Compassion in Buddhism: Why does Kuan Yin have so many hands? 

Kuan Yin is an archetype of compassion in Buddhism. Sometimes portrayed as female, or male, or androgynously, they manifest the impulse to help suffering beings.

In his celebrated Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot observed:

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

Reality is a lot to take sometimes. One teacher says this practice builds our “reality tolerance.”

Ours is a sobering practice

The bare bones of it is to appreciate the “three inconvenient truths”, as the American nun Pema Chodron calls the “three marks of existence” the Buddha taught are intrinsic to reality: impermanence, stress, and interconnectedness.

It’s inconvenient for us that everything changes. 

For example, just when I’m feeling settled as I sit to meditate, there’s this pain, or that song going through my head and ricocheting off my inner cranium walls, telling me I have been overdoing it with Spotify.

Deep down we much prefer convenience

From a Buddhist perspective, the habit energies called delusion come along to satisfy our preference for convenience, controlling the internal narrative, spinning reality in a distorted way, supporting our insupportable preferences for stability and constancy.

Mostly, we fall for this over and over, until we grasp that our practice is about seeing these delusive habit energies arise in the mind in their many guises and to work through them.

A milestone in practce …

is seeing how our conditioned patterns distort our perceptions of reality in real time.

This practice is sobering because we get intimate with our personal experience of stress and frustration- one of the three aspects of reality the Buddha called dukkha.

If we don’t clearly see the mechanisms of our own stress and frustration, it’s hard to be happy. 

When we see this clearly, there is such a relief.

In the Pali language of early Buddhism, the meditation we practice is called vipassana. “Passana” means to see, and the prefix vi means “in a particular way.”

As we adapt to regular sitting practice, there’s a deepening sense of calm and inner composure, which helps us see things more clearly.

A calmer mind is less inclined to fall for the delusive habit energies of desire, aversion or agitation. We can see our stuff more clearly, our hidden motivation and agendas, for example.

Tranquility allows a healing to happen, a gathering together of all our broken parts, the unfinished business, the parts we have disowned.

But the practice doesn’t end here, it’s just getting started.

We notice that just as we have work to do, so does everyone else.

We realize we’re all in this mess together. Even when we do not know what to do next, we feel we should at least try to be kind.

The late Zen master Bernie Glassman tells us “I define realization as the depth to which one sees the interconnectedness of life.”

Then he adds a corollary, which emphasizes compassion in Buddhism:

And the degree of your enlightenment can be measured by your actions.

Here is a Zen koan- a kind of teaching story- from ancient Zen lore about compassion in Buddhism as the the fruit of our sobering practice, of living our interconnected-ness.

How Does Kuan Yin Use Those Many Hands & Eyes

Yunyan asks the more realized monk Daowu:
“Why is it that the Bodhisattva Guanyin has so many hands and eyes?”
Daowu responds, “It is like someone sleeping, in the night, reaching behind her head for her pillow.”
To these words Yunyan said, “I understand.”
When asked what precisely was his understanding he answered, “Our bodies are covered with eyes and hands.”
Daowu replied, “Almost. You’re eight tenths of the way.”
Then, when asked what is the more complete response, was told,
“There are only eyes and hands.”

This conversation between two monks is preserved in the twelfth century anthology of Zen stories called the Blue Cliff Record. Both monks, Yunyan and Daowu, were students of the same teacher and would themselves each become famous teachers.

They both deeply realized this interconnectedness. Daowu, it seems, had a deeper understanding than the younger monk Yunyan, who asked why the bodhisattva Kwan Yin has so many hands and eyes.

In my mind, Yunyan was really asking “What’s the deal with this deity we all talk so much about, who has a thousand hands and a thousand eyes? What’s up with that?”

Kwan Yin is an archetype of compassion in Buddhism.

Sometimes portrayed as a man, sometimes as a woman, and sometimes androgynously, Kwan Yin manifests the altruistic impulse to reach out and help suffering beings.

Daowu says this altruistic impulse comes deeply from the heart without a second thought- like someone turning in her sleep and reaching a hand behind her head to adjust her pillow. 

He says this natural impulse of compassion in Buddhism is like having eyes and hands all over our body. True, true, says his companion Yunyan. But he adds- that’s only 80% of the answer. 

The full answer, he says, is realizing “There are only eyes and hands.” I appreciate the writer James Ishmael Ford take on the full answer here:

Just this. Ends and means, one thing; our interdependence and you and I, one thing.