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This chapter examines the growing performance of mizuko kuyō-related rituals — often referred to as “water baby ceremonies” — in convert American Zen centers. Since the late 1970s and increasingly since about 1990, Zen centers run mainly by and for white converts to Buddhism have been providing rituals for use after an abortion or miscarriage. Created by first-generation converts rather than imported by Japanese missionary priests, these rituals are partly derived from mizuko kuyō and partly the invention of female Zen teachers seeking to meet the needs of their students in the wake of Roe v. Wade. Tied to the growth of these rituals is the increasing popularity of celestial bodhisattva figures such as Kannon and Jizō, whose convert devotees promote a more devotional side of Buddhism than has been acknowledged in new Buddhist circles.

As this book makes former groups of Kannon visible, it also explores the fluidity of numerical categorizations of deities that attempt to quantify invisible beliefs. Although initially formed with the idea of corresponding to the six paths of transmigration in Buddhist thought, the Six Kannon were anything but a monolithic cult. As the Lotus sūtra explains, in order to save a sentient being most expediently Kannon can assume thirty-three different types of bodies. Yet the plethora of images of Kannon seen all over the world reveals that there are many more forms and that the number thirty-three stands for the great number of variations Kannon can take. Pious motivations commonly drove the faithful to use creative calculations to adjust the number of Kannon to suit their needs.

This chapter introduces the substantive content of Jōkei's devotion and propagational efforts. Jōkei was by far the most prolific author of a liturgical literary genre known as kōshiki (Buddhist ceremonials), popular among prominent monks within the established schools during the early medieval period. These, along with other devotional texts such as ganmon (written prayer or vow), became a central source for analyzing Jōkei's eclectic propagation of devotion toward Sākyamuni, Maitreya, Kannon, and the Kasuga deity, among others.

This chapter analyzes the soteriological aims of Jōkei's message and the means he promoted for achieving those aims. Above all, Jōkei encouraged aspiration for birth in the realms of Maitreya and Kannon, and emphasized the necessity of relying on the “other power” of various Buddhas and bodhisattvas. At the same time, he emphasized the importance of karma and the relevant consequences of our thoughts, words, and deeds.

This chapter contains an essay by D. T. Suzuki in which he discusses the significance of “hands” in a contemplative, poetic manner using parables from Zen literature and ideas from the poet and painter William Blake that oppose the “mechanization” of human minds. Suzuki explains how hands and consciousness function together. He argues that hands communicate the essence of spirit whereas machines are functions of the intellect. Suzuki concludes this essay by focusing on the goddess of mercy, Kannon, who possesses one thousand arms representing loving kindness and helps sentient beings; this emphasizes the loving and creative function of the hands.

A centerpiece of the corpus of extant iconic image sets of Six Kannon painting, of which five originals survive, is the large fourteenth-century set from the Hosomi Museum in Kyoto. Just how unstable the number six can be is demonstrated in the Six Kannon cult by the establishment of the Seven Kannon group, which is a phenomenon where both alternate Kannon types (Fukūkenjaku and Juntei used by Shingon and Tendai respectively) are included in one group. The Kyoto temple called Shichi Kannon’in historically enshrined such an example. Six Kannon joined by one Seishi (Skt. Mahāsthāmaprāpta), commonly misidentified as “Seven Kannon,” were worshipped in the practice of the once popular but now almost unknown Edo-period ritual called Shichiyamachi (Seven nights of waiting). Other paintings of Six Kannon, such as the sixteenth-century set from Kōdaiji that includes paintings of the Six Kannon along with Thirty-three Kannon, served a pivotal role in the transmission and subsequent expansion of the Six Kannon cult.

In the tenth century Tendai and Shingon School monks adopted and modified six types of Guanyin found in early Chinese texts, especially Mohe zhiguan, into a cult in Japan. As the monks promoted the constellation of these images as particularly efficacious, sculpture sets were installed at temples in the capital. Many of the main sites that housed Six Kannon images in the Heian period (794–1185) are gone and known only through records, such as the Kyoto temples Hosshōji and Hōjōji. However, rare early vestiges of former sets from this period are found in sculptures from Buzaiin in Ishikawa and Konkaikōmyōji in Kyoto. Evidence for early Japanese images of Six Kannon and their records, such as iconographic manuals, diaries, and chronicles, demonstrate the wide extent of the cult and its images that flourished under elite patronage in the Heian period.

