The Bitter Buddha, comedian Eddie Pepitone

Wisdom Quarterly; John Rabe (Off-Ramp/SCPR.org), Eddie Pepitone

Budai AK-47 (Mr. Will Coles)

Most comics use the F-word in their live acts like it's an article. But when Eddie Pepitone [a regular on the Jimmy Dore Show] uses it, it comes from the heart, or maybe his ample gut [which is good luck to rub].

 

The 54-year old comedian and actor (Law and Order: Criminal Intent, The Beat, Now and Again), who lives in North Hollywood, California, is finally seeing a glimpse of the fame his friends and colleagues have wished for him for years.

• VIDEO: "The Bitter Buddha" (comedy)

He's a regular on the club circuit, gained fame through appearances on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, and is the star of the documentary "Eddie Pepitone: The Bitter Buddha," by Steven Feinartz, which is now out on DVD.

 

Ya gotta feed'em the right nuts for their teeth!

Host John Rabe sat on a blanket with him at his favorite park in North Hollywood where he meditates and feeds the squirrels with his wife Karen. "And we're a little pedantic to other people in the park," he says, "because we see them feeding squirrels things like bread and even peanuts, and we're like 'No, no, no! Walnuts are the best for them because the shell works their teeth.' So we've gotten this reputation for being the squirrel pains in the asses." More

• AUDIO: Listen to the episode now

O, Christmas: Shaman Santa Cometh! (video)

Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; John Allegro

Was "Santa" originally a Siberian/Scandinavian shaman distributing magic mushrooms?

Reindeer-drawn sleigh in pagan Scandinavia, the Norwegian Lapland (visitnorway.com)

 

Budai (Elysia in Wonderland)

We love the holiday season -- not because of the crass commercialism, family fights, or endless droning of Judeo-Christian Xmas TV specials around the house.

No, it is because scholarly research has shown us the true origins of the Santa Claus.

It is not, as the Catholic Christians say, Saint Nick(olas). But we'll have to check in with Megyn Kelly and Jon Stewart for the ongoing debate about that as Stephen Colbert and Bill O'Reilly weigh in.

The indigenous Scandinavians, the Sami, and their shaman ways tied to reindeer and magic mushrooms: Introducing Santa

 

Weihnachten means Krampus

No, it is a Scandinavian/Siberian tale of something that really happened and happens -- a custom, a ritual, something to look forward to in the cold of winter. Across Siberia and Norwegian-Swedish-Finnish Lapland, among the indigenous peoples, the blond Sami and brunette (pre-Buddhist) Mongolians, the local shaman gathered the entheogen mushrooms.

• (Many Buddhists are Russians, and many more are Mongolian-Siberians, Central Asians, and inhabitants of Europe's only indigenously Buddhist country, Kalmykia).

Amanita mushrooms on pine needle floor

The red and white gifts from Mother Nature sprung up under and around pine trees. Big gifts come in small packages. Each family got its share, delivered by reindeer-drawn sleigh to hut houses with prominent chimneys burning away. The shaman came in the front door, made his moist distribution, which were in dire need of drying to preserve and maximize their effectiveness. (A chemical conversion process takes place through heating, drying, or boiling).

• Why pine trees? Is it because they are evergreen and therefore a symbol of fertility? Partly as birthrates nine months down the road show, but mainly because these fly agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria) have a symbiotic relationship with the roots of pine trees. Not much can grow in the bed of dropped needles, a chemical plant strategy to enhance the success of their species by more or less sterilizing adjacent ground and minimizing competition.

Paul Stamets: the world's first "Internet" or communication Web, Mycelium "Running"

  

Mushrooms communicate very well.

The driest and warmest place to accomplish this was above an open fire, in the hearth, in convenient stockings that that hung their. Stocking stuffers, to the delight of Kris Kringles and toadstool-loving gnomes and sprinkling-fairies and mischievous elves who haunted residents with their poltergeist activities. These elementals really went to work, activities which became visible to those consuming the Forest's offerings. No one knew better than the reindeer themselves, with perhaps the exception of old jolly (delirious) Saint Shaman. They "fly" in two senses, high as the sky thanks to licking the snow and trotting, prancing, bounding as they pull.

