Exploring the Origins of Guanyin Belief Folklore: Research on Native Guanyin Folk Culture and Its Inheritance and Development

Author: Liu Hui
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: This book is a theoretical monograph on the folk culture of Guanyin and its inheritance and development research. The content involves inheriting folk traditional culture, promoting the compassionate spirit of Guanyin, creating advantages in folk belief culture, innovating the content of Guanyin temple fairs, developing Guanyin cultural resources to serve social harmony, and cultivating the Guanyin cultural industry with breakthroughs in development. It represents a new development in Guanyin folk culture and is suitable for researchers and learners in folk culture. The belief in Guanyin is the crystallization of the wisdom of the Chinese nation and the profound accumulation of Huaxia civilization. The long-standing and deeply rooted nature of Guanyin belief in China is due to complex reasons. The different accounts of Guanyin belief and Guanyin's origins in Chinese and Indian Buddhism each have their own profound historical and cultural backgrounds. The Indian Buddhist accounts of Guanyin emerged in the ancient cultural atmosphere of India, bearing the imprint of "Western Heaven mythology," depicting a virtual character with strong religious connotations and a mindset of male superiority and female inferiority. In contrast, the Chinese Buddhist legends of Guanyin align with the traditional Chinese belief in women's kindness, approachability, and closeness, as well as with Confucian moral and ethical thought, making them readily accepted by the Chinese people. The reason why Guanyin in China has become a revered "personal deity" for the people, a "Buddha" in folk belief, and its core is fundamentally the pursuit of Guanyin's compassionate and kind spirit. The phenomenon of Guanyin folk culture demonstrates and promotes the pursuit of moral psychology and personality improvement from a spiritual and cultural perspective, the pursuit of moral norms that nourish society, and the pursuit of achieving harmonious unity between humans, nature, the environment, and society.