Putuo's status as Guanyin's mountain traces to a Japanese monk who tried to take a statue home and, by tradition, was not allowed to leave with it.
The Guanyin who would not go
Tradition holds that in 916 CE a Japanese monk named Egaku, attempting to carry a Guanyin statue from mainland China back to Japan by boat, found his vessel repeatedly blocked near the island by a field of iron lotus flowers that appeared in the water, a sign he interpreted as the bodhisattva's own refusal to leave China. Egaku left the statue on the island instead, founding what became known as the "Guanyin Who Would Not Go" temple and establishing Putuo's identity as Guanyin's dwelling place on earth.
Three temples, one island
Putuo's devotional geography centres on three major monasteries, Puji, Fayu and Huiji, each associated with different periods of the island's development and each maintaining its own community of resident monks and nuns, an unusual concentration of major institutions on a single small island rather than spread across a mountain range.
A mountain that is actually an island
Unlike China's other three major Buddhist mountains, Putuo is a small island in the Zhoushan archipelago off the Zhejiang coast, reached only by boat, a geography that has shaped its pilgrimage practice around sea crossings rather than mountain ascents.