  

Jolly Budai or Hotei with his sack and candy (Dbonyun/flickr.com)

Massive Budai (melissahardytrevenna)

• Eventually the legend of an obese saintly man carrying a big sack of gifts to give out drifted Far(ther) East from Siberia to China and made it to Buddhist Asia. In addition to Scandinavian shaman "Santa" in his white and red furs, there is Chinese shraman "Santa" in his patchwork saffron robes: Budai (Hotei) Bodhisattva, the "fat, happy Laughing Buddha" as he is almost universally regarded. He was actually a historical figure, a jolly and rotund Buddhist monk who went about carrying a sack of treats to give to children.

Another Mushroom Link

Jesus was a mushroom -- no, really, he was!

If we were to say that Saint Issa (of "Jesus Christ" fame) was a mushroom, we would be scorned and ridiculed -- charged with hooliganism and inciting religious hatred like our Russian colleagues. But it is not we who say such a strange thing. 

It is preeminent, banned-by-the-Vatican scholar John M. Allegro (johnallegro.org) -- author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, familiar with many texts in Christian languages (Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English) -- who figured it out.

 

The would-be Satan or Santa?

He was such a towering figure in Christian theology that he could not be dismissed. So his work, originally titled "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East," was banned.

 

What does Allegro mean when claiming that the sacred sage Jesus (a former Buddhist monk according to the BBC), son-of-god (Sanskrit devaputra, anyone reborn among celestial devas, son-of-man, anyone reborn in our manusya loka, Human Plane, as the offspring-of-humans), Jewish revolutionary (renegade rabbi), and presumptive Vajrayana "Maitreya" (Messiah, the new Mithra), was a "mushroom"?

Ye olde Xmas catalogs (wishbook)

Was he the Nazarene Leader of the Essenes or "Jesus Christ," whose name is actually a title meaning "Yahshua the Redeemer"?

Of course, Jesus of Nazareth may have been a good Middle Eastern man and troublemaker (or an exiled dynastic Egyptian trying to gather up an army to attack the Pharaoh), but he only lived on in legend as the "greatest person who ever lived" (Jesus Christ superstar) because clever esoteric Essene/Jewish cultists embodied the lore of magic mushrooms in the name of this obscure figure.

Sami (Erika Larsen/NYTimes.com)

He returned to Nazareth or Jerusalem, Palestine (or Ethiopia, or Egypt) from 18 "lost years" in Kashmir, India. (See scholar Holger Kersten). He was preaching something new, which the mushroom cult adopted as a cover story. Christianity grew to greatness not as the religion of this godman-sadhu-guru, as we are we taught in the West, but as the amalgamation of Euro Pagan Greco-Roman syncretism -- appropriating (borrowing) everything but calling it by new names to fit its take-over-the-world theology.

• 

  Xmas in Japan = money

  Why do so many people claim Jesus/Y'shua as their own -- Jews, Greeks, imperial Holy Romans, Egyptians (Coptics), Tibetan Buddhists (who consider him a tulku, rimpoche, or even as Maitreya Buddha), Persians (who see him as Mithra), and so on and so on? It is because Christianity misappropriated parts of Jesus' life story to fabricate the greatest story every sold/told. It worked. Catholicism/Christianity can claim about three billion adherents, at least nominally, twice the number of Buddhists (when China's billion Buddhists, formerly counted as "atheists" in officially-communist China, are classified correctly in census records).

(TTW) Allegro on the mycological origins of Jesus Christ (Min. 1:50)

 

Scandinavian shaman fairyland

The Essenes -- mystic-monastic Jews, forerunners of the Gnostics, with a monasticism for spiritual striving that was new to the Near East/West (rather than the traditional rabbinical/priestly family integration) -- would have been lost to history. But the message that we are all "GOD," that we are of a divine nature (i.e., have the potential to become devas and brahmas when we are reborn again as spiritus, "light beings," subtle matter of the Fine Material Sphere), that an entheogen like magic mushrooms draws out and makes evident, was too good to lose.

Allegro figured out and published how Jesus came to be conflated with magic mushroom lore, but that he was, of that Allegro was absolutely convinced.

Garden gnome Budai

What motivated Budai/Hotei Bodhisattva to gain weight, distribute treats, and be so happy, that we do not know. Wandering Buddhist monks, called shramans, are like that.

