I’m no expert on Buddhism, but from what little I know (from a combination of that Keannau Reeves movie and some websites) Buddah went through a near-starvation phase, and then realized that he needs to eat. But, I don’t remember seeing anywhere where there’s a fat Buddha phase. And, since much of Buddhism seems to be the need to avoid desire, I would think a food fetish is very un-Buddha like. Sooo, why are all the statutes and recreations of Buddha him as a fat dude?
Buddha was indeed most likely rather trim. People who beg for food aren’t prone to obesity.
The fat Buddha is known as “Hotei”, which is apparently not supposed to actually represent the human form of Siddartha Gotama. Depending on who you ask, he’s either a heavenly incarnation of Buddha or a Chinese Buddhist monk named Hotei who laughed all the time and was known as “the laughing buddha”.
I wondered this for many years. If you look in Alice Getty’s xcellent book The Gods o Northern Buddhism in fact, you’ll see several depictions of a virtually skeletal Buddha, signifying the Starving Buddha. I have a lot of books on Buddhism i my eligiousbookcase, but not one of them explains why the “standard” Buddha in the West is a fat, smiling igure.
fnally earned the reason from the book Chinese Mythology, part of the Paul Hamlin eries on world mythologies. Apparently the “fat Buddha” is a hybrid figure, a combination of the Maitreya Buddha (the “Buddha who is to come”), Mi-Lo-Fo, conflated with the God of Wealth, a plump and happy figure. Getty actually has pictures of the God of Wealth in her book. The Maitreya Buddha, not having been born yet, has not undergone the sarvation that the presumably historical Gