Would you like to irritate some Buddhists? Point to the fat figure you can see in so many places and call it “the Buddha”.

You do not need to look far to find the Chinese god of happiness, as he is also known. In Chinese (and some Japanese) restaurants and curio shops you will find him easily, always laughing, sometimes at the young children jumping down on his enormous belly.

Many of you will have thought that the fat figure pictured below is indeed the Buddha. But it is not. Actually all these figures, large and small, are of Buddhist origin. But now the figure has become part of wider Chinese and Japanese folklore, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike.

Figure 1: Budai. Photo credit: Marian McCaffrey, Wikimedia Commons

Somewhere around the end of the tenth century CE, there lived in China an eccentric Chán monk called Bùdài (Pu Tai in the older trascription method, or Hotei in Japanese), who wandered the country carrying nothing but his walking stick and a sack with his few belongings. In time, his good humour made him famous across China and from there into Korea and Japan. Today, Budai's friendly laugh is invading the western world as well, indeed, to such an extent that he has taken the Buddha's place in the minds of westerners! (You can read more about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budai)

But what about the Buddha himself? There are no pictures or sculptures of the Buddha that were made during his lifetime. In fact, for the first several centuries after the Buddha's death, it would be considered uncouth to make such a representation.How could a mere artist depict someone who had completely escaped into nirvana?

When Buddhists finally decided to make paintings and sculptures of the Buddha, then, they had no idea what the founder of their religion had looked like. What they did know that he was described as showing the "32 marks of the superior man" as well as the "80 secondary marks of the superior man". Let's look at just a few of them:

He has the mark of a thousand-spoked wheel on the soles of his feet

He can touch his knees with the palms of his hands without bending

His sexual organs are concealed in a sheath.

His hair is blue-black, and curls clockwise in rings.

He has eyelashes like an ox

His head is like a royal turban

(You can view the full list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-two_marks_of_the_Buddha)

Figure 2: The Buddha. Photo credit: Don Manfredo: Wikimedia Commons

Needless to say, if all this were to be taken literally the Buddha must have been a very odd-looking person. But it was understood from the beginning that these marks did not necessarily describe his physical body but a sort of aura that he carried around with him and which could only be seen by the spiritually advanced. And it was this aura that would eventually be depicted in paintngs and sculptures of the Buddha.

As time went by, different Buddhist cultures created their own ideas of what the Buddha must have looked like (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_art), and this is why a Thai Buddha-statue looks different from a Mongolian one. But they all agree on one thing. The Buddha was not fat.

Figure 3: The Buddha. Photo credit: Unknown 19th century Mongolian artist, Tibetan Museum Society, Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, what about our old friend Budai? He is regarded by some in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition as a transformation body (i.e. an appearance on Earth) of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future. Some Taoist traditions have adopted him as one of the Immortals, and in that Chinese folkloric religion that somehow never got awarded the dignity of being an "ism", he will forever live on as the laughing, travelling monk with his stick and sack, with little children swarming all over him. The "Chinese god of happiness"? There are certainly worse ways to be remembered.

There is a sense in the higher reaches of Buddhist philosophy in which we are all "Buddha", in which everything is "Buddha". In that sense, Budai is the Buddha, just as we all are. But he was not the historical Buddha.

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This work is licensed by Michel Clasquin-Johnson under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.

Last edited by Michel Clasquin-Johnson on May 25, 2010 9:13 am -0500.