being superior to the other.” ⁴² Again he is well able to be given an escort of numerous divinities, the ephemeral and as it were evanescent character of whom, in relation to him, is exactly set forth. ⁴³ However, he is not put in place either of Amitabha or, despite the appearance of it he can make, as we are going to see, of any other Buddha. The heaped measure of eulogy addressed to him marks at the same time the acme of his dependence: “Protector of the world! It is not only your head, it is your whole perfect body which bears the talisman of Amitabha!” Poetic enthusiasm is sometimes well able to obscure doctrinal precision, it does not abolish it, or even blur the outlines of it:

“In time to come, Avalokita will be a Buddha; then he will annihilate

all suffering. I too bow before him.

“Standing at the side of the Guide of men Amitabha, he refreshes

him with his fan; being conveyed, by meditation which is like a

magical appearance, into all the Buddha-Lands, he adores these

Jinas.” ⁴⁴

The Chinese name of Avalokitesvara is Kuan-cheu-yin, “He (or she) who perceives the tones of the world”, or more simply, Kuan-yin, “who perceives the tones”. “O piercing gaze, pure gaze, compassionate gaze! O ceaselessly attentive solicitude! O light without admixture of impurity! O sun of wisdom which penetrates all shadows, whose ray subdues all evils! . . . Mercy which illumines like lightening, love which covers all beings like a protecting cloud, soft dew, kind rain! Thou who dost quench hatred and discord, disputes and litigations, thou who givest peace even in battle! O Kuan-cheu-yin!” ⁴⁵

Most often, Kuan-yin is represented with feminine characteristics. This apparent change of sex could have been favoured by his fusion with a Taoist divinity; perhaps even, more anciently, by the recollection of the “mother of the World: revered in ancient India and depicted with a lotus in her hand; ⁴⁶ by still other assimilations. According to the Chinese tradition, one of the first inaugurators of this iconographical revolution was the famous painter Ou Tao-tse (Tao-hiuen), who lived in the eighth Century (711 - 756). In fact, it seems necessary to go back much further.⁴⁷ The case of Kuan-yin is moreover not unique. ⁴⁸ However, at least in theory, female sex is never really attributed to him. All that is recognised in him, as with every “P’ou-sa” (Bodhisattva) - but more than in the others, if possible, for he is among all “renowned for his subtlety”,⁴⁹

is the supernatural or magical (siddhi) power “of assuming at will the external (outward) form deemed appropriate” for his mission. Certain texts speak of his thirty-two or thirty-three forms; others, of his “infinite forms”. For “his happiness is to work for the liberation of all beings; he puts on for that end the most diverse appearances, showing himself according to the occasion as Buddha, P’ou-sa, Brahma, Indra, Vaisramana, Vajrapani, King, Brahmin, Monk, ordinary man, woman, nun, child”. ⁵⁰ The Lotus, which gave a list of his principal transformations, did not mention the female form. ⁵¹ However, it is quite natural that he is presented “as a woman in the worship of women”, above all when these ask him for fecundity. A man is not asked for that, say Chinese women. No text, no prayer is addressed to Kuan-cheu-yin as if to a woman. In the Temples, his image is masculine or feminine, according to the public for which the Temple is specially intended; but, when the image is feminine, as an indication that the form is imaginary, the bosom is never feminine. In the principal Temples, there are no images, but an empty seat, surrounded by flowers and lights, Amitabha or Avalokitesvara being invisible.” ⁵² Moreover, a type of Kuan-yin with pronounced moustaches continued even under the Ming dynasty. While studying “European influences on Chinese art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, M. Paul Pelliot has even pointed out a curious painting, in which Kuan-yin is seen in the figure of a European warrior of the age of Louis XIII, with a wig and a baton. ⁵³

One author has spoken in this regard of Avalokitesvara as of a “hermaphrodite” figure. ⁵⁴ The term is utterly incorrect. It would be better to say, with J.J.M. de Groot, although the assertion is perhaps excessive, that, become Kuan-yin, he is “the great personification of the religious equality of the sexes”. ⁵⁵ In fact, Kuan-yin has nothing of a sexual divinity. To speak of his feminine characteristics is even no doubt to say too much. At least in the numerous images of him, the gracious smile on his face is solely that of compassion and goodwill. There is however something feminine at the same time as pure in his “beautiful eyes”, full of wisdom and pity, which some fervent texts praise. ⁵⁶

