Budai

Also Known As: Chinese 布袋, “cloth sack”; personal name Qieci 契此; also called Changtingzi and the Laughing Buddha; Japanese Hotei; Korean Podae; Vietnamese Bố Đại
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Buddhist Mythology, Chinese Mythology, Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Budai tells fortunes that never miss, foretells the weather with his footwear, sleeps in snow without getting wet, and is held to be Maitreya, the future Buddha, walking about unrecognised.
Role in Mythos: He is the wandering Chan monk of tenth-century Zhejiang whose dying verse turned a local eccentric into the popular face of Maitreya across China and, as Hotei, into one of Japan’s seven gods of good fortune.
Relation to Humans: He begs from ordinary people in markets and villages, takes whatever they give, and answers their questions about the teaching by setting down his sack. In return they read the weather from his feet, fought over his portrait when he died, and now set his statue at the front of their temples.

A fat man in a loose robe comes down the road into a market town in Zhejiang with a stick over his shoulder and a cloth sack swinging from the end of it. He begs at every stall. Whatever he is handed, pickled meat, salt fish, a spoonful of salted vegetables, he puts a little in his mouth and drops the rest into the sack, where it joins everything else he owns. Nobody in town knows his family. They call him Budai, which means cloth sack, and the name has outlived the one he was ordained with.

That ordained name was Qieci. He lived around Fenghua, in the hill country of Mingzhou, in the years after the Tang dynasty came apart, and he belonged to the Chan school in the loosest possible sense. He had no monastery of his own and no students. The collection of Chan biographies finished by the monk Daoyuan in 1004, less than a century after his death, describes him without flattery: a slack and heavy body, a wrinkled brow, a big belly, speech that wandered, and a habit of lying down to sleep wherever he happened to be standing when he got tired.

The same record says that people watched his feet. When rain was coming he would appear in wet straw sandals, hurrying along the road. When a dry spell was setting in he clattered about in high wooden clogs, then climbed onto the market bridge and slept there with his knees drawn up, and the townspeople planned their week around which pair he had on. He told fortunes too, good and bad, and the record insists they came true on the day he named. Once he was found asleep in a snowfall with no snow lying on him.

Monks who met him wanted more than weather. One asked him what the cloth bag was. He set the bag down. Another asked for the essential meaning of the Buddha’s teaching, and he set the bag down again, put his palms together, then picked it up and walked off. He never explained himself. Later Chan readers decided the sack was empty and that the emptiness was the point, though the oldest account is clear that it was full of leftovers.

Then came the morning at Yuelin Temple. In the third month of 916, or 917 by another count, Budai sat down on a flat rock under the eastern corridor and spoke four lines: Maitreya, true Maitreya, divides his body a million times over, shows himself to the people of the age again and again, and the people of the age do not know him. When the verse was finished he died where he sat, quietly, upright on cold stone.

The verse changed what he was. Maitreya is the Buddha still to come, waiting out the ages before his last birth, and here was a fat beggar announcing with his final breath that the waiting figure had been wandering the markets of Zhejiang the whole time. Reports followed from other districts of a monk seen walking the roads with a cloth bag on his shoulder. Monks, nuns and laypeople competed to have his portrait painted. His body was kept in the east hall of Yuelin Temple, and the biography notes that it was still there to be seen.

From that point the tramp and the future Buddha share one image. In Chinese monasteries the laughing, bare-bellied figure sits in the entrance hall under Maitreya’s name, the first thing a visitor meets. Two great Chan teachers of the twelfth century, Dahui Zonggao and Hongzhi Zhengjue, drew him into their school’s own lore, and he was matched with the last of the Ten Ox-herding Pictures, in which the awakened man walks back into the marketplace with open hands. Painters loved him. Liang Kai brushed him in ink in the thirteenth century, and later artists show him sitting or sleeping on his sack, dancing, pointing up at the moon, or mobbed by small children who climb over him as if he were furniture.

Japan read the two characters of his name as Hotei and took him further from the monastery. The bulging bag and the contented face looked like prosperity, and he joined the Shichifukujin, the seven gods of good fortune. Oddly, in group portraits of the seven he is sometimes the solemn one. Further afield he became simply the Laughing Buddha, and in the West he is routinely taken for Gautama himself, a lean ascetic prince confused with a stout Chinese vagrant who lived some fifteen centuries later. In Thailand he is mixed up with a different fat monk altogether, the disciple Kaccayana, called Phra Sangkajai. The two can be told apart by the head: Sangkajai keeps a trace of hair, and Budai is entirely bald.

What he can do follows from what the verse says he is. He sees ahead, in rain and in a stranger’s luck, as a being who is waiting on the far future might. Cold does not reach him and snow will not settle on him. He can be in a million places at once, wearing whatever body the age requires, and he was seen on the road after his own death with the bag back on his shoulder. He teaches without speaking, and the lesson is carried by a gesture anyone can copy.

His limits are just as plain. He is not recognised, and the verse itself complains of it. His speech does not hold together, so those who want doctrine from him get a sack on the ground and a back disappearing down the road. He owns nothing he cannot carry, eats what he is given, and sleeps on a bridge. And for all the multiplying bodies, the one that begged in Fenghua grew old and died on a rock. They kept it in the east hall.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Budai?

Budai is the nickname of Qieci, a Chinese Chan Buddhist monk who lived around Fenghua in Zhejiang and died in 916 or 917. The name means “cloth sack” and comes from the bag he carried on the end of his staff. After his death he came to be venerated as an incarnation of Maitreya, the future Buddha, and is widely known as the Laughing Buddha.

Is Budai the same as the Buddha?

No. Budai is a Chinese monk of the tenth century, while Gautama Buddha lived in India some fifteen centuries earlier. Budai is often mistaken for Gautama in the West because he is called the Laughing Buddha, but in Buddhist tradition he is linked with Maitreya, the Buddha still to come.

Why is Budai identified with Maitreya?

Budai is identified with Maitreya because of the verse he spoke just before he died at Yuelin Temple. In it he said that the true Maitreya divides his body a million times and shows himself to people who fail to recognise him. His followers took the verse as a statement about himself, and Chinese temples now place the laughing, big-bellied Budai in the entrance hall as Maitreya.

What is in Budai’s sack?

The earliest biography, completed in 1004, says Budai kept everything he owned in the sack along with scraps of the food he begged, such as pickled meat, fish and salted vegetables. Later Chan Buddhist readings treated the sack as empty. When monks asked Budai about the sack or about the meaning of the teaching, he answered by setting it down.

Are Budai and Hotei the same figure?

Yes. Hotei is the Japanese reading of the same two characters that spell Budai in Chinese. In Japan Hotei became one of the Shichifukujin, the seven gods of good fortune, because his bulging bag and contented look suggested prosperity.