Sanskrit: God (ishwara) who is looking (lokita) down (ava) with compassion.
The Buddhist deity of compassion was first worshipped in India as Avalokiteshwara – the Lord who looks upon us (with compassion).This deity later evolved in China to become the female deity, Kuan Yin.According to Buddhist scholar, John Blofeld, writing in Bodhisattwa of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin -
Kuan Yin means “She who hearkens to the cries of the world,” and is a translation of the Sanskrit name of her chief progenitor, Avalokiteshwara.In Korea and Japan and, above all, in China before the Red flood engulfed her temples there, Kuan Yin has been popularly revered as a goddess for a thousand years or more, though in truth she is not a goddess but a celestial Bodhisattwa and was formerly embodied in male form, as is sometimes the case to this day.
Transformation of the male Avalokiteshwara into the female Kuan Yin -
A scholarly analysis of the deity’s gender change is given by Bagyalakshmi in her article, Creation of Goddess of Mercy from Avalokitesvara -
Avalokitesvara who is a male Bodhisattva in India was transformed into a goddess in a Chinese male oriented society. A preliminary statement can be made here, that sinicization of Buddhism led to the creation of the Goddess of mercy with Chinese characteristics from a male deity with Indian characteristics. What brought about this change in the gender of this Bodhisattva and why? This transformation of a male deity from India into a female Goddess of mercy in a strongly patriarchal Chinese society both at the terrestrial and celestial levels has surprised many. Celestial because for any woman to gain entrance into the Paradise of Amitabha, she should shed her female form and assume a male form. For a female divinity to have grown in the terrestrial level in a male dominated society, and to have given rise to a cult is equally strange. It is not that there were no goddesses prior to the introduction of Buddhism in China. Only they were not as important.
The transformation does not appear to have come about suddenly. The male Bodhisattva was gradually given an ambiguous form so that people saw what they desired to see. If we examine the iconographic representations of the goddess in China and elsewhere, the paintings and statues of this Bodhisattva initially did not reveal this change. The female anatomy was conspicuously absent, but from a graceful body structure one could feel the feminine element. At the same time the male characteristics of moustache and beard were also visible in the form of tendril like lines. Even these vanished in the sculptures of the Dazu caves where they appear to be completely female. (Full article available here ).
