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 Hawai'i with the first Chinese plantation workers, each of whom would have kept a ricepaper 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 Hawai'i's people.

This is a book for every Boomer trying to balance their spiritual ideals of the '60s with the wearing realities of middle age. The author enlists the practical inspiration of Water-Moon Kuan Yin, a Buddhist goddess associated with compassion, to aid in the mundane challenges of caring for her aging father - transferring his health insurance, struggling with a wheelchair van, managing adult diapers, or playing in the fictions of his dementia.

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 Hawai'i with the first Chinese plantation workers, each of whom would have kept a ricepaper 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 Hawai'i's people.

This is a book for every Boomer trying to balance their spiritual ideals of the '60s with the wearing realities of middle age. The author enlists the practical inspiration of Water-Moon Kuan Yin, a Buddhist goddess associated with compassion, to aid in the mundane challenges of caring for her aging father - transferring his health insurance, struggling with a wheelchair van, managing adult diapers, or playing in the fictions of his dementia.