Avalokiteshvara Was Originally an Invented Man
Go to any Korean temple and you will hear people calling on Avalokiteshvara (Gwanseeum Bosal) and Amitabha Buddha. They pray for their children to pass exams, for their husbands to get promoted, for their families to stay healthy. The way prayer gets answered in Buddhism is simple: I pray, a being like Avalokiteshvara hears my voice, and answers out of compassion and the power of a sacred vow. This is what Koreans call gapi, a blessing granted from above.
But there is a problem. The core component of this system, the "one who listens," did not exist for the first several hundred years of Buddhist history. And with no one to listen, there was no "please, I beg you, grant me this" either.
Search through the Pali Nikayas and the Chinese Agamas, the texts considered closest to the Buddha's own words, and you will not find Avalokiteshvara. You will not find Amitabha Buddha or the Pure Land of Bliss either.
The Buddha passed into nirvana around the 5th to 4th century BCE. The first Chinese scripture to mention Amitabha is the Pratyutpanna Samadhi Sutra, translated in 179 CE, and the earliest artifact in India bearing Amitabha's name is the pedestal of a Buddha statue from Mathura in the 2nd-century Kushan period. In other words, he appeared roughly 600 years after the Buddha's death.
The most interesting part is gender. In India and early China, Avalokiteshvara was a man with a mustache. Then, around the Song dynasty, the figure became a woman. Around 1100, a story spread in China about Princess Miaoshan, claiming that Guanyin had originally been a Chinese princess. It is a newly invented Chinese story with no trace in any Indian scripture. If this were a being that actually existed, its gender and origin would not change from region to region.
In 1745, the Japanese scholar Tominaga Nakamoto argued in his Shutsujo Kogo (Words After Emerging from Meditation) that the Mahayana scriptures were not preached by the Buddha himself, but were built up by later generations, each adding layers on top of what came before. This is known as the theory that Mahayana is not the Buddha's teaching. Today, Buddhist scholarship effectively accepts as established fact that the Mahayana scriptures were written over several centuries after the Buddha's death.
Think of the prayer-answering mechanism as a machine. The input is my prayer, the output is my wish coming true, and in the middle sits the device that receives and processes the prayer: Avalokiteshvara. But if that device cannot be historically verified, was formed later, and even changed shape from region to region, then this machine is running without its core component.
So where do the prayers go? Since the receiver has never been proven to exist, they are letters with no delivery address.
And if this is not even original Buddhism, what exactly is the "please grant me" Buddhism we see in Korean temples? Next to the main Buddha hall, Korean temples have a Sanshingak (mountain spirit shrine), a Chilseonggak (Seven Stars shrine), and a Samseonggak (Three Sages shrine). The mountain spirit is an indigenous Korean mountain god, and the Seven Stars are the worship of the Big Dipper. Neither has anything to do with Buddhist scripture. The wish-making structure of folk religion moved into Buddhism and now lives alongside it. Even within the Korean Buddhist community, this is criticized as gibok Buddhism, or blessing-seeking Buddhism. The "pray and it will be granted" Buddhism we know is closer to a blend of later Mahayana devotion and indigenous blessing-seeking folk belief than to the Buddhism of the Buddha.
The Buddha himself directly criticized the idea that wishes come true through prayer.
In the Ittha Sutta (the Discourse on What Is Wished For) of the Anguttara Nikaya, the Buddha says that long life, beauty, happiness, fame, and rebirth in heaven are five things everyone wants, but they are not obtained through prayer or wishing. If they could be obtained through prayer, who would ever fail to get them? To obtain them, he says, you must act in the way that leads to them.
The Asibandhakaputta Sutta of the Samyutta Nikaya is even more blunt. To the Brahmins who claimed that praying for the dead would send them to heaven, the Buddha asks: if you throw a large rock into a lake, and people gather around praying, "Rise up, rock!", will the rock float? The rock sinks according to its weight, and a person goes according to their karma.
The mechanism of early Buddhism was not "answers" but karma. What I do is the cause, and the result comes from me as well. There is no being in the middle who listens and decides for me.
This creates a strange scene: people making wishes in front of statues of the very Buddha who rejected prayer.
What's more, in early Buddhism the Buddha entered complete nirvana. Like a fire that has gone out, he no longer intervenes in the world of rebirth. In the Questions of King Milinda, compiled around the turn of the common era, King Milinda asks exactly this: if the Buddha has already entered nirvana and does not receive offerings, what result can offerings possibly have? The monk Nagasena answers: the Buddha does not receive them. It is the offerer's own act that produces the result. He uses the analogy that even after a great fire goes out, people light their own fires with their own firewood.
Even by Buddhism's own internal answer, statues do not respond. The Buddha is not built to respond. Yet people pray expecting a response. When the wish comes true, they call it gapi; when it doesn't, they say their devotion was not sincere enough.
