Senju Kannon- Japanese GodDeity"Thousand-Armed Bodhisattva"

The Shattering

The Senju Sengen Darani-kyō tells the origin. Avalokiteśvara looked out at the suffering of all beings in all six realms and vowed to save every one of them. If the resolve ever faltered, the bodhisattva's body would shatter to pieces. The resolve did not falter. The suffering did not end. And so the body broke apart anyway, not from failure but from the sheer weight of what it had promised. From the fragments, a thousand arms grew. Each arm opened its palm, and in each palm an eye appeared. Each hand took up a different instrument: a lotus in one, a sword in another. No two hands carried the same thing.

The Thousand and One

In 1254, the sculptor Tankei completed the central image at Sanjūsangen-dō in Kyoto: a seated Senju Kannon, gilded, with forty-two arms fanning outward from the body. Forty arms, each saving twenty-five worlds. The math yields a thousand. Flanking this figure, filling the long hall in ten rows fifty deep, stand 1,001 smaller statues of the same form. All gilded. All identical in posture, each with its own slight variation in the carving of the face. The hall is 120 meters long. When you stand at one end and look down the rows, the golden arms overlap into a single shimmering wall.

Kiyomizu-dera, built on its cliff above Kyoto, also enshrines a Senju Kannon as its principal image. Pilgrims on the Saigoku circuit of thirty-three Kannon temples visit both.