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You will prepare and submit a term paper on Many Faces of Guanyin. Your paper should be a minimum of 1500 words in length.
You will prepare and submit a term paper on Many Faces of Guanyin. Your paper should be a minimum of 1500 words in length. The name is translated as ‘the one who listens to the cries of the world’ (Gill). As far as Guanyin as one of Avalokiteśvara’s faces is worshipped by all nearly all denominations of China and Eastern Asia, legends connected with her and the ways of her depiction differ in separate cultures. However, the deity is depicted predominantly in female guise, though appearing before us in a thousand different images.
According to the legend, Guanyin was the third daughter of the king Mao Zhong, who devoted herself to the service to the gods against her father’s will, and the king decided to kill her daughter to keep her in the earthly world. However, the lord of the underworld set her free and she resurrected. Guanyin taught people to grow rice which became very nutritious as she filled each grain with her milk. Being a symbol of samsara, she stood on a rock among the wild waves saving the shipwrecked as she came to the rescue when people were threatened by sword, demons, water or fire.
The main source providing information on Guanyin’s faces is The Lotus Sutra describing 33 main guises of this bodhisattva seven of which are female (Chung). The Buddhist canon depicts the bodhisattva as a female (this tradition was established not earlier than in the 14th century), which reminds of the pre-Buddhist image of Guanyin, however, bodhisattvas are epicene. Guanyin is mostly depicted with four or eight hands, eleven faces, thousand-handed, yet the canon includes even more complicated depictions up to 84000-handed images (which are, in fact, rather rare).
As Guanyin is considered to be the helper to women in birth, she is often depicted holding a baby. Her usual attributes include a jar and a willow branch, a rope (which is a symbol of rescue from the miseries of life), beads, a rod, a trident, a tiger-leather skirt (the symbol of fearlessness) etc. Sometimes she is depicted as a girl with the basket filled with fish riding a cloud or a dragon. .
