Who is avalokiteshvara

Represented in different manifestations and throughout Asia, Avalokiteshvara is usually identified by a small seated Buddha depicted within his headdress. Known as Mount Potalaka, this perfected land was originally located on an island somewhere south of India, but in Chinese traditions, the island moved to a new location off the east coast of Zhejiang Province. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.

Featured Audio. Continue Exploring. Collection Catalogues , New Releases. Free and open to the public. Contact Rights and Reproductions Using Images. Web Accessibility Accessibility at Yale. Thank you for subscribing to Tricycle! As a nonprofit, we depend on readers like you to keep Buddhist teachings and practices widely available.

Subscribe now to read this article and get immediate access to everything else. Tricycle is a nonprofit that depends on reader support. Help us share Buddhist teachings and practices by donating now. Thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara, ink on paper Robert Beer. Courtesy of Wisdom Publications. Get Daily Dharma in your email. Please try again. The world was clearly bigger than anyone realized.

Master meditators realized that shunyata emptiness , so dark to the human mind, is actually populated with subtle energies of enlightenment, wisdom, and compassion—buddha fields filled with sublime beings. The Prajnaparamita Sutra underwent spiritual surgery and became the Heart Sutra. The story of Buddhist art is thus a sophisticated travelogue—much less neat and linear than in Western art, much more conditional and chaotic.

As Guanyin evolved during the first millennium in China, the bodhisattva began to exhibit traditional female traits such as kindness and thoughtfulness. A fourteenth-century Chinese ink painting describes her as a ghostly, white, meltingly contemplative figure whose trailing robes drape over a mountain ledge. Gazing at the moon, Guanyin—cat-like and nearly formless in diaphanous garments—seems to be turning transparent and wraithlike, as though contemplating the emptiness of all worldly ambition.

Jesuit missionaries, bringing their Christian evangelism to China around this time, began circulating images of the Madonna and Christ Child, inspiring yet more cross-cultural borrowing. A Chinese variant of Guanyin called Songzi balances a child on her hip.

Carved in sandalwood or other soft woods, or cast in clay like a votive offering, Songzi would have been painted, often with gilding. In a five-foot-tall Edo-period painting on silk, Kannon, the Japanese bodhisattva, becomes motherly in a different way.

The formidable yet kindly celestial female reclines on the rocky shore of the legendary island Mount Putuo, where she is said to dwell. A chubby boy-like pilgrim wades through the surf at her feet, his hands joined in reverence. He and others like him have come a long way to find her. Open Access. Eskenazi Ltd. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met Collection API is where all makers, creators, researchers, and dreamers can now connect to the most up-to-date data and images for more than , artworks in The Met collection.

Learn more. The Artist Project. Related Objects Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara Guanyin late 10th—early 11th century.