Quan Am

A Vietnamese friend in his thirties, I’ll call him Binh (Peaceful) to protect his privacy, invited me go with him today to the Buddhist temple he has attended since his mother first took him there as an infant. Now his mother is aging and unwell, and he lives with her and cares for her. We’re both Queer and anti-capitalist, we’re both photographers, and we both believe “our actions are the ground on which we stand,” so we’ve had plenty to talk about since we met at the Occupy Portland camp in 2011. Binh also suffers from migraines, and we were both a little nauseated and not quite in top form today. 

It is a Vietnamese Buddhist custom to visit the temple around Tet (Lunar New Year) to pay respect to one's ancestors, to offer thanks for the past year’s blessings, and to ask a blessing for the new year. But Binh was in a car accident just a few weeks ago, and though he wasn’t injured, his car was destroyed. He has not been to the temple this year because he no longer has a car, and the temple is quite a distance from where he and his mother live. I was happy to give him a ride and see the temple for myself.

We arrived at a quiet time. The head monk and most of the community was away at a funeral, so apart from a few women working in the kitchen, we had the place to ourselves. We lit nine sticks of incense and then visited one shrine after another, some outdoors among the trees, some indoors laden with orchids and forsythia and pyramids of oranges, pineapples, grapefruit, and citron. As we burned incense, bowed, and meditated, I was drawn to the 25-foot statue of Quan Am in the courtyard. 

Quan Am is not a goddess, not a legendary person, but a visual representation of the quality of compassion that lives in us all. The Quan Am mantra (prayer) translated into English is “Homage to Quan Am, who hears all the sounds of the world.” Images of Quan Am (aka Kwan Yin or Canon) remind us that suffering is universal, that our most important gift to each other is deep listening, and that our capacity to hear, comprehend, and empathize is infinite. One of my Buddhist teachers said we draw the spirit of compassion into ourselves, we deepen our compassionate nature, by listening.