Kwan Yin

O, Lotus-born: om mani padme hum

Unidentified artist, Guanyin as the Nine-Lotus Bodhisattva, late 16th century, Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 1593, China. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

This is my “imaginative rendering” of one of my most beloved spiritual guides, Kwan Yin.

Kwan Yin, O, Lotus-born: om mani padme hum.

Once you were male. Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of compassion. Poised on the brink of personal perfection, rewarded for your muscular spiritual effort by being invited to disappear into the light of Nirvana, you opted to remain here, right here in Samsara, to support your friends, all sentient beings -- teenaged mothers and political poets, each breathing creature and every last blade of grass -- until every one of us attained liberation.

But as it turned out, your male form could not bear the weight of suffering, and you shattered. You tried again, this time incarnating as female with the capacity to soften and yield to the pain of the world and so become the source of comfort you yearned to be.

Kwan Yin. Goddess of mercy. She Who Hears the Cries of the World. She who sees every corner of creation and tends it with motherly extravagance and fierce protectiveness.

Unidentified (Chinese), Kwan Yin (Goddess of Mercy), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.8.345. Public Domain.

Concealed by your singular countenance of lovingkindness there extends an endless series of heads with an infinite capacity to listen. Hidden within your two arms, one pouring healing dew from a delicate vessel and the other raised in a mudra of benediction, are a thousand arms, with an eye in the center of each palm, so that you may not miss a single dark pocket of the world where one of your children weeps. Ever barefoot, you are rooted in the earth.

Kwan Yin, we call upon you. Light our way home. Protect all who travel over land, by sea, in the air. Help us cultivate the patience to cultivate our gardens when rain is too much or too little. Give us the courage to bear our babies and the fortitude to raise them to be bodhisatvvas of compassion, all of them, living instruments of peace.

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I am thrilled to share that a new edition of my book GOD OF LOVE will be coming out on September 8, with updated language and concepts, a daring new preface by me, and a funny and moving introduction by legendary priest Greg Boyle (founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles). Monkfish has helped give this interspiritual classic vibrant new life. There is an audiobook version too, which I read myself, except for Greg’s intro, read by my talented brother Roy.