Question: I would like to ask about the relationship between the Thousand-Armed Kannon and Princess Otohime and about their relationship to our physical world.

Answer: Their relationship is as with uncle and niece by marriage. Princess Otohime is the wife of Susano no Mikoto, the younger brother of Amaterasu Ôkami.

Princess Otohime got hold of all of the world’s riches and kept the treasure in the Dragon Palace. The Chinese ideogram for which the “oto” of Otohime is written is a pictorial depiction of the shape of a snake, so she is the Snake Princess. The “oto” of the ideogram for “snake” has the same vibration as the “oto” for “sound.”

When the Chinese ideogram for “su” as in the word Sushin, God of Su, is written in freestyle with a brush, it can look like the ideogram for “standing” and when the ideogram for “standing” is put on top of the ideogram for “day” or “sun”, it becomes the ideogram for “sound,” or in Japanese, “oto”. The “oto” of the ideogram for “sound” has the same vibration as the “oto” of the ideogram for “snake.” Princess Otohime stays in her residence and the world is dark. The Chinese ideogram for “darkness” is the ideogram for “sound or “oto” within the ideogram for gate, a traditional metaphor for “home.” When the ideogram for “sound” or “oto” is put beside the ideogram “sound” or “oto,” it forms the ideogram for “dark.”

That which watches and protects the darkened world of Princess Otohime is Kanzeon.

Kôhô (Bulletin of the Kôhô Society), Issue 2

July 1949

Translated by cynndd