Juichimen Kannon- Japanese GodDeity"The Eleven-Faced Bodhisattva"

The Shattering

Avalokiteśvara, Kannon in Japan, vowed to liberate every sentient being from the cycle of suffering. Should he ever falter, his head would shatter into pieces. When the bodhisattva looked upon the world and saw how vast and unrelenting that suffering remained, he was overwhelmed. His head broke apart.

Amitābha Buddha gathered the fragments and reassembled them into eleven faces, each turned outward so that no direction would go unwatched. Some are compassionate, some wrathful, one laughs. And crowning them all sits the face of Amitābha himself, the Buddha who made the bodhisattva whole again.

The Form in Japan

Within the Tendai school's Roku Kannon system, Jūichimen Kannon watches over the hungry ghosts, beings consumed by insatiable craving whose suffering is so pervasive that only omnidirectional compassion can reach them.

The standing Jūichimen Kannon at Shōrin-ji in Nara Prefecture was carved from a single block of sandalwood in the eighth century. Two arms: one holds a water vase containing the nectar of compassion, the other extends in the gesture of granting wishes. Pilgrims on the Saikoku Sanjūsan-sho, the thirty-three-temple Kannon circuit in western Japan, still walk from station to station. Hase-dera temple, the eighth station, enshrines a gilt-wood Jūichimen Kannon over ten meters tall.