These facts have no precise parallel in Christian iconography. Only a Gnostic tradition has spoken for a while of a “multiform Jesus”. ⁵⁷ When Photius wrote: “Christ’s face is different among the Romans, Hellenes, Indians, Ethiopians, for each of these peoples assert that the Lord appeared to it with the appearance peculiar to it”, all he did was to record a quite commonplace established fact, which has continued to be verified down to our own times. In a passage of the De Trinitate, St. Augustine says even less, fundamentally, he even says quite the contrary to our Buddhists and, whatever people may have been able to claim, his remark does not admit of any mystery.⁵⁸ It is rather in regard to the angels that we meet with an idea recalling approximately the Buddhist idea. The Latin theologians of the Middle Ages well knew that angels have no sex; moreover they had like the devotees of the Pure Land, a certain disdain for the weaker sex; also, more rigorous than these in the logic of their preferences, they generally refused to believe that a good angel could ever be able to show himself in female form. They reserved this melancholy privilege for bad spirits. ⁵⁹ We can still see in Suarez a detailed exposition of the changes of form to which demons are accustomed. ⁶⁰

Despite the rite of the empty seat in use in a number of Amidist Temples, a rite which recalls to mind the reserved of the first Buddhist centuries relative to Sakyamuni - and which was found again, as is known, in the Manichean liturgy, - the images of Kuan-yin are spread in profusion. Wu Tsa-tseu, the great painter of the eight Century, scarcely subsequent to Tao-hiuen, who has contributed a great deal to sinicizing Buddhist art, made him one of his favourite subjects. He created two types of him. His works themselves have perished, but they have inspired a host of others. In the images of the first type, Kuan-yin is standing, above, waves; “the wind agitates his long mantle whose folds take on the same movement as the waves”. This type is reproduced on several stelae of Si-ngan-fou, Sseutch’uan and Yunnan, as well as in a renowned picture by Lui-chao chan. The images of the second type show a Kuan-yin seated on a rock, at the seaside, and surrounded by people praying; the most famous and beautiful of them is a great painting of the Daitokuji in Kyoto.⁶¹ They will be called the Chuei-yue Kuan-yin, i.e. “Kuan-yin sitting by the water in moonlight”, or “Kuan-yin of the moon reflected in water”, or perhaps “Kuan-yin reflected in the water like the moon”; in Japan, they will be the “Nyo-i-rin-Kwannon”.

Some more popular images illustrate in a hundred ways the protecting and helping role of the great Bodhisattva. Here is, for example, a modern album, published for his glory. In it are to be recognised various situations evoked by the twenty-fourth chapter of the Lotus or in the Lokesvarasataka, as they are recognised in the Indian sculptures of Ajanta, Ellora, Aurangabad and Kanheri. By their genre, these artless colour plates recall our images of Épinal. In a first image, Kuan-yin stretches out one of his arms, from Heaven above, down to the head of a poor castaway, fallen from the top of a rock into a deep lake, and who adores him, kneeling on a miraculous lotus. Then there is another castaway, close to being seized by horrible sea monsters, who is saved thanks to a long ribbon hanging down to him from the Bodhisattva’s right hand. Or else, there is a great hand which rises from the bottom of a whirlpool and gathers up on its palm a man in distress, while, always in the clear sky, Kuan-yin smiles. A series of vignettes shows wretches confined in dungeons, or appearing before the judge, or put to torture, who find themselves liberated or relived in an analogous manner. Scenes of flood flow next: Kuan-yin protects the inhabitants of a house surrounded by the rising waters; or else, standing on a lotus, at the top of the mast of a junk, she assures a zone of security to the fearful passengers; elsewhere, furious dragons spit out the tempest, and on a shaky footbridge some travellers are about to perish, but she looks at them from the height of her serene Heaven, and this glance saves them. Now it is she who, standing in the clouds, brings success to warriors and impunity to supplicants. She turns away serpents, moreover, from the path of a man who is crossing dense thickets. Another such image shows her with three heads, and eight arms each holding one of her eight attributes. ⁶²

In the same album, one of the plates attracts the attention by a detail which is familiar to us. From Kuan-yin’s left hand dart rays which are about to envelop a man, attacked in the forest by a tiger. These rays are arranged like those of our “miraculous medallion”, or like those of several statues of saints, especially of the St. Rosalie who inspired Gérard de Nerval:

Neapolitan saint with hands full of fires . . . ⁶³

“The pencil of rays which darts from your hand”, sang Vajra-datta, “shines in the world like the sword which disperses terrified enemies. It glitters like a large sheet of water for the inhabitants of the infernal desert and, in spreading, it dissipates their burning pain.” ⁶⁴

