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hand holding a precious object including a rosary, cudgel, jar, spear, pagoda, golden arrow, halberd, or bell, etc. and it is therefore not surprising that the images of Chun-t'i on the altars of both Buddhist and folk religion temples portray her with eight or eighteen arms and hands, the main two hands being held palms pressed together before the chest in prayer. The uppermost hands hold discs of the Sun and Moon respectively and the remainder, individually, hold various attributes including a seal of office, a sword, shield and fly switch. She is variously represented with three heads though predominantly she is depicted with one head with three faces one of which is that of a sow. Chun-t'i again often has a third eye in the centre of her forehead, usually a Taoist form but attributed to her Indian origin as a metamorphosed caste mark. She is generally portrayed sitting on a lotus throne in the same posture adopted by the Buddha and, in one of her poses, also by Kuan Yin P’u-sa. According to Werner the legend explaining the third face being that of a sow and the creatures supporting the lotus also being pigs relates how one of the abbesses of the Semding monastery in Tibet in whom the goddess Chun-t'i was believed to be successively incarnated, had an excrescence resembling a sow's ear at the back of her head.
In northern and central China in Tantric Buddhist temples, the Lamaist goddess Maritci, portrayed in a chariot drawn by seven pigs is identified as Chun-t'i; in the south however, where Tantric Buddhism hardly penetrated, images identified as Chun-t'i are said by priests, should devotees enquire, to be the Brahmanic cult of Maritci. However, in Tibetan and Mongol [Tantric] Buddhism Tou-mu is a common deity with her three eyes and many arms; she is considered to be an incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva known throughout China as Kuan Yin and this doubtless explains the confusion with Kuan Yin in central and southern China. She has been identified as Tou-mu Yuan-chün, the main deity in the T'ai Sui Hall in the Jade Emperor temple in Tainan, where she is flanked by two Tantric aides, Ch'ieh-ch'ih and Yao Ya.
In her Taoist form she is portrayed seated on a lotus, again of Indian origin, which in a number of temples rests on the back of a tortoise which in turn rests on three or seven pigs. Most likely this is no more than a reflection of the tale in the Feng-shen Yen-i in which one of the disciples of Tou-mu, Shui-huo Tung-tzu, who changed into a tortoise, bore off Tou-mu to the Western Heavens.