The island of Kyushu has an exceptionally high concentration of documentary and physical evidence of past Six Kannon practice in Japan. The miraculous story of the Six Kannon images that appeared at Six Kannon Lake in the Kirishima Mountains fueled the worship of the cult. The varied cult imagery from Kyushu includes the incised bronze sutra container from Chōanji dated to 1141 that had been buried in a mountain in Kunisaki, to a sixteenth-century set from Chōkyūji made by the Shukuin busshi group of sculptors, to the Fumonji seventeenth-century set that had dual Buddhist-kami identities, which was relocated several times over the centuries between different temples and shrines in the Sagara domain. This chapter’s geographic approach makes clear that the strategy of matching Six Kannon with six kami, or six gongen, was a major driving force for the cult in the region of Kyushu.

Two wooden sculpture sets of Six Kannon, the thirteenth-century set from Daihōonji in Kyoto attributed to the artist Higō Jōkei and the fourteenth-century set from Tōmyōji in the Minami Yamashiro district of Kyoto, are well-documented sets that show the history, modifications, and movement of the cult. Copious inscriptions inside images in the respective sets reveal diverse sponsorship, from an elite female patron in the former to a huge group of patrons from a variety of backgrounds in the latter. Extant thirteenth- to fifteenth-century written records on ritual procedures, such as Roku Kannon gōgyōki, which focused on Six Kannon, contribute to the knowledge of how the rituals related to Six Kannon were performed as well as how the Six Kannon functioned in response to different needs, such as assisting with the six paths, protecting the dharma, or bolstering sectarian heritage, throughout their changing circumstances and movement over time.

Painted and printed sets of Thirty-three Kannon transported from China in the fifteenth century inspired the shift to Thirty-three Kannon worship. This new theme in Japan is exemplified by the celebrated set from 1412 attributed to Minchō. Another area of transition between the Six and Thirty-three Kannon cults is in the fact that the main temple icons of the major Thirty-three Kannon pilgrimage routes all feature one of the Six Kannon rather than any of the thirty-three images described in the Lotus sūtra or those imported from China. Within the context of pilgrimage, one surprising area of transition between the cults is found in the imagery cast into large bronze bells used at Buddhist temples. Finally, beginning in the seventeenth century, boundaries of the distribution of multiple Kannon imagery were pushed even further as publications of the printed iconographic manual Butsuzō zui, which clearly organized illustrations of groups of Seven and Thirty-three Kannon, rapidly proliferated throughout Japan and then abroad, giving Kannon worldwide exposure.

In a remote setting at the base of Mount Wakakusa in Nara, not far from Tōdaiji Great Buddha Hall and Kasuga Shrine, is an unusual stone Buddha head, known as “Hora no buttōseki” (Stone Buddha head in the grotto). The head is perched atop a pillar that has reliefs of the Six Kannon and an inscription dating to 1520. By way of a conclusion, this monument is examined in terms of the themes treated in the book: landscape and sacred geography, text and image relationships, ritual practice, ritual lives of objects, and numbers of Kannon.

Buddhist deities and Japanese gods like Hachiman, Amaterasu, and Uhō Dōji were seen as embodiments of the wish-fulfilling jewel. The paradigmatic jewel deity is Nyoirin Kannon. This Bodhisattva formed with the Wisdom kings Aizen and Fudō a powerful triad, which transformed into a ritual weapon in political and military struggles opposing the Emperor and the shōgun. Beyond the obvious apotropaic and soteriological nature of these gods, the embryological code is essential to understand their true meaning and function.

Introduces reader to the architecture, iconography, and doctrine of Hasedera, a prominent Buddhist temple in Kamakura. This temple provides a graphic example of how pre-modern and contemporary forms of Buddhist teaching and practice relate to ongoing life concerns. Central to both teaching and practice are the sacred figures of Kannon and Jizō, which continue to be perceived as responding to the needs of women. Recent Tokugawa research reveals evidence of rituals for grieving child loss long before emergence of mizuko kuyō. The chapter discusses the head priest’s comments about when and in what form this practice began at Hasedera. Also included are responses to questionnaires left at this temple by those who came in quest of its healing rituals in the 1980s and 1990s.

This chapter focuses on the lives and creative output of two Rinzai nuns, Daitsū Bunchi (1619–1697) and Tokugon Rihō (1672–1745). They both served for decades as abbesses of imperial convents, and both created chinzō portraits, paintings and/or sculptures of Kannon, Bodhidharma, Ś ākyamuni, and other images that distinguished them from their male counterparts (e.g., images made of needlework, hair, and other bodily relics). Relying on their own written accounts, this chapter demonstrates that these two women were motivated to create votive objects, images, and calligraphies themselves as an integral aspect of their practice, rather than commissioning them from professional artisans, which as imperial nuns they had the financial means to do.