Counting on Kannon with Thirty-Three Images

Lecture information:
In Japan many temples with a central icon of Kannon (Avalokiteśvara) were organized by the sixteenth century into pilgrimage routes with thirty-three stops. Thirty-three has significance as the number of manifestations of Kannon described in the Lotus Sutra. As early as the fourteenth century, examples of paintings and sculpture that depict all thirty-three manifestations together appeared in Japan. Yet if we consider the identities of each Kannon icon along the popular pilgrimage routes, they do not match any of the Lotus Sutra manifestations. Instead, we find that each one is usually one of the Six Kannon. Beginning in the tenth century, Six Kannon were grouped together as the focus of a cult to protect beings in the six paths of transmigration. At the time the cult of the Six Kannon faded in the sixteenth century, the Thirty-Three Kannon pilgrimage cults began to flourish and new alliances for Kannon worship were formed through the use of old images.

Lecturer information
Sherry Fowler is a specialist in Japanese Buddhist art history and Associate Professor of Japanese Art History at University of Kansas. Recently she has been researching images of Kannon. Among her publications are Murōji: Rearranging Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple (University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), “Views of Japanese Temples and Shrines from Near and Far: Precinct Prints of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Artibus Asiae 68/2 (2008) and “Travels of the Daihōonji Six Kannon Sculptures” Ars Orientalis 36 (2006). She has a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles.