Mount Putuo

Putuo is the pilgrimage centre of Guanyin, and Guanyin is the site of one of the largest transformations in Buddhist history.

Avalokiteshvara becomes Guanyin

In Indian sources, Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, is male. In Tibetan tradition he remains male, Chenrezig, of whom the Dalai Lamas are held to be emanations.

In China, over roughly the tenth to fifteenth centuries, the figure became overwhelmingly female.

The change was not decreed and did not happen at once. It appears to have proceeded through local cults (notably the legend of Princess Miaoshan, a king's daughter who refuses marriage, is persecuted by her father, and gives her eyes and hands to heal him), which attached themselves to the bodhisattva and gradually reshaped the iconography. By the Ming, the female form was standard.

Chun-fang Yu's study of the process is the standard treatment. It is one of the clearest documented cases anywhere of a major deity's gender changing through popular devotion rather than doctrinal decision.

The consequences were large. A compassionate female figure who responds to those who call on her, grants children and rescues from danger occupied a place in Chinese religion that nothing else did, and Guanyin devotion crosses Buddhist, Taoist and popular boundaries freely.

The island

Putuo is an island of about twelve square kilometres in the Zhoushan archipelago, identified with Potalaka, Avalokiteshvara's mountain island in the Indian sources.

Three great temples anchor more than thirty others: Puji (tenth century), Fayu (1580) and Huiji (1793). A thirty-three-metre Guanyin faces out to sea.

The Guanyin Who Would Not Go

The island's founding story concerns a Japanese monk, traditionally Egaku, carrying an image of Guanyin home from Wutai in the ninth century. His ship was turned back repeatedly by storms until he accepted that she did not wish to leave.

The temple built for her is still called Buken Qu Guanyin, the Guanyin Who Would Not Go.

It is a founding legend that explains a pilgrimage site by the deity's refusal to be taken elsewhere, which is neat, and it also records the fact that Putuo sat on the sea route between China, Korea and Japan and drew traffic accordingly.

Practice

Pilgrimage peaks on the nineteenth days of the second, sixth and ninth lunar months, Guanyin's birth, enlightenment and renunciation.

Private cars are banned; everyone arrives by ferry. The Buddhist Association of China oversees the religious buildings, as at every registered Buddhist site in the country, so the island operates under state supervision alongside monastic administration.

Putuo's status as Guanyin's mountain traces to a Japanese monk who tried to take a statue home and, by tradition, was not allowed to leave with it.

The Guanyin who would not go

Tradition holds that in 916 CE a Japanese monk named Egaku, attempting to carry a Guanyin statue from mainland China back to Japan by boat, found his vessel repeatedly blocked near the island by a field of iron lotus flowers that appeared in the water, a sign he interpreted as the bodhisattva's own refusal to leave China. Egaku left the statue on the island instead, founding what became known as the "Guanyin Who Would Not Go" temple and establishing Putuo's identity as Guanyin's dwelling place on earth.

Three temples, one island

Putuo's devotional geography centres on three major monasteries, Puji, Fayu and Huiji, each associated with different periods of the island's development and each maintaining its own community of resident monks and nuns, an unusual concentration of major institutions on a single small island rather than spread across a mountain range.

A mountain that is actually an island

Unlike China's other three major Buddhist mountains, Putuo is a small island in the Zhoushan archipelago off the Zhejiang coast, reached only by boat, a geography that has shaped its pilgrimage practice around sea crossings rather than mountain ascents.