Avalokiteshvara

Avalokiteshvara is the same figure in India and in China, and is male in one and female in the other, and the change is documented well enough to be traced.

In the Indian sources the bodhisattva of compassion is male. The Lotus Sutra devotes a chapter to him, listing the forms he takes to reach beings, and the Karandavyuha Sutra, of perhaps the fourth or fifth century, makes him a cosmic figure from whose body the world is generated and gives the six-syllable mantra its setting. The name is usually parsed as the lord who looks down, or the lord who observes the cries of the world.

In China he became Guanyin, in Japan Kannon, in Korea Gwaneum, and by the Ming period the standard depiction is unambiguously female, white-robed, sometimes holding a child, and functioning in popular religion as a goddess of mercy and of childbirth. The transition can be followed in the material record: sculpture and painting from the Tang are male or ambiguous, and the female form becomes dominant from roughly the tenth to twelfth centuries.

Chun-fang Yu's study of this transformation is the standard account and argues that no single cause explains it. Contributing factors include the Lotus Sutra's own list of forms, which includes female ones; the absorption of indigenous Chinese goddesses; and the emergence of the Miao-shan legend, in which a princess refuses marriage, is killed by her father, and returns to save him. Glen Dudbridge traced that legend to a twelfth-century inscription.

The Tibetan reception went the other way, keeping the male form and identifying the Dalai Lamas as his emanation.

The six syllables associated with him are the most-recited formula in the Buddhist world, and two things about them are worth setting straight.

The first is the translation. The English rendering the jewel in the lotus is grammatically wrong. Read as a compound, manipadme would have to be a vocative addressed to someone called Jewel-Lotus, and the form is feminine, which points to a female figure, most plausibly a consort, rather than to Avalokiteshvara himself. This has been argued in detail by Sanskritists and is not a fringe position. The devotional readings the tradition supplies are different again: Tibetan commentary maps the six syllables to the six realms of rebirth and to the six perfections, and treats each as purifying a particular affliction. That is a religious reading, offered as one, and it does not depend on the grammar.

The second is access. Much Vajrayana practice is closed: the mantra of a specific meditational deity comes with the empowerment that authorises the practice, and reciting it without that is regarded within the tradition as ineffective at best. The six-syllable mantra is deliberately outside that system. It is carved on roadside stones, printed on flags, turned in wheels, and taught to anyone. Tibetan teachers say plainly that it requires no permission.

The distinction between open and closed mantras is a real feature of the tradition and not an accident of what happens to have been published. Confusing the two, assuming that because this one is public, all of them are, is the commonest Western misunderstanding of how the material works.