print to burn (zhima)

In this print, used during the the Hungry Ghosts Festival and in funerals, the goddess Guanyin blesses the vessel that caries souls to Heaven. The long "sutra" explains in boudhist terms how life can be painful and how death is liberator. This comes to be strangely close to christian beliefs, and for some reason Guanyin was sometimes called by missionaries the "Holy Mary of the Chinese". Iconographically, and along many centuries, the Mercyful god(dess) inherited some old Helenistic features and some newer catholic traces, like becoming a nimbused child-bearing woman.