My unexpected Guan Yin rant
Despite alternate spellings, the idea remains the same: this is the goddess of mercy, compassion, and nurturance.
I recently inherited a rather tall antique statue of the Buddhist goddess of compassion, boddhisattva Guan Yin or Kwan Yin, or Kuan Yin, depending on how you’re used to seeing it written. Now, this statue is about 3-1/2′ tall, is glazed terracotta and is somewhat valuable, but that’s not the point. The point is that like most true antiques coming out of Asia, it was, to all intents and purposes, stolen from some shrine somewhere.
Because the Chinese want to sell this stuff, you can hardly be stopped at the border and accused of stealing most of the time, but in fact, actual antiques, not just replicas, are an endangered species, if you will, and the West is in cahoots with the Orient to buy highly prized objets d’art and display them in our homes. Selling it back to the Chinese is not an option; they don’t want their own stuff back (yet). Who knows? Someday, like Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, they might demand all this stuff be returned, but until then, I own a statue of a bodhisattva that once sat in a shrine, and I feel highly ambivalent about it.
The reason this is going to be a rant is because we appropriate other cultures all the time, and have done so ever since we “discovered” their countries hundreds of years ago. My distaste for this is based on how little we understand the culture we’re appropriating, at the same time we unthinkingly assume that because we’ve taken a class, lived in an ashram, or attended a Buddhist university, that we are now qualified to teach (and, annoyingly, preach) the path to others. Further, we in the West tend to appropriate only the parts that are easy, the parts we like, the parts we understand, the parts we can fit into our Western lifestyle.
This kind of atomistic approach to a religion and to spiritual beliefs indicates a lack of spiritual maturity, I’m sorry to say. I don’t mean to undermine those who practice yoga or meditation, or the various forms astrology takes based on spiritual practices; just to remind you who have lifted these pieces out of an entire culture, that you would benefit from learning about the entire culture, the religion, and the spiritual beliefs these practices are based on before you attempt to speak from a holistic place of wisdom you have not yet attained, nor are likely to if you continue to look out of Western eyes while you try to speak with the voice of the East. Do you see the inherent contradictions? I sure hope so.
Let me go back to go forward.
Guan Yin is one of those seemingly ‘archetypal’ feminine energies one loves to love and be associated with. She represents everything we’d like to be: purely compassionate, caring, nurturing, motherly, protective, etc. These are all good things. She is associated with the sea, and, like Saint Peter, can be called upon to protect sailors. Furthermore, she is a bodhisattva, which means she attained perfection of spirit on the earthly plane, and could have ascended, free from karma, but she chose to stay here on earth to protect the vulnerable from harm, a personal sacrifice that I am in awe of, so I tend to think very highly of Guan Yin. In my own personal pantheon, she ranks amongst the highest energies to try to align myself with, and strive to be like, no matter how difficult or impossible at times it is for mere mortals to live up to these aspirations.
I’ve seen this particular image many times online; it seems to be very popular, and deservedly so. The colors are extraordinary, for one thing, and the pose tells us something about the spirit of Kwan Yin we might find surprising.
However, here is the problem: let’s say you honestly believe that after taking 5 years of classes at a Buddhist university, you consider yourself educated enough to be able to call yourself a personal trainer, or a relationship counselor. You do not have Western qualifications, in that you haven’t earned a degree in psychotherapy or psychology, but you do have life skills you’ve picked up through your experiences with the university, or your ashram, or wherever it is you have learned the bits and pieces you’ve accumulated.
Maybe you learned with a guru, who guided your spiritual training. Now you’d like to translate all of this into your new calling. I think this is a noble endeavor. I feel the spirit of Guan Yin is at work within you, and I’m glad you’ve learned all this good, healing energy. However, I still would prefer to hire a therapist with a bunch of letters after her name, rather than you, to help me with my relationship problems.
As good a person as you are, you are limited by two things: time spent in an ashram, listening to a guru, or in a Buddhist university, is not the same thing as taking classes where you become accredited in psychology and theory about how relationships, and people, function in the real world. The second limitation stems from your lack of real-life experience, and I mention this because I’ve seen it happen many times.
The new devotee of Krishna or Buddha is filled with spirit and wants to do good and spread joy to others, but has spent the past five years living in celibacy amongst other celibates. Now, however, they emerge, a butterfly from the cocoon of purity, having been inculcated in the religious principles of the East to talk to the materialist culture of the West.
On top of this set of contradictions is the hardest one to overcome, which is that you are a person raised and educated in the West. You are Western, yet you’re trying to absorb Eastern principles and teach them to others, also raised in the West. This phenomenon always reminds me of the ‘telephone game‘ of childhood, where one child in the circle whispers a word to the next child, and so on, until by the time the word gets to the last child in the circle, it bears no resemblance to the first word uttered.
So the best that this person, pure of heart and spirit, is going to do, is to mess up people’s lives with the mish-mash of beliefs they bring to the experience of teaching some garbled version of what they’ve just learned.
There are those who emerge from schools, courses, and classes bounded by religious belief, who go on to put up a shingle in the real world and practice as counselors. However, no matter how well-intentioned, how purely empathetic and giving they are trying to be, there will always be a problem for those of us from the West who attempt to follow behind someone who has no practical life experience in their new field, but attempts to teach from spiritual belief: they lack credibility.
Take, for example, the relationship coach who has never married, never stayed in one relationship for very long, yet went to India, sat at the feet of her guru, then returned to her country, attended this Buddhist university, and ‘graduated’ with the desire to help others. This is a lovely sentiment, one we should be glad she feels. However, after all this spiritual preparation, she now believes she’s qualified to do something she has always wanted to do, which is to help others with their relationship problems. That’s all well and good, except for one tiny detail: she’s not professionally qualified, and so she is at risk of doing more harm than good, and that’s not behaving in the spirit of Guan Yin at all.
Is Kwan Yin a "universal archetype"? Should she be? Or does she 'belong' to those who created her?
shoot nice story man.