November 18, 2005

• Kuan Yin, how refreshing! Shes dietified at the buddhist temple near my home. I was formerly a buddhist (now back to my Catholic roots), on the right hand side of the five buddhas was a statue for her. Similar to Mother Mary of the Christian faith, she holds many faithfuls thoughts. Perhaps more interesting is One Possan (I'm sure I mispelled that) a Buddhasatva that went to hell and vowed not to leave untill all souls were freed.
• Kuanyin has many temples dedicated to her only throughout Asia. There are several large bronze statues of her in temples here in Singapore, and I go (pretty) regularly to pray. I think it's not an exaggeration to say that she is probably the pre-eminent deity for lay worshippers, because she is the one to pray to in times of need.
• The story of Avalokitesvara (Quan Yin, Kuan Yin).
• dietified at the buddhist temple near my home My wife dietified for a couple of months last year, and lost quite a bit of weight. However, she put it all back on this year, through a process I call "buddhisation". Now I rub her bald head for luck when I visit her lotus flower, you kinky little shit.
• Kuan Yin is my house goddess. I have two beautiful statues that have watched over me and every house I've lived in since I was 21.
• Nice article, I hadn't heard that version of her "human" story before. I also enjoyed the article on Shakti on that site, lots of interesting reading there. (Shakti kicks ass!)
• addendum: the Shakti article may be NSFW in sensitive offices.
• A thousand arms, eh? Think of the mittens!
• the foods good at the temple anyway (very healthy, I perfected my cooking atrs there, onne can cook a dish for two hundred people with using the same amount of oil one would use to cook a chicken brest), but the martial arts schools are blah. i'm sure I could put at least a few china men down without breaking a sweat. ( you know karate I know insane, try to hold me down I feel no pain) hey Alendra, sect of buddhism is it that you practice? Theres a few different temples here in Canada, the one near me is Fo guang Shan, from Tai wan. I have a Buddhist name also Wen Her/Man War. I used to volunteer there. It's actually quite nice even though it's kind of qwi loasized(I term I use for westernization of asian culture, based on the term Anglosisation)) but interesting none the less. Fo Guang Shan (the temple near me at least) has mostly nuns, which is nice for a change from priest run churchs. Also on weekends the whole community eats together, which is nice. I'm trying to introduce the concept to the native indians here as I believe it will improve their cultural dynamics. The quest for fire is far from over though.
• I don't really follow any sect. My grandmother, before she converted to Catholicism, was Pureland Buddhist for a while. I followed her in doing prayers and meditations. But other than the occasional trip to the Goddess of Mercy temple, I'm not really doing very much as a Buddhist.
• A Korean friend gave my mother a figurine of Kuan Yin sometime in the 1940s - all white , standing, dressed in graceful robes. It was quite beautiful, but disappeared long ago. One thing I always wondered about was that her left hand, which was at waist level, was detatachable. Does anyone know if that was a manufacturing issue, or is there some other reason?
• It's probably the willow branch, path. She uses it to draw sacred water from her vase and scatter it to bless and heal mortals.
• That's lovely. Thank you. (Did you get my email thanking you?)
• Avalokitesvara serves as the great bodhisatva-template for Mahayana/northern school Buddhism; a Tibetan equivalent is Chenrezig. As such, Avalokitesvara is bedrock under northern schools Buddhism. In China often called Kuan-Yin, in Japan Kannon, in Tibet Chenrezig. Avalokitesvara is perceived as the embodiment of compassion, or of the enlightened mind, a totally unbiased mind aspiring to the liberation of all sentient beings from suffering -- the scope of this aspitation is large and open-ended, since it means sentient beings in all worlds in all universes at all times past present and future etc. It's important not to equate compassion with pity; ideally, it arises spontaneously. Tara is a female meditational deity, an embodiment of the fully enlightened mind's enlightened activity. She's envisioned in a number of ways, and is often referred to as the mother of all the buddhas, she who liberates, she who saves etc. Familiarity with Tara as a meditational deity tends to be more characteristic of Tibet, while Avalokitesvara is more widely characterisitic of all northern school or Mahayana Buddhism.
• (I surely did, path! I'm so sorry, I must have forgotten to reply!)
• I seem to recall it's pretty widely accepted that much of the iconography of the female Guanyin was influenced by the statues of the Virgin Mary brought to south China by Portugese sailors. I do love these cultural cross-overs.
• Hey Path, everything has meaning even if it's isn't supposed to. The detachable hand eludes to the biblical law about stealing. Most likely because the mother is supposedto prevent the child from doing such things etcetera(would take too long to explain).
• That video might be the most psychedelic thing I've ever seen.
• It's odd to think of a deity changing sex like that. I suppose there must have been an interim period when this particular entity didn't get much attention, or at least its sex wasn't much to the fore. Am I right in thinking that something broadly similar happened with the third person of the Christian Trinity, which at one stage was (or might have been) a female personification of the Holy Wisdom (aka Agia Sophia), but ended up as the Paraclete or Holy Ghost, a bird of (so far as I know) indeterminate sex? Must look it up.
• Another article on Shakti
• When I worked at an art museum, we had a larger-than-life Kuan-Yin in a quiet corner of the Asian gallery. She always looked as of she was about to open her eyes and come to life. If I stood and looked at her long enough, my mind would start to play tricks on me, and I could almost see her breathing.