This Isn’t a Picture I’m Holding: Kuan Yin by Kathy J. Phillips

The bodhisattva Kuan Yin remains one of the most popular figures in Buddhism, loved and worshiped throughout Asia for over a millennium. She arrived in Hawaii with the first Chinese plantation workers, each of whom would have kept a rice paper print of her over a small altar in his room. In this delightful book, Kathy Phillips and Joseph Singer celebrate Kuan Yin’s many incarnations in words and images that exhibit humor, poignancy, and the open-endedness of a koan. An introduction examines Kuan Yin and her place in religion, legend, art, changing social prescriptions for gender, and the everyday lives of Hawaii’s people. UH Press, 2004 Paperback, 168 pages