At least one miracle story involves the Blessed Virgin's assuming the physical
identity and existence of a nun who abandons her convent; unfortunately I
have no reference to it, though I've seen it described in many works.
John Parsons
On Sun, 15 Nov 1998, Phyllis Jestice wrote:
> I've gotten involved in a comparative religion project. The members of the
> group have come up with some very interesting cases in which a holy image
> takes on wounds, etc. in place of a loyal devotee. For example, The Record
> of Lineages of Buddhas and Patriarchs (C. Fozu tongji)tells of a man named
> Sun Jingde who was guarding the northern frontier from 535 to 537. He
> was a faithful devotee of Guanyin and kept a golden image of the bodhisattva,
> to which he offered daily worship. He was wrongly imprisoned and sentenced to
> death. After praying to Guanyin fervently one night, Sun dreamed of a monk who
> promised to save him from death if Sun would chant a thousand recitations of
> the sutra that the monk would dictate. But Sun only chanted it nine hundred
> times when he was taken out of the prison to be executed. He managed to finish
> the last one hundred recitations just as he arrived to the execution grounds.
> When he was struck with the executioner's blade, he was miraculously unharmed,
> but the blade broke in three pieces. Twice a new knife was produced, but the
> same thing happened. When this was reported to the King, Gao Huan, he pardoned
> Sun and promoted the sutra. When Sun looked at the statue of Guanyin, he saw
> three impressions on its neck that looked as if they were made by a knife
> (italics added).
> This passage is taken from Chun-fang Yu, "Guanyin: the Chinese Transformation
> of Avalokiteshvara," in Latter Days of the Law. Images of Chinese Buddhism
> 850-1850, ed. Marsha Weidner, Hawaii, 1994, p. 158.
>
> Are there parallels in medieval Christianity to this case of miraculous
> rescue with the added element of wound transference? I can remember a few
> hagiographical cases in which the devotee of a saint sees a vision of the
> saint bearing the wounds from which he or she saved the loyal follower, but
> most of my research has been on a period too early for this sort of thing,
> especially for holy images that suffer miraculous wounds. I'd appreciate
> any examples of such occurrences or insights on this.
>
> Phyllis
>
> Phyllis G. Jestice
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
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