A number of these images correspond to miracles which tradition held to be historical. We recalled above the storm from which Fa-hien escaped, on returning from his pilgrimage. But already in India itself he had twice benefited from supernatural protection. Attacked one day, near Sravasti, by a herd of furious elephants, he invokes Kuan-yin: at once a lion appeared which put the elephants to flight⁶⁵; and a bit further on, after crossing the Ganges, wild buffaloes attacked him: this time, it was a great vulture which came just at the right moment to disperse them. In the following century, in the Kingdom of the Northern T’sin, a certain rich man, Suen King-te, had made for him a statue of Kuan-yin, which he daily honoured with great devotion. Having been condemned to death for political reasons (about 562), on the night before the execution he saw in a dream a bonze who said to him: “Invoke Kuan-yin, and your life will be saved.” When he woke, he invoked the well-beloved P’ou-sa a thousand times. Men came then to take him to the place of execution. But the executioner, three times running, failed to cut off his head. Told about the marvel, the emperor pardoned the condemned man. On returning to his house, Suen King-te saw three deep cuts in Kuan-yin’s neck. From that time to our own, the prayer which he composed enjoyed great popularity among Chinese Buddhists. ⁶⁶ The story wonderfully illustrates a passage from the twenty-fourth chapter of Lotus: “If you happen to incur the anger of the King, if you are on the point of being executed, and if you have the desire to live out your life, invoke the power of Kuan-yin, and the sword will suddenly disintegrate.” ⁶⁷

The paintings discovered at Tuan-kuang by the Stein and Pelliot missions attest the preponderant importance acquired by the cult of Kuan-yin about the ninth and tenth centuries. At the beginning of the twelfth Century a renewal of intensity was given to it by a publication of the Monk Pu-ming: it is a matter of a story (history) of the Bodhisattva’s former lives, a romantic work, thoroughly Chinese, which has no parallel in Indian literature. ⁶⁸ The principal source from which this cult then radiated was the sanctuary of P’ou-t’o, in the Chou’chan (Chu-san, Cho-kiang) islands, whose foundation went back, according to legend, to the Japanese monk Egaku (Huei-ngo). Sent to China by the Empress Tachibana Kachi-ko, wife of the Emperor Saga, on a mission of religious information, Egsku procured there a statue of Kuan-yin, which he brought back with him after a long sojourn on the continent. This was in 858. Now, “as he was passing (on his way) to Sseu-ming, while going round P’ou-t’o island, his ship struck a rock and could not go forward. Then those in the boat, seized with fear, composed this prayer: If the Venerable statue does not judge the time opportune for going to the East, we beseech her to remain on this mountain, so that the boat may start again.” Egaku then made on the bank a hut of branches, put the statue in it, and remained with it, while the boat withdrew. He served her, by himself, for many years; then he founded a monastery. P’ou-t’o - we recognise in this name the abbreviation of the Sanskrit Potalaka, name of the mythical abode of Avalokitesvara ⁶⁹ - became a great centre of pilgrimage. Miracles multiplied there. In 1080, Wang Chuan-fong, sent on an embassy to Korea, passed in the offing of the island: “he saw his boat endangered by a turtle; he was very much afraid, and, turning towards the grotto, began praying. Suddenly, he perceived a golden-coloured gleam, and saw Kuan-yin appear, shining like the full moon, emerging from the grotto. The turtle dived, and the boat was able to go on its way.” Other monasteries were not long in setting up round about. The Sung, then the Ming, and the Yuan heaped their favours on them. ⁷⁰ Numerous works in verse and prose celebrated nan-hai Kuan-yin, the Kuan-yin of the South Sea. Her “complete life” is related in a huge novel, which, at least in its present form, is more dependent on popular religion than on Buddhism properly so-called. ⁷¹ It was in one of the monasteries of P’ou-t’o that there must have been trained, at the beginning of our Century, the famous T’ai-su, founder of the “Society of Buddha” and author of the manifesto for the reform of Buddhism (1918).

The pilgrimage of P’ou-t’o was frequented mainly by women. The Kuan-yin whom they came there to invoke was above all the Lady who gives children, Sung-tseu niang-niang. It was she whom they likewise invoked down to our days in many Chinese pagodas. In a number of them, there could be seen one or two little shoes, placed at the feet of the statue by women desiring to become mothers. ⁷²

