Preface 2

  1. Where there is light, there is also darkness; and when there is joy, there is also sorrow. If Laozi shoulders this side of existence, then Guanyin needs to shoulder the other side. Guanyin’s unknown future path is full of suffering and evil spirits, but because divine beasts are divine beasts, they have no choice but to leave her.

  2. All alone, Guanyin begs for food as she walks along the dried riverbed and through the wilderness. Famished, she encounters an even more famished tigress who, although nearly dead from hunger, still wants to nurse her three cubs one last time. The tigress is so hungry that she can no longer produce any milk, so she cries out when her cubs bite her teats. She stands up and gazes at the sky and into the desolate wilderness, until finally her gaze comes to rest on her cubs.

The tigress decides that if she wants to live, she has no choice but to consume her own cubs.

Just as she is about to eat her cubs, however, she finds she is unable to continue, and instead spits them out.

She loses consciousness, as her cubs also pass out from hunger by her side.

  3. Guanyin approaches and, after stopping in front of the tigress and her three cubs, decides to feed the tigress with her own flesh. She sits down and places her arm in the animal’s mouth. The tigress slightly opens her mouth, but is so weak from hunger she doesn’t even have the energy to bite down on the arm.

Seeing this, Guanyin pokes her arm with a thorn until it bleeds, then lets the blood drip directly into the tigress’s mouth. As Guanyin does so, the tigress regains consciousness and begins to recover her strength, whereupon she proceeds to stare at Guanyin.

Guanyin closes her eyes and lies down beneath the tigress’s mouth. The tigress begins to devour her, eventually spitting out one of the bones. Later, Guanyin awakens from the bone, her face covered in a glow as if from the rising sun. From the bone the tigress spits out, Guanyin attains a new life.