Thirty-Two Forms
A reflection post on deity practice
Reading time: About 3 minutes.
There is a sutra where Shariputra (because it’s always Shariputra) asks Avalokiteshvara how, exactly, they serve so many beings so skillfully. Avalokiteshvara responds that they take the form the student needs to see in order to hear the message they are being given. “If it is a Brahman I take the form of a Brahman. If it is a king I take the form of a king. If it is a peasant I take the form of a peasant.” And so on.
My teacher asked me, in a recent exchange we had about my thangka practice, if “Our friend Val” has a thousand-arms even when they show up as Kwan-yin. I loved this question because it got right into the heart of something I learned early on with this piece: we are inseparable from the deity, and the deity is inseparable from all depictions of themself.
Which is to say, Kwan-yin is often depicted with several dozen arms, rather than a thousand, and more often as a statue than a drawing, but Kwan-yin is Avalokiteshvara is Quanyin, is Guanyin, is Kannon, is also Chenrezig, is Mahakala is me is you is my patron is also any being who overcomes hatred with compassion.
I came to this realisation while reading The Art of Awakening by Konchog Lhadrepa & Charlotte Davis, shortly after doing a Chenrezig Sadhana. There is a passage in the book about cultivating stable pride as a Thangka artist and Vajrayana practitioner (emphasis my own):
“This is a firm pride, a stable confidence in our own enlightened nature. A clear and vivid visualization is not enough; we must also have a strong conviction in ourselves as the deity. It is also referred to as vajra pride and has nothing to do with ordinary pride or arrogance. Stable pride is in this context reminding ourselves of the truth of our sacred true nature, the primordial purity or buddha nature.”
Upon reading this passage I immediately had a vision of a Pride parade, of queer and trans people marching, dancing, walking, wheeling along, every single one of them in the form of a thousand-armed deity. I saw every one of them a Bodhisattva committed to our collective liberation by freeing us of the false separations created by cisheteronormativity that sets up sex and gender and sexuality as binaries and hierarchies.
I saw all beings who have ever fought for the human right to shelter, food, clean water, breathable air, and to participate in community, as thousand-armed beings protecting what is sacred and inviting those who insist on serving oppressive systems to step into their own thousand-armed potential. I saw arms bursting forth from people who previously believed in the superiority of their race or gender or sex as they realise the sacredness of our multiplicity and interconnected, interrelatedness and let go of the systems that only aim to separate and cultivate poverty mentality, ignorance, and aggression.
And I cried.
I cried joyfully and brokenheartedly, utterly tapped into the tenderness of bodhichitta in my longing for every being to find their own way of embodying a thousand arms of service, a commitment to bearing witness, and infinite divine forms to serve our collective liberation.
May all beings be free.
Progress image of Avalokiteshvara taken on 8 January, 2024
