By Dharma-Aloka

On September 2, 1997, Land of Medicine Buddha in Soquel, California consecrated a new statue of the bodhisattva Ksitigarbha, who is very dear to Chinese Buddhists. During a visit of Lama Zopa Rinpoche to the center in 1994, Angela Wang, now co-director, put a small statue of Ksitigarbha in his room. Lama Zopa got the idea of making a big statue of Ksitigarbha to be placed on the land, and around that time Angela had a dream about doing the same thing. They talked about it, and the idea for creating a large Ksitigarbha statue was born. Lama Zopa determined where it should be located, the direction it should face, and so on, and work began.

Ksitigarbha is, apart from Kwan Yin, the most popular manifestation of the Buddha to the Chinese people because of his substantial vows to protect those in the lower realms. This is important to the Chinese because of their concern about ancestors who may have been born into the lower realms.

Land of Medicine Buddha has had a connection with Chinese people since it opened its doors in 1991. Many Chinese from Taiwan and California were introduced to the center through Dr. Chiu-nan Lai when she came on as co-director with Guillaume Peters that spring. (Prior to that, Chiu-nan had been leading healing courses and pilgrimages to holy Buddhist places in China and India for Chinese people. Then Su Hwa, a disciple of Lama Zopa’s from Singapore, served as manager and director for over a year.

The land itself has a long, unhappy history with Chinese people. During the late nineteenth century, mining and logging operations in California were often undertaken with Chinese laborers, who were badly exploited. The land, then, was a logging camp, and the surrounding land, including neighboring Forest of Nisene Marks, was heavily logged during that time. Chinese laborers were brought from China, supposedly to work for six months and then return with their pay. They worked, but instead of being paid at the end, they were given the task of digging a large trench, and then shot and killed. At that time, it was not illegal in Santa Cruz County to kill a Chinese person.

Many of the early staff at the land felt that there was some karmic debt that needed to be paid back to the Chinese who had been so abused. The statue of Ksitigarbha is one way, people feel, of acknowledging the Chinese participation in Land of Medicine Buddha, and makes it a more meaningful place for the Chinese to come and make offerings.

It is very good for monks and nuns to read the Sutra of Ksitigarbha

and to do the practice, but mainly to read the sutra.

It lists so many benefits of being ordained: even wearing the

saffron robe for just one minute. Lama Zopa Rinpoche

The Sanskrit words Ksiti-garbha can be translated as the essence, storehouse, womb, treasury, matrix or even embryo of the ground, with all the connotations of fertility and creative power the words suggest.

According to sutras preserved in the Chinese canon, Ksitigarbha has vowed to help beings realize enlightenment during the period between the parinirvana of Shakyamuni Buddha and the coming of Maitreya. Though he manifests in all six of the realms of renewed existence, he is most famous for rescuing those who, on account of their past misdeeds, have fallen into the realms of torment. Ksitigarbha’s altruistic vows were made in the inconceivably distant past when, reborn in the female form, the bodhisattva strove to assure his mother a favorable rebirth.

As an archetypal Great Being (mahasattva), he personifies the renunciation, courage and perseverance of the mind that has awakened to the truth of suffering (duhkha) and its cause. His wrathful form is [Vajra] Garbharaja, embodiment of the elemental forces of nature as well as the apparently ruthless even-mindedness and clarity that destroys misunderstanding and stamps out selfishness.

In the dynamic process of personal cultivation, Ksitigarbha represents the complimentary functions of equanimity and steadfastness. For that reason he is often shown standing at the edge of a huge pit of fire, ever ready to descend into the flames and bring out all those who are ready to listen to a word of wisdom. As teacher of those in torment he is Yama, lord of the underworlds.

Ksitigarbha has inherited the boundless nurturing powers of the archaic Indian goddess Prithvi, a personification of the earth itself, who in her Buddhist form takes on a neuter or androgynous aspect. In Japan, Ksitigarbha is the patron of pregnant women, children who have died in infancy and, more recently, aborted fetuses.

Ksitigarbha alone among the Great Beings is portrayed as a monk, a mendicant and a pilgrim. As such he is the patron of travelers on foot and those who rely on the generosity of others. In this, his “created body” (nirmanakaya) form, he is the very model of the wandered, the eternal stranger who renounces a fixed abode in order to serve beings everywhere. By means of his activity he demonstrates that nirvana and samsara (literally, wandering) are in separable and equally the manifestations of interdependent co-arising (pratitya-samutpada).

Though a member of the Buddha family headed by Akshobya, Ksitigarbha is sometimes included in paintings of the Amitabha trinity on account of his unsurpassed ability to lead sentient beings to the Land of Perfect East (Skt. Sukhavati, Tib. Dewachen). Another common image of Ksitigarbha shows him wearing a crown and holding a wish-fulfilling gem in his left hand. Even in this regal form representing his “body of enjoyment” (samboghakaya), he is clothed in the robes of renunciation.

The outer Ksitigarbha is the tender, compassionate and helpful wanderer of the six realms. The inner Ksitigarbha is the focus of puja and the mantric basis of esoteric ritual practice. Together with his archetypal “twin” Akashagarbha (“Ethereal essence” or “Treasury of Space”), he watches over all that lies between heaven and earth: the five aggregates, the six elements, and the six kinds of sensory awareness. The “Secret” Ksitigarbha is hidden within the experience of the yogi and reveals himself directly, as the self-liberating data of the six senses and their respective modes of consciousness, in accord with the ripening of causes and conditions.

There are several types of meditation centered on the worship of Ksitigarbha. The most widespread is the recitation of the phrase “I prostrate Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva (Namo Ksitigarbha bodhisattvaya).” Followers of the Mantrayana and trainees in the East Asian “Way of Natural Wisdom,” a fusion of Taoist yoga, esoteric Buddhism, and indigenous nature mysticism, employ tantric rites and recite Ksitigarbha’s mantra, Om ha ha ha vismaye swaha. Those “true words”¹ are a sonic form of Ksitigarbha’s majesty, power and joyous laughter, the spontaneous expression of the knowledge of liberation in the very midst of the six realms.

Ksitigarbha and Akashagarbha form an esoteric pair within the microcosm of the human body/mind organism with its six “wheels” and various channels. They symbolize the limits of both sensory awareness and samsaric realm. Ksitigarbha, at the mulhadhara chakra, stands upon the earth; and Akashagarbha, at the ajña, dwells in the heavenly “space” beyond which there is only the primordial awareness.

¹ In the Chinese language, synonymous with “mantra” and, in Japan, the common name for Mantrayana, shingon.