Avalokiteshvara

Avalokiteshvara, 'the lord who looks down with compassion', is the great bodhisattva of compassion of the Mahayana, and the twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra — the Universal Gateway — is his chapter, setting out the thirty-three forms in which he appears to whatever being needs him. The Karandavyuha Sutra gives the mantra om mani padme hum and the six-syllable scheme that maps the syllables onto the six realms, and it places him in attendance on Amitabha, whose image he carries in his crown. His eleven-headed and thousand-armed forms arise in the Nilakantha and related tantras from the story that his head split with grief at the suffering he saw and Amitabha gave him eleven, and that the thousand arms with an eye in each palm grew from his resolve to reach every being at once. In Tibet he is Chenrezig, patron of the country and source of the Dalai Lama lineage; in China and Japan the same figure is venerated in a feminine form, Guanyin and Kannon.

Recitation of om mani padme hum is the standing lay practice across Tibetan culture, and he is turned to in illness, drowning, grief and fear. The thousand-armed form is the one used in tonglen — breathe in the suffering, breathe out relief — which is the practice the iconography was made to teach.