In this popular role - a role already known to and approved by the Lotus of the True Law ⁷³ - Kuan-yin is the heir of non-Buddhist divinities. One of them, as we have said, is Taoist: she is the T’ien sien-sung, or the Pi-hia yuan-kiun, “Princess of the variegated clouds”, who has always remained in competition with her. ⁷⁴ It is nevertheless an exaggeration to say, like O-Kummel ⁷⁵, that “the sweet figure of mercy, Kuan-yin”, was at first “completely foreign to Buddhism” and only later became “the feminine equivalent of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara”, or, like René Guénon⁷⁶ , that she has always, in fact, remained Taoist. We need only acknowledge that for the people, in the common cult which outlived the degenerated great religions of the China of the last centuries, the Buddhist and the Taoist figures were practically “the same Goddess under different names”. ⁷⁷ Another origin of the popular Kuan-yin is certainly to be looked for in the Indian Goddess Hariti, who is still living today in the religious consciousness of the Nepalese. She was originally an ogress, a devourer of children, the ogress of the smallpox; she changed entirely the day she was converted, as a sutra relates, by Sakyamuni in person. ⁷⁸ She can still be recognised in Japan in the Koyasu-Kwannon, or Kwannon of easy childbirth.

Kuan-yin is sometimes depicted by herself, sometimes carrying a small child. In such a case, she is either standing or sitting on a seat or a lotus. In these various forms, the resemblance to our “madonnas” is often striking. The sixteenth Century missionaries were greatly intrigued by it, and discernment of the fact “recurs like a refrain in the mouth of Europeans” whose eyes have once fallen on these images. When discovery was made at the beginning of this century, in a ruined sanctuary in the neighbourhood of Turfan, of a fresco which depicted Kuan-yin seated, surrounded by eight little fellows and carrying a child at the breast, she was given at first sight, by virtue of this so appreciable parallel, the name of “Our Lady of Turfan”. ⁷⁹ That was, too obviously, the occurrence of an illusion. “If they drew some Egyptian mummy from her age-old sleep, they would not be any more reluctant to recognise in it a replica of Isis suckling Horus, while every modern Hindu would see in it the same sense of certainty Krishna in the arms of his mother Devaki or his nurse Yagoda.”⁸⁰

Moreover, have not Christians likewise thought to recognise the Virgin Mother in certain statues of Isis? Have not certain others made use in the same way of the statues of Demeter Kouro-trophos, universal nurse, protectress of small children, who carried a little God in the folds of her mantle? ⁸¹ Again, have not many spontaneously christianised the young mother at whom her new-born smiles, described by Virgil in his Eclogue to Pollion? These quite external associations, these cultic “reinvestments” prejudge in nothing (prejudice in no respect) resemblances or differences of another order. “The same images”, M. Alfred Foucher writes with regard to this, “do not always represent the same personages; they are still further from being invested with the same ideal. We must acknowledge from this point of view that there is nothing more down-to-earth or more mixed than the ideas incarnate in the “Buddhist Madonna”, the ancient man-eating ghoul who was the terror of fecund mothers before becoming the hope of barren women and the wife of the demon of gold”. ⁸²

Kwannon is as popular in Japan as Kuan-yin in China. All the sects there honour her. No Temple was perhaps more frequented than her famous sanctuary of Asakusa, beside the Sumida river, in Tokyo. ⁸³ Her images had very quickly conquered the entire archipelago. They have multiplied there unbelievably. The majority are feminine, but up to about the twelfth and even the thirteenth Centuries some have moustaches. ⁸⁴ It is wholly false to say that the Japanese Kwannon “has lost all his Chinese characteristics”. ⁸⁵ The thirty-three types known in China have all passed into the archipelago. There are Kwannons with a “thousand”, twenty, eight, six or simply two arms. ⁸⁶ There are some, as in Tibet, with three, nine or eleven heads, even with thirty-six heads: “the problem of representing such a symbolised figure without sacrificing natural grace seems insoluble, and yet more than one sculptor triumphed over the difficulty and produced images of great beauty.” ⁸⁷ There is the Kwannon with white garments (Biakuekwannon; Sanskrit: Pandaravanini), dear to well-read painters, whose robe goes back behind his head in the form of a hooded cloak and trails lightly behind, as though to indicate the movement of condescending approach, and whose attributes are the rosary and the branch of willow used in purifications. ⁸⁸ There is the child Kwannon, Kwannon of the white body, Kwannon of the Brahmin body, the horse-headed Kwannon; there is Kwannon in the robe of leaves, Kwannon in the pearl, Kwannon in the fish; there is Kwannon who changes dreams, the Kwannon appeared in the boiling waves. . . ⁸⁹ Certain types are later, such as Kwannon seated on a dragon’s skin. ⁹⁰ But whatever the specialised form, it is always Kwannon the holy, or the noble Kwannon, it is the succouring Kwannon.

