Manjushri

Manjushri (Gentle Glory) is the bodhisattva of wisdom (prajna) in Mahayana Buddhism, the personification of the transcendent insight that cuts through ignorance. His emblems make the point directly: in his right hand he brandishes a flaming sword that severs delusion, and in his left he holds, or bears upon a lotus, a volume of the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) scriptures. He is invoked especially by students and by those seeking understanding, and he appears in many Mahayana sutras as a keen interlocutor who presses the deepest points of the teaching to their edge.

Manjushri is already a major figure in some of the earliest Mahayana sutras to reach China, including the Lotus Sutra, translated into Chinese by Dharmaraksha in the third century CE and again, more influentially, by Kumarajiva around 406 CE, and the Vimalakirti Sutra, in which he is given an unusually prominent role debating the wise layman Vimalakirti on the meaning of non-duality, one of the most celebrated philosophical dialogues in the whole Mahayana canon. His fuller name, Manjushri Kumarabhuta, Manjushri in the form of a youth or prince, reflects his consistent depiction as eternally young, read as expressing wisdom's freshness, immediacy and freedom from the accumulated weight of age.

Manjushri's cult is strongly tied to place. In Chinese Buddhism he (as Wenshu) is the presiding bodhisattva of Mount Wutai in Shanxi, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains and a major pilgrimage centre where he was believed to manifest to the devout. In Tibetan Buddhism he is central both as an object of devotion and, in wrathful form, as Yamantaka (Vajrabhairava), the fierce meditational deity understood as Manjushri's power turned against death and ignorance; great scholars and teachers are frequently regarded as his emanations. Through this range, from the serene youth with the sword to the terrifying conqueror of death, Manjushri stands, across the Mahayana and Vajrayana worlds, as the very figure of enlightened intelligence.

In addition to his sword and book, Manjushri is very frequently shown riding a blue or golden lion, an animal chosen to express the fearless, roaring quality of proclaimed wisdom, in deliberate visual contrast to the bodhisattva Samantabhadra, his frequent companion in Chinese and Japanese temple triads flanking a central Buddha image, who instead rides a white elephant symbolising practice and compassionate action. The paired imagery of the lion-riding Manjushri and elephant-riding Samantabhadra, wisdom and practice shown side by side, is one of the most common bodhisattva groupings in East Asian Buddhist temple art.