So what is this? It is not the Buddha's teaching, and it is not the response of a being whose existence has been confirmed. It is a belief that looks at the result afterward and assigns its cause to an unproven being. That is the true nature of the wish-granting prayer we see today.
Read the original (Korean) →
But there is a problem. The core component of this system, the "one who listens," did not exist for the first several hundred years of Buddhist history. And with no one to listen, there was no "please, I beg you, grant me this" either.
First: Avalokiteshvara Appeared Out of Nowhere
Search through the Pali Nikayas and the Chinese Agamas, the texts considered closest to the Buddha's own words, and you will not find Avalokiteshvara. You will not find Amitabha Buddha or the Pure Land of Bliss either.
The Buddha passed into nirvana around the 5th to 4th century BCE. The first Chinese scripture to mention Amitabha is the Pratyutpanna Samadhi Sutra, translated in 179 CE, and the earliest artifact in India bearing Amitabha's name is the pedestal of a Buddha statue from Mathura in the 2nd-century Kushan period. In other words, he appeared roughly 600 years after the Buddha's death.
The most interesting part is gender. In India and early China, Avalokiteshvara was a man with a mustache. Then, around the Song dynasty, the figure became a woman. Around 1100, a story spread in China about Princess Miaoshan, claiming that Guanyin had originally been a Chinese princess. It is a newly invented Chinese story with no trace in any Indian scripture. If this were a being that actually existed, its gender and origin would not change from region to region.
In 1745, the Japanese scholar Tominaga Nakamoto argued in his Shutsujo Kogo (Words After Emerging from Meditation) that the Mahayana scriptures were not preached by the Buddha himself, but were built up by later generations, each adding layers on top of what came before. This is known as the theory that Mahayana is not the Buddha's teaching. Today, Buddhist scholarship effectively accepts as established fact that the Mahayana scriptures were written over several centuries after the Buddha's death.
Second: If Avalokiteshvara Was Invented, Where Do Prayers Go?
Think of the prayer-answering mechanism as a machine. The input is my prayer, the output is my wish coming true, and in the middle sits the device that receives and processes the prayer: Avalokiteshvara. But if that device cannot be historically verified, was formed later, and even changed shape from region to region, then this machine is running without its core component.
So where do the prayers go? Since the receiver has never been proven to exist, they are letters with no delivery address.
And if this is not even original Buddhism, what exactly is the "please grant me" Buddhism we see in Korean temples? Next to the main Buddha hall, Korean temples have a Sanshingak (mountain spirit shrine), a Chilseonggak (Seven Stars shrine), and a Samseonggak (Three Sages shrine). The mountain spirit is an indigenous Korean mountain god, and the Seven Stars are the worship of the Big Dipper. Neither has anything to do with Buddhist scripture. The wish-making structure of folk religion moved into Buddhism and now lives alongside it. Even within the Korean Buddhist community, this is criticized as gibok Buddhism, or blessing-seeking Buddhism. The "pray and it will be granted" Buddhism we know is closer to a blend of later Mahayana devotion and indigenous blessing-seeking folk belief than to the Buddhism of the Buddha.
Third: The Buddha Rejected Prayer
The Buddha himself directly criticized the idea that wishes come true through prayer.
In the Ittha Sutta (the Discourse on What Is Wished For) of the Anguttara Nikaya, the Buddha says that long life, beauty, happiness, fame, and rebirth in heaven are five things everyone wants, but they are not obtained through prayer or wishing. If they could be obtained through prayer, who would ever fail to get them? To obtain them, he says, you must act in the way that leads to them.
The Asibandhakaputta Sutta of the Samyutta Nikaya is even more blunt. To the Brahmins who claimed that praying for the dead would send them to heaven, the Buddha asks: if you throw a large rock into a lake, and people gather around praying, "Rise up, rock!", will the rock float? The rock sinks according to its weight, and a person goes according to their karma.
The mechanism of early Buddhism was not "answers" but karma. What I do is the cause, and the result comes from me as well. There is no being in the middle who listens and decides for me.
The Mysterious Mechanism of Prayer
This creates a strange scene: people making wishes in front of statues of the very Buddha who rejected prayer.
What's more, in early Buddhism the Buddha entered complete nirvana. Like a fire that has gone out, he no longer intervenes in the world of rebirth. In the Questions of King Milinda, compiled around the turn of the common era, King Milinda asks exactly this: if the Buddha has already entered nirvana and does not receive offerings, what result can offerings possibly have? The monk Nagasena answers: the Buddha does not receive them. It is the offerer's own act that produces the result. He uses the analogy that even after a great fire goes out, people light their own fires with their own firewood.
Even by Buddhism's own internal answer, statues do not respond. The Buddha is not built to respond. Yet people pray expecting a response. When the wish comes true, they call it gapi; when it doesn't, they say their devotion was not sincere enough.
So what is this? It is not the Buddha's teaching, and it is not the response of a being whose existence has been confirmed. It is a belief that looks at the result afterward and assigns its cause to an unproven being. That is the true nature of the wish-granting prayer we see today.