Not satisfied with varying the types of her, the devotees of Kwannon reproduced the images of her in series. To the repetition of the nembutsu on the lips of Amida’s devotees, a repetition which does not do away with the essential unity of the invocation and interior act of trust, corresponds in a way the multiplicity of identical plastic figures, with arms themselves multiplied for a multiform and omnipresent succour one and the same. Only it is not Amida himself who is the object of such a draft of representations: it is his “word”, Kwannon. Although it imitates the “thousand Buddhas” of Central Asia and China⁹¹, and although the iconographical tradition of Avalokitesvara lent itself to it as we have just seen, the phenomenon, in its particularity (peculiarity), is Japanese. It dates at least from the very first years of the twelfth Century: in 1103, Ensei, pupil of Chosei (Himself pupil of Jocho), sculpted, on the order of Shirakawa ho-o, the hundred Kwannons of the Hojoji. ⁹² Soon other Temples were still better supplied. The Temple of Asakusa was one of them. In Acquaintance with the East, Paul Claudel will record the memory of the visit which he made to another of these strange sanctuaries, that of Shidzwoca:

“. . . to the right and left of me, along the entire length of the dim hangar, the three thousand gold Kwannons, each identical with the other in the set of arms which surrounds it, are lined up in tiers by rows of a hundred fifteen deep; a sunbeam brings this overflow of Gods to life. If I wish to know the reason for this uniformity in the multitude, or from what bulb burst forth all these identical stalks, I find that the worshipper here, without doubt, looks for more area in the reverberation of his prayer, and believes, with the object, to multiply the efficacity . . .” ⁹³

As they preceded the setting up of Amidism in separated sects, the Kwannons in series remained independent of these sects. They form an essential element in the religious art of Japan.

No more however in Japan than in China, did the innumerable images, so varied, of Kwannon always nourish solely the superstitious and “matter of fact” piety which M. Alfred Foucher recalled. Undoubtedly, the Koyasu-ko, confraternities of women desiring a fortunate maternity, developed in the invocation of Koyasu-Kwannon, who took quite simply the place and role of an old shintoist divinity, Koyasu-myojin. ⁹⁴ Nevertheless, much more than the vulgar Giver of children, many representations decorated with figures evoke the great, merciful Bodhisattva of the Lotus, even a wholly interior contemplative ideal, and in this case merit their appellation of “Kwannon of contemplation”. Such is, in China, the Kuan-yin due to the inspired brush of Mou-k’i (thirteenth Century), “a white apparition with a meditative expression, at once sweet and grave sitting at the foot of the mountains, beside the waters, in a misty atmosphere which blurs the peaks in the background; her mantle is indicated in long lines with soft modulations which suggest inner harmony and complete calm, like the perfectly smooth water which bathes the rock.” ⁹⁵ Such again is, in Japan, the Kwannon of the Kondo of Joryuji, “standing, in painted wood, holding a vase with a lotus, whose beautiful face, hieratic, calm and noble, with half-open eyes, fine proportions, superb folds which, in a single stream, hand down at the sides, invincibly bring to mind the wonderful figures of the romanesque portal of the cathedral of Chartres.” ⁹⁶

Must we go further and, beyond the aesthetic analogies, believe that some at least of these images conceived by Buddhist Asia could be endowed with something analogous to the “mysterious reflected image in which everyone acknowledges the presence of the Virgin?” ⁹⁷ Doubtless, that would be going too far. At all events, an object sometimes of “the purest and sweetest (cult) that pagan China may have known”⁹⁸, they are certainly the most vivid expressions of the Amidist doctrine of salvation by meditation from on high. How can it be in doubt, before the most spiritually beautiful of these figures? “The severity of Buddhism was relaxed. A vast tenderness began to float in the folds of Kuan-yin’s robe. Her eyes are no longer set in solitary contemplation; they are lowered upon the suffering of the world and placidly seek out all those who invoke her in their distress.” We are no longer astonished, in seeing these works of art, that towards the end of the sixteenth Century, when the first Jesuit missionaries of China established in Shinking their “Temple of the Flower of the Saints”, the people have thought themselves able to recognise in their image of the Virgin the very compassionate Kuan-yin. We even understand that later the Japanese Christians of Naga-saki and neighbouring regions, “during the 250 years of savage persecution, have been able to pray to the Holy Virgin before a status of Kwannon. ⁹⁹ The Japanese police saw only a Buddhist divinity there: the faithful, who invoked her, had transformed it into an image of the “Queen of mercy”.” ¹⁰⁰

In The Mahayana Code of China, pp. 157 and 162, J.J.M. De Groot cites a cantata of eight verses in honour of Kuan-yin, which, the translation of it is reliable, makes us think of our Salve Regina: “Hail, O Bodhisattva Kuan-yin, great, full of grace and mercy, in the paradise of sovereign happiness!” (Monastic morning Office in China).

end of Chapter Five

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