from The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth
The way of compassion
May my body
be a prayerstick
for the world.
Many Buddhists have believed that the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (enlightened hero of compassion) is beyond gender. According to the Lotus Sutra, this deity transforms the body and becomes a female, male, soldier, monk, god, or animal to save various beings from suffering. When he/she looked out into the world and saw the immense suffering of all beings, he/she shed tears of compassion. One of these tears was transformed into the Noble Mother Tara, the embodiment of wisdom and compassion in Tibet. Tara traveled across China and to southeast Asia and Japan. She syncretized with local protectresses, old Earth and Water Goddesses, who combined with the wisdom being Tara to give birth to Kuanyin (China), Kuan Seum (Korea), and Kanzeon (Japan), "Listening to the Sound of the World."
In her display as Avalokiteshvara, she has six heads with which to perceive the world in all its forms and a thousand arms and hands to help those who are suffering. She has given herself to the world to be shaped by its needs. All her hands hold instruments of effective action. Like the Mother of the World, she is outside us, but like our own mother, she lives inside each of us as well. In fact, she lives inside each thing. She can be found everywhere-in the falling rain that nourishes the Earth and eases the summer's heat, and in the starving child who awakens our compassion. She is the part of use that enters the body of communion without hesitation. She enters this body naturally and fearlessly.
The eyes of Kanzeon see into every corner of Calcutta. The ears of Kanzeon hear all the voices if suffering, whether understandable to the human ear, or the voices of felled cedar and mahogany or struggling sturgeon who no longer make their way up Mother Volga to spawn. The hands of Kanzeon reach out in their many shapes, sizes, and colors to help all forms of beings. They reach out from the ground of understanding and love. "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground" (Rumi). It is understood that the craft of loving-kindness is the everyday face of wisdom and the ordinary hand of compassion. This wisdom face, this hand of mercy, is never realized alone, but always with and through others. The Buddhist perspective shows us that there is no personal enlightenment, that awakening occurs in the activity of loving relationship.
Buddhism, shamanism, and deep ecology are ways for us to understand and realize that this Earth is a vast and rich network of mutual arisings, dyings, and renewings. Seeing this, we experience ourselves as part of the world around us, and the world around us is part of us. It is from this base that authentic harmlessness and helpfulness awaken.
Leaving behind the anthropocentric view that hold us away from the world and discovering how we are related to and indeed embedded in all that exists has profound political and environmental implications. The Earth is imperiled. It is suffering. Living as part of its body, we suffer with and through it. Awakening through this suffering, we might be able to help the Earth and ourselves, heal it, and thus heal ourselves. The Zen monk Dogen wrote, "You should know that the entire earth is not our temporary appearance, but our genuine human body." Earth, according to Dogen, is truth and speaks truth but not always or necessarily with a human tongue. It is our body. And its voice can be heard even in the desert silence.
We can ask ourselves, then, When will we see our True Eye? When will we discover our True Hand? Kanzeon has innumerable hands. They appear in every shape and color. She is everywhere, hearing the suffering of Earth. Kanzeon is Earth, as well, in its many forms of suffering and beauty. Her hands reach out through clear-cut forests, poisoned rivers, and hungry children to awaken us. Her hands reach back to herself through our compassionate response to victims of war, slaughtered rhinos, and grasslands that are now wastelands.
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