More importantly, what will Wisdom Quarterly staff be doing for Christmas, the Pagan holiday of gift giving and merriment? Eating traditional Chinese food, rubbing Budai's belly for luck, reading our fortunes in the folds of inedible cookies, visiting family and friends to collect and distribute gifts just as Buddhist Lisa Simpson would have us do (any maybe this year there will finally be a wrapped pony under the plastic tree), and Xmas Eve meditation at Against the Stream.

(ML) A Very Pagan Xmas: The True Origins of Christmas

 

Everything we "know" about Christmas we don't. Iranian Mithra has more to do with it than Israeli Jesus. Every common holiday misconception is cracked wide open. The producers who unmasked Halloween now unwrap Christmas. This is a must see for seekers of truth. It recounts Biblical tales. But was Dec. 25th Jesus' birthday? Why do we decorate a pine tree, put lights up, teach children to believe in St. Nicholas, or Santa and his magical reindeer? Paganism. Christendom adopted popular customs; it did not invent them. This will be the Season for Reason when the real story of Christmas is known. For once our eyes are open, Christmas may never close them again.

  

Paul Stamets' Fungi Perfecti (fungi.com)

 

The Sami or Lapp

Sami girl in kolt (visitnorway)

Lapp means a "patch of cloth" for mending. Thus, the name suggests that the Sami are wearing patched garments [just as India's "shamans," the Buddhist shramanas, or "wandering ascetics" (some say bhikkhu/ni originally meant "one who picks up  or makes use of discarded rags for clothing") wear patched robes], a derogatory term and one that needs to be replaced. The word "Laplander" is also problematic since that could mean any person who lives within this region, even non-natives. Finally, there's a part of the Sami population who always have lived outside the region of "Lapland" such as the Sami of Sweden, Jemtland, and Härjedalen. (Editor: One Sami word that made it into several major languages is tundra, which speaks volumes about this part of the world). More

• PHOTOS: Reindeer, dishes, and Sami (New York Times) 

How to solve Zen koans (cartoon)

CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Gia Yesu, Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly, with instructor Betsy Enduring Vow (ZCLA) and Grayson and Roshi Jeff Albrizze (PasaDharma.org)

IF koans (Zen Buddhist "riddles" from the Japanese word for "public case") are not for intellectually "solving" or "deciphering," what are they for?

ZCLA is an oasis of diversity (Obon)

We went down to the Zen Center of Los Angeles today with Roshi Albrizze (PasaDharma.org) to see Roshi Tenshin Fletcher (zmc.org) and took ZP-1 (Zen Practice, Module 1, ZCLA's intro class). 

Noah Levine (breitenbush)

Author and Theravada insight meditation (vipassana) practitioner Noah Levine, co-founder of Dharma Punx/Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society, was on hand with us for basic training. We learned to sit up straight, bend down to bow fully, hold our hands with opposing thumb-tips on our laps, walk as slowly as humanly possible, and were given some insight into "working with koans." Fortunately, Noah pressed and pressed to get at the point of koan practice. The example Betsy gave was:

 

Yes I do, Joshu! We all do.

A monk asked Zen master Joshu, "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" The Zen master replied, "Moo!" (Japanese mu, negation, "not," "nonbeing").* Betsy went on to explain that this would be like the Archbishop of Los Angeles asking the Italian pope, "Is there a God?" and the pontiff answering, "Hell no!" A paradox, because surely a figurehead like the leader of the Catholic Church believes in his deity, so why would he negate the archbishop's question? Thinking will not arrive at an answer, but there is a way to find out. How does one solve it and, moreover, what would be the point of solving it?

 

*This famous question comes from a fragment of a koan (Case 1, The Gateless Gate). Paradoxically, another koan (Case 18, The Book of Serenity) presents a longer version, in which Joshu answers "yes" in response to the exact same question asked by a different monk.

Noah, did it blow your mind? It did ours, like a rake in a rock garden! (buddhistmedia)

Homer goes to hell for a day (Avici), and Flanders is the devil.

 

How to solve koans

Pick a finger (Gutei)

There is no thinking, grappling, ruminating, or pondering involved. That is surely a dead end. An answer/solution arrived at in this way, if it is good and particularly pithy, will "stink of Zen." The bell will ring, and the interviewer (for dokusan or face-to-face meeting) will yell, "Next!" 

 

Of course, "Next!" is what s/he'll yell even if the Zen practitioner gets it "right." But s/he won't do it with a twinkle in his or her eye acknowledging that you were onto something this time, and it is now appropriate to move on to the next public case.

Instead of "thinking," a koan is successfully resolved by grokking, that is, by a semi-subconscious remembrance of the case without straining to get anywhere in an effort to solve it. Rock/grok it gently like a baby at heart level. In this way, illumination dawns, an epiphany (satori) occurs, and a deep certainty arises that one has understood what the conscious mind could never have hammered out by mere reasoning.

Roshi Jeff Albrizze (PT)

So when Bart Simpson was asked, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" the answer was not to slap his digits against his palms producing a muted clap. It was, instead, a way of opening the boy up to a world of conscious possibility, an awareness or knowing beyond thought and wit and reason. 

 

"Intuition" is a name for it, but it is very misleading due to the connotations we've layered on. "A knowing that surpasseth all understanding" is a Christian translation for the phenomenon that seems to approximate the wordless experience. "Direct knowledge" unmediated and unencumbered by the thought process might be a New Age way of stating it.

Budai: Fat, Happy Homer "Buddha" Simpson statue (Kidrobot)

 

"Japanese Yosemite" (Kamikōchi), Nagano Prefecture, altitude 4,900 ft. (1,500 m). The kami or kanji 神垣内 of Kami-ko-uchi are the shapeshifting mountain monsters of Japan. This water soaked site resembles the flooding Yokoji ZMC near Idylwild, California, experienced after a wildfire annihilated the earth-retaining forest all around the center.

  

Dharma talk: Zen Mountain Center to rebuild?

Fire dragon of flames (privet.ru)

Abbot Tenshin, Yokoji Zen Mountain Center (ZMC): Tenshin's "Dharma" talk was brief and to the point: There was a fire, but a fire crew made up of convicts/volunteer firefighters, who had learned to meditate at Yokoji, refused to give up when ordered to abandon ZMC by the fire department.

 

Their heroic efforts saved the Yokoji. Proving there's no such thing as karma, or that there is such a thing as karma, but that it rarely -- as happened here -- turns around to benefit one so clearly and tangibly.

 

However, karma works in mysterious ways: What fire could not do, Nature obliged the rains to take care of: Five days of California monsoon weather (due, we think, to climate chaos and our deteriorating environment) washed down tons of muddy debris on ZMC, covering most of the site under three feet of silt and ashes. Maybe it will be dug out, maybe it won't. Trees' lives hang in the balance.

Tenshin Fletcher (zmc.org)

Although the trees are all hearty redwoods, they cannot bear to have their trunks sunk underground. Donations of time, effort, and funds would help, but Tenshin is reluctant to say so. For the one thing he has learned through all of these ordeals is that he and his family will survive. Life may be full of ups and downs, but we can remain relatively steady in the ebb and flow, wave and trough, high and low. Abbot Tenshin Fletcher -- who received helpful advice from Tassajara in Big Sur (San Francisco Zen Center), which famously survived a California forest fire -- previously lived and worked at ZCLA years ago and has remained a vibrant Dharma friend of the current ZCLA Abbess Wendy Nakao and many of the center's older and disproportionately Jewish-Buddhist (JuBu) residents.

Explaining the "Parable of the Raft"

Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Ven. Karunananda, Ph.D., Wisdom Quarterly

Siddhartha was an ascetic under trees in search of freedom from samsara's seas (Hokusai)

 

Ascetic Sid, Mes Aynak (livescience.com)

According to the historical Buddha, the "Sage who came from the Shakya clan," if we want to cross over from this shore (samsara) full of danger to the further shore (nirvana) beyond all danger, we need to put together a "raft" (a sufficient understanding of the practice).
 

We gather just enough material then we strive diligently and consistently. We exert just enough effort (viriya), paddling with every limb we have, to cross over to nirvana.

• The Parable of the Raft

Persistent balanced-effort is the gradual path the Buddha taught, or we risk exhausting ourselves and giving up long before we reach the goal. Or we die trying by the legendary exertion that gets all the attention (in the story of the Buddha, of forest dwelling monastics, of patriarchs in later schools) in spite of the fact that it does not work to overdo it. Paradoxically, sometimes the "effort" required is allowing, that is, accepting, non-doing, abandoning the detrimental, letting go of clinging.

Under a sprawling Bodhi tree

Siddhartha persists but with ease and balance accessing the wealth of the jhanas.

 

Bodhi tree shrine, India (Themeplus)

Siddhartha did not succeed under the Bodhi tree because he tried so hard: So long as he was trying that hard, he could not succeed. He succeeded because he eased off, first accepting help from the maiden Sujata then realizing that jhanas (blissful and equanimous meditative absorptions) were the way. As an austere ascetic, he had been so afraid of pleasure and of becoming attached to it that he had avoided

A sufficient raft is all we need. Even a poorly fabricated raft is enough to get across over the flood (ogha), this sea of samsara. "Enough" concentration is enough, enough insight is enough. The goal exists.
 

Whether or not we achieve (patiently allow) absorption, access concentration may be enough. It becomes the route we take, the one now available to us. The Buddha's gradual path takes us from virtue to calm (samatha) to effortless-concentration (samma-samadhi). 

 

Even a flimsy foundation may be just enough support to successfully practice mindfulness (four foundations or bases) that support wisdom. Liberation depends on it.

The swirling, whirling, sucking sea

If there is time and a suitable teacher, a more stable platform is helpful. A human life is extraordinarily rare. It's a terrible thing to waste and a wonderful thing to utilize to finally see nirvana. If all one reaches is absorption (jhana), which is purifying by suppressing the defilements, that will lead to a very welcome rebirth.

But the end of all rebirth and suffering is the goal for those who have understood what the Buddha taught. So beyond calm, there is liberating-insight to strive for. This breakthrough is accomplished by practicing the factors of Dependent Origination. One thereby sees and undoes suffering. It is only by knowing-and-seeing the Path (magga-phala, "path-and-fruition" consciousnesses) that one awakens to unending peace.

The world is the world is the world

O, spirit, where shall I sit? - Try that tree (Deen406)

From this world, it is easy to see dukkha (suffering, disappointment, woe, lack of fulfillment from our many endeavors).

 

It is also visible from the lower Sensual-Sphere deva worlds, but on this plane we have drive due to there being reasons to strive constantly on our heels, urging and reminding us of the dangers: aging, sickness, ignominy, death, rebirth. The threat of defamation and infamy are very real as we face Eight Worldly Conditions:

• success and failure (gain and loss),
• fame and obscurity, 
• praise and blame, 
• pleasure and pain.

Who needs "the end of all suffering"? We all would IF we understood what the Buddha meant by dukkha. Some say, "All life is suffering." That is completely wrong -- unless one grasps what "suffering" means as a translation of dukkha. All the Buddha ever taught, according to him, was suffering and the end of suffering, disappointment and the end of disappointment, dukkha and nirvana. 

The way to nirvana is enlightenment (bodhi). And the way to enlightenment is mindfulness (as set up moment to moment and actively developed through contemplative themes outlined in the Maha Satipatthana Sutra). And the way to mindfulness is "meditation" (calm, zen, jhana, serenity, samatha, unification, singlemindedness, absorption, nondistraction, and samma-samadhi or "right concentration"). And the way to meditation is virtue (sila), which imparts peace of mind and non-remorse.

Samsara is impermanent (ever changing), unsatisfactory (disappointing), and impersonal. There is great danger inherent in it for the unenlightened. So we should get enlightened or into the stream certain to take us to enlightenment as soon as possible. Danger, what danger?

Until stream entry there is an ever-present danger of falling into unfortunate realms (rebirth destinations) for indeterminate periods of time. Then, during those times, one forgets the goal, forgets even the possibility of there being freedom from suffering, the possibility of awakening from this miserable dream with nightmare aspects. Continued: Who am I?

Who am I?

Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven, Ven. Karunananda, Ph.D., Wisdom Quarterly

But I am. I am this I am! "I think; therefore, I am"! I am my thinking, no, the Thinker, right?

 

Continued from Explaining the Parable of the Raft. All we see is an illusion, seeming to be what it is not: seeming to be stable, seeming to be able to satisfy/fulfill us, seeming to be a thing (when it is really a composite).

A composite? Things are not single-things but amalgamations of things. We can see it all around us, as things fall apart. So long as they seem solid, we repeatedly forget that they are something else.

 

But what we never see, never dream, are never told, are never taught except that a buddha rediscovers and teaches the world is that ALL things are impersonal. "I" is an aggregate-thing, "ego" is a thing, "self" ("soul") is a thing. What is it composed of?

 

Self/No-self (gingernutdesigns/flickr.com)

It is composed of FIVE HEAPS of things (and those things themselves are things, dharmas, composite-aggregates of other things). 

1. Forms, 2. sensations, 3. perceptions, 4. formations, and 5. consciousnesses are the categories of heaps, things, bundles of phenomena that keep giving rise to the illusion, "SELF," the idea or assumption that there is a "self" and, likewise, that there are others. And we never see, or more correctly, and never is seen. What is not known-and-seen? We never awaken to what is real. Nirvana is real.

Why do we neglect the highest good, the ultimate goal of knowing-and-seeing? There are many reasons, which seem private and idiosyncratic. But for all they come down to the defilements (āsavas, the inflows and outflows that swirl in samsara). So why are we surprised that we feel disappointed, empty, unfulfilled, desperate, miserable, alone, out of control? All of that is dukkha.
 

Budai (Hotei) hears, sees, speaks no harm.

The "defilements" are of different kinds: taints of [clinging to] sensuality, being, views, and delusion. The Buddhist scholar Isaline Horner translates the original terms kāmā-, bhavā-, diṭṭhā-, and avijja-āsava -- quoted by Padmasiri De Silva in An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology (2000) -- as the "cankers" of "sense-pleasure, becoming, false views, and ignorance." The word canker suggests something that corrodes or corrupts slowly. These figurative meanings perhap describe facets of the Buddha's conceptual teaching of āsava: kept long in storage, oozing out, [seeping in], taint, corroding, and so on.

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Partying at the "Little Buddha" Club

Amber Larson, CC Liu, Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; HuddsFilm1/flickr.com (photography)

Waiting around to enter the Little Buddha club (Huddsfilm1/flickr.com)

  

Bar's namesake is NOT the Buddha but Hotei

What is there to do in Europe? Not much. Oh, I know! Let's go to the Little Buddha club. Bands play there, suds flow, and we can stand around looking pretty. Dirty Green Vinyl is playing. Maybe I'll meet someone, too.

Who would name a bar, a place explicitly existing to be out of it, after the most sober person in history? Enlightenment is the opposite of delusion, wisdom the opposite of intoxication, right view the opposite of hallucinations. But, hey, why so heavy? It's just a name.

Why is this place called "Little Buddha"?

And anyway it does not refer to the historical Shakyamuni, "Sage of the Shakyas," the warrior prince who abandoned the palace and the good life for a higher calling, the real high life (brahmacarya) that leads out of this misery-fraught wandering on through worlds, lives, torments, and doldrums.

It's like nirvana! I think that's why.

Still, people might think it does. We should protest. We should circulate a petition on Facebook. We should march in front of this hole in the wall. It's bad enough when this kind of thing happens in Thailand.

 

Now it's made it to the Continent and its economic environs. We can't stand for that. *Yawn* Or maybe we can.

Who?

Who is the "Little Buddha" after which the club is named anyhow? There was once a Mahayana monk in China, a Siberian St. Nick/Santa Claus character who carried around a cloth sack filled with candy instead of mushrooms to be handed out to children. He is jolly, jovial, and really chubby. He isn't the Buddha at all, just the good luck Bodhisattva Hotei (Budai, Bố Đại, Pu-Tai, "Cloth Sack").

Yeah, I hear Nirvana played here. What?

He is arguably the "face of Buddhism," obese and golden, full of good fortune, found at the entrance of many good restaurants and Asian businesses. He is more a patron saint of worldly success than any kind of spiritual icon. Nevertheless, one finds him in Pure Land temples and Theravada altars with lots of Chinese or Japanese influence. Hotei is everywhere in Asia. Who doesn't need a belly to rub for luck?

That's not "the Buddha"!

Bố Đại: the fat, happy Laughing Buddha

Hotei (Japanese), Budai or Pu-Tai (Chinese, 布袋; Bùdài), Bố Đại in Vietnamese, is a Chinese folkloric deity also popular with Taoists. His name means "Cloth Sack," and comes from the bag that he is conventionally depicted as carrying. He is usually identified with (or as a pre-incarnation of) Maitreya the future Buddha -- so much so that the Hotei image is one of the main forms in which Maitreya is depicted in East Asia. He is almost always shown smiling or laughing, hence his nickname in Chinese, the Laughing Buddha (Chinese, 笑佛). Sadly, many Westerners confuse Budai with the historical Shakyamuni Buddha Gautama.

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