Kuan Yin?

[kyobo]

Hello all. Have any of you worked with Stephen Karcher's KUAN YIN ORACLE? Alternately, do any of you work with or practice or relate to Kuan Yin in any way?

With palms together
Kyobo

 

[candid]

Hello Kyobo,

Kuan Yin has had very special meaning to me years ago while I was a struggling artist. She came about quite naturally without my intention of evoking the deity. Its was only after researching the natural impressions I was receiving that I discovered she was seen, at least in part, as a compassionate female deity with close ties to music and art.

It was only a year later when an image appeared during meditation, who after more research was revealed to me as Avalokitesvara, a male counterpart to Kuan Yin.

Kuan Yin still holds a mythical place in my heart, though I no longer believe these images to be deity, except as a timeless and inspiring image or archetype.

I?m curious as to why you?ve asked this question. Have you something of your own experience with her to share?

Candid

 

[candid]

I?ll share one additional experience, which I found to be ironically humorous.

During my ?romance? with Kuan Yin, I stopped into a nearby laundering establishment and began a conversation with a Chinese woman there. I was enthusiastic and entirely naive, thinking that simply because she was Chinese she?d have valuable insight to share with me about Kuan Yin. Upon asking her of the deity, she looked at me and blinked as though having no clue what I was talking about, then she mutely pointed to her calendar on the wall. I turned to observe the object of her pointing to see a picture of the Virgin Mary. I said, quietly and with visible disappointment ? you are... Catholic? She smiled and nodded. I smiled back to her and left.

They really aren?t so different, Mary and Kuan Yin. Both typically hold a child (or fruit). Both symbolize the eternal Universal Mother, and are embodiments of unconditional love and compassion.

Candid

 

[kyobo]

Hi Candid. Kuan Yin and I go back a long way! Thirty-five years to be exact, ever since I saw my first porcelain figurine of the goddess in New York City's Chinatown. I have since come to know that she is a celestial bodhisattva, the female persona of Avalokitesvara, and the equivalent of the Japanese Kannon and the Tibetan Chenrezi.

Kuan Yin is also the way I came to the I Ching. While I had known of the I Ching and 'experimented' with it off and on for a number of years, it was Stephen Karcher's KUAN YIN ORACLE which made some connections I hadn't considered between Taoism, Buddhism, Kuan Yin and oracles.

I wish he had fleshed them out further, and I don't think I have the intellectual acumen to fully connect all the dots, and I've applied substituted the I Ching for Kuan Yin's oracle poems, but what I've come to is this, in brief.

Kuan Yin is the oracular atmosphere -- hearing our 'cries' and responding with 'compassion.'

I could say a lot more, but this is the starting point for me.

With palms together.
Kyobo

 

[megabobby]

i read your post----i had never heard of kwan yin,but i have been working on getting my 'yin yoga' in harmony with the tao but the only goddess archetypes i kinda had to work with were western ones and for some reason they were kind of hard to fit into my whatever you call it.

anyway i went to a kwan yin website and that was exactly the focus i needed. For me it's like sometimes you gotta be yin and sometimes you gotta be yang. growing up i didn't even know yin existed basically so i've been kind of learning lately to like "be the dash line in the hexagram in this situation, chill and be passive right now"

i've been learning this and it's nice to kind of have a human face on it now to kind of identify it with. i feel really happy about this and i thank y'all for this synchronistic opportunity.

megabobby