Who Is Kannon? Compassion, Many Forms and Thirty-Three Temples

In a book published in 1894, Lafcadio Hearn describes following an old priest into a dark chamber of a temple at Kamakura. The priest lit lanterns and drew them slowly upward on ropes. First a golden foot appeared, then a hem, a hand holding a lotus, a smiling face, and last a crown made of many small faces. The figure was Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, in the form with eleven faces.

That slow reveal is a fair picture of the subject. Kannon is seldom met as a single image. Temples keep many forms, each with its own scripture, origin story and place on a pilgrim's route. This page sorts out the forms, the earliest records and the long walk between thirty-three temples.

One name, many forms

The dictionary JAANUS gives the names Kanzeon and Kanjizai alongside Kannon. They render the Sanskrit Avalokitesvara. The Chinese translation Kanzeon was shortened to Kannon, and the meaning is usually given as the lord who regards living beings with compassion. Nippon.com glosses it as the one who hears the cries of the world.

The plain form, Sho Kannon, wears a crown bearing a small figure of Amida and holds a lotus or a water vase. Forms with many arms and heads also arrived early. JAANUS says they reached Japan even before esoteric Buddhism was formally introduced in the early eighth century.

The most important text in Japan is the twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra. It describes how Kannon answers those in need, and its prose lists the shapes this bodhisattva may take. JAANUS says that list is the origin of the idea of thirty-three forms.

Hearn adds a correction to the name. The Bato form is not horse-headed, he writes: only a small horse head is carved on the tiara, and farmers prayed to it for their horses and cattle.

Where the figure came from

JAANUS says the origin is unclear. Kannon is thought to have been a popular Indian deity absorbed into Buddhism, and two sources can be traced in art: a princely figure holding a lotus beside the Buddha, and the god Shiva, whose name Isvara is probably part of the title. In Pure Land art, Kannon is the more prominent of Amida's two attendants.

Gender is where the sources part. The name is masculine in form. In China the figure was identified with female native deities and was often considered female. JAANUS says Kannon was not shown as a woman in Japan, although some forms are described as female and female kami were usually identified as forms of Kannon. Hearn, writing in the 1890s, calls the figure a goddess and says she became an idealized Japanese woman. His footnote, citing a handbook of Chinese Buddhism, treats her as the Chinese Kwanyin adopted into Buddhism. Read the date and the author before you trust a pronoun.

The earliest records in Japan

JAANUS says the earliest Japanese images are bronzes of a simple crowned figure, often holding a jewel, usually identified as Guze Kannon. The first painting of Kannon is on a wall of the Horyuji main hall in Nara. Famous sculptures from the late seventh and eighth centuries survive at Yakushiji and Todaiji. For esoteric forms, the first known text on the eleven-faced Kannon is dated 733. A major scripture entering the records in 753 is the first to mention Fudo Myoo and also speaks of the Unfailing Lasso form.

Temples were often founded after a vision or a miraculous image, and JAANUS notes they stand beside rocks, springs and mountain features that may already have been sacred. By the end of the tenth century, Ishiyamadera, Kiyomizudera, Kuramadera and Hasedera were widely visited.

Sherry Fowler's study, described by the Sainsbury Institute, says a cult of the Six Kannon began in Japan in the tenth century and stayed prominent into the sixteenth. Her key example is a life-size set of six wooden figures made in 1224 and kept at Daihoonji in Kyoto.

A single object shows the same devotion in wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a gilt-wood Kannon Bosatsu dated to the eleventh century, a gift of Robert Lehman in 1948 (accession 48.162.1a, b).

Thirty-three temples, one legend

The Saigoku pilgrimage links thirty-three temples across seven prefectures of western Honshu, from Wakayama to Gifu, for more than a thousand kilometers. Nippon.com reports that it was added to the Japan Heritage list in 2019.

The founding story dates it to 718. The priest Tokudo Shonin of Hasedera fell into a coma, met the king of hell, and was told to establish thirty-three Kannon temples. That is a legend, and sources date the actual circuit differently. JAANUS places the formation of the thirty-three-temple circuit in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Hearn heard a related tale at Kamakura. In it, Tokudo found a glowing camphor log, and two elderly strangers, who turned out to be a kami of Kasuga and the sun goddess Amaterasu, carved it into two statues. One stayed in Yamato. The other was set in the sea and washed ashore at Kamakura. That is temple legend.

Later circuits followed. After the Kamakura bakufu rose, JAANUS says, a thirty-three-temple circuit was set up in the Kanto region. With a third, thirty-four-temple circuit they make a hundred Kannon sites. Pilgrims collect three stamps at each temple, and the main images are in seven forms, not thirty-three.

A hall of 1,001 statues

The official pages of Sanjusangen-do in Kyoto, formally Rengeo-in, a Tendai temple, give the facts. The hall was built in 1164 in the palace of the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa, burned about eighty years later, and was soon rebuilt. The present main hall is about 120 meters long. Its seated Thousand-armed Kannon and the 1,000 standing ones are National Treasures, and in 2018 all 1,001 statues stood together in the hall again.

How to read a Kannon image

• Crown. A small figure of Amida in the crown marks the usual form.
• Hands and name. A lotus or a water vase is the ordinary attribute. Other forms are named for what they hold or do, such as the Unfailing Lasso and the Wish-Fulfilling forms.
• Heads and arms. Count them. They tell you which scripture the image follows.
• A horse on the crown. This is the form that protects animals.
• White robe and willow. These later images came with Zen in the late twelfth century.
• A closed shrine. Some images are secret and shown rarely, or not at all.

Common mistakes and mix-ups

"Kannon and Guanyin are the same thing." They share a source, the Indian bodhisattva, but the figure took different local forms. JAANUS says that in China it was often seen as female, while in Japan it was not shown as a woman.

"Thirty-three temples means thirty-three Kannon." The number comes from the Lotus Sutra list, while the main images at those temples are in seven forms.

"Kannon and Jizo do the same job." Both are bodhisattvas of rescue, but Jizo is the shaven monk with a staff, while Kannon wears a crown.

"A Maria Kannon is a Buddhist figure." JAANUS says that images apparently of Kannon called Maria Kannon served as Christian images in secret worship during the Edo period. The statue can mean two things at once.