The Bodhisattva of Wisdom, and the Flaming Sword

Manjushri (Gentle Glory) is the bodhisattva of wisdom (prajna) in Mahayana Buddhism, the personification of the transcendent insight that cuts through ignorance. His emblems make the point directly: in his right hand he brandishes a flaming sword that severs delusion, and in his left he holds, or bears upon a lotus, a volume of the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) scriptures. He is invoked especially by students and by those seeking understanding, and he appears in many Mahayana sutras as a keen interlocutor who presses the deepest points of the teaching to their edge.

Manjushri is already a major figure in some of the earliest Mahayana sutras to reach China, including the Lotus Sutra, translated into Chinese by Dharmaraksha in the third century CE and again, more influentially, by Kumarajiva around 406 CE, and the Vimalakirti Sutra, in which he is given an unusually prominent role debating the wise layman Vimalakirti on the meaning of non-duality, one of the most celebrated philosophical dialogues in the whole Mahayana canon. His fuller name, Manjushri Kumarabhuta, Manjushri in the form of a youth or prince, reflects his consistent depiction as eternally young, read as expressing wisdom's freshness, immediacy and freedom from the accumulated weight of age.