The Lotus Sutra By Kannon Summary

Whether in reality or fiction, the physical world is fraught with peril. Death and suffering threaten to destabilize the body and mind at any moment. While fears of spiritual damnation and hellish torture loom in the minds of man, the dangers of reality are far more visceral. What could be the salvation for those in this world from the terrors of this world? Well, if you 're Buddhist, Kannon will surely be your answer. This deity frequently appears in Japan in reality, Buddhist text, and fiction.
As depicted in Japanese culture and literature, Kannon is the deity of mercy, a bodhisattva whose goal is to protect humanity from the dangers of this realm. The lore of the deity is written in its namesake sutra, a chapter of the Lotus Sutra, and

A key, explicit demonstration of Kannon answering one’s prayer to salvation appears in “As Deep as the Sea.” In this tale, a hawk keeper falls into a chasm and, with no way to escape, begins to chant the Kannon Sutra, to which he has been faithful for years. Soon enough, a large snake appears and slithers to the top of the ravine; the protagonist, digs his knife into the serpent and rides to safety (“As Deep as the Sea,” 194). Kannon had taken the form of a large serpent in order to rescue the protagonist once he had recited the line, “His vow to save suffering beings is as deep as the sea” (“As Deep as the Sea,” 193). We can conclude that this serpent was a form of Kannon and not simply a random occurrence because of the story’s conclusion, where the knife the protagonist had lodged in the snake’s back appears in the pages of his copy of the Kannon Sutra. Through prayer, the protagonist escaped a life-threatening situation via Kannon’s shapeshifting. Another demonstration of Kannon’s mercy appears in “Touched in the

His son carves an 11-headed Kannon icon out of wood, prays, and soon after a man with a stick appears and frees the protagonist from the spell. While it may seem as though the foxes’ trap was simple mischievous and did not really warrant the intervention of a deity, as the text points out, “Yoshifuji looked terribly thin and sick” (“Touched in the Head,” 115). Regardless of whether this was the foxes’ intent, one can assume that if Yoshifuji remained with the foxes, his life may have been in danger. Possibly, he could have died from starvation, given his thinness. It is shown once again that, through prayer, one can be directly saved by Kannon, who may appear as a being as grand as a giant serpent or as simple as a “man with the stick...an emanation of the Kannon Yoshifuji’s brothers and son had carved” (“Touched in the Head,” 115). These acts of divine intervention appear in other tales, but on a different