Vernacular Compassion in Metropolitan Bangkok: Guanyin Devotion, Iconography, and the Urban Infrastructures of Religious Experience

This article argues that “compassion” in the worship of Guanyin in metropolitan Bangkok is not an unchanging category as one might assume, but a religious construction generated by the dialectic of devotion, images, and the urban religious architecture. Based on a consideration of Guanyin devotion in various locations around Bangkok and the larger metropolitan area, the following study illustrates the construction, mediation, and stabilization of compassion through devotee practices, images of Guanyin, and spatial configurations necessary for access to, presence within, and experiential encounter with the religious site. Although Guanyin devotion occurs within Mahayana networks, the Chinese diaspora community, and non-monastic devotional settings, each site analyzed here can be understood as a living space where issues of religious authority, visual judgment, spatial accessibility, and bodily experience meet. Through ethnography, visual analysis, and a focus on concepts of lived and material religion, it is demonstrated that the concept of compassion does not arise from theological discourse; rather, the definition of compassion is created locally through the dynamic interrelationship between bodies, images, spatial configurations, and lived experience.