Guanyin

The story

A small boat, in the middle of the sea, and a sky closing like a fist.

The wind has torn the sail. Waves as high as houses crash over the deck. The boatman stopped rowing long ago, because it is no use any more. He has no temple with him, no teacher, nothing to offer. He has only a name, which his mother used to repeat to him when he was a child, and he says it with all the breath he has left.

“Guanyin.”

That is how, in many tales, rescue begins. In the twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra, a disciple asks the Buddha why the bodhisattva is called Guanshiyin, which means “she who hears the sounds of the world”. And the Buddha answers: because when countless beings are suffering and call on her with all their heart, she hears their voices and sets them free.

Fire does not burn those who call on her. In rising water, whoever speaks her name finds the shore. Before a raised sword, the blade breaks. And if a monk is needed, she becomes a monk; if a queen is needed, she becomes a queen; if a child is needed, she becomes a child. She takes whatever form that sorrow needs.

The Chinese, who have loved her for many centuries, wanted to know something more. They wanted to know how she had become like this.

And they tell a story.

Long ago, in a faraway kingdom, a king named Miaozhuang had three daughters. The first two married as their father wished. The third, Miaoshan, was different. Ever since she was small she had loved silence and animals, and she could not bear to see anyone suffer. When the king told her it was time to take a husband, she answered gently:

“Father, I do not want to marry. I want to learn how to free those who suffer.”

The king did not understand her. He grew angry, then made threats, then tried to win her over with gifts. Miaoshan did not give in. She asked only for permission to enter a monastery, and her father, to test her, sent her to one where the nuns had orders to give her the hardest work: fetching water from far away, chopping wood, scrubbing the kitchens.

But the good we do for others comes back to us. It is said that in the monastery the animals of the forest came to help her. Tigers carried the wood on their backs; a dragon made a well spring up right in the courtyard, so that she no longer had to walk all the way to the river. The nuns watched her, speechless.

When the king heard of this, he lost all patience. His anger was so great that Miaoshan's life on earth came to an end, in a way the stories do not like to tell.

So the princess went down into the realm of the dead. She walked among the sorrowful souls, and instead of trembling, she began to recite the name of the Buddha. A gentle echo spread through the darkness. The gloom lifted, the flames went out, and meadows bloomed where there had been only red-hot stones. The lord of the underworld, Yama, watched this wonder and understood that his realm could not hold her.

He sent her back to earth, and Miaoshan, once more among the living, withdrew to a mountain, the Fragrant Mountain. She lived there alone, praying, and welcoming anyone who climbed up to ask her advice.

Up that mountain came farmers whose fields had been scorched by drought, mothers with sick children, travellers who had lost their way. She never asked anyone where they came from or what they had done. She offered water, she listened, and when she spoke, she spoke little. Those who went back down to the valley did not remember her words. They remembered being listened to, all the way to the end, and for many that was already a medicine.

The years went by. The king, grown old, fell ill with a sickness no doctor could cure. Then a monk told him, in a calm voice, that there was only one medicine: a pair of hands and a pair of eyes, given by someone who had never known anger. “On a mountain not far from here lives someone who might give them.”

The king did not know what to do. He sent messengers up the mountain. When they arrived, the person who lived there answered without hesitation: “Take what is needed.”

It was Miaoshan. She did not say who she was.

The king was healed. Full of gratitude, he climbed the mountain with his whole court to thank the one who had saved his life. He saw a figure sitting there, still and serene, without hands and without eyes. And he recognised the voice that spoke to him.

“Father,” she said. “There is nothing to forgive.”

The king fell to his knees. He wept, and so did the queen, and the two sisters, and all the ministers. Nothing could give back to her what she had given. All they could do was pray.

Then, they say, the sky grew bright as gold. Miaoshan was transformed before their eyes. Her hands returned, but not two: a thousand, each with an eye in its palm, reaching out towards the world. That, it is said, is how Guanyin learned to see everywhere and to help everywhere.

This is a legend, and not all Buddhists tell it the same way. But all of them recognise the face of that bodhisattva: dressed in white, with a small vase of pure water in one hand and a willow branch in the other. In India, where her story began, she was a man, Avalokiteshvara. In China, little by little, she became a mother.

That is why, they say, in temples she is found in so many different forms: seated on a lotus, standing on the waves, with a child in her arms, with a thousand arms spread like the spokes of a wheel. Each time it is her, because a single form would not be enough for every sorrow.

Out at sea, meanwhile, the boatman's boat was still rocking. Then a lower wave, and another, and another, carried him towards a beach he had never seen. The wind dropped. The clouds parted.

For a moment he thought he saw, on the water, a white figure smiling. But perhaps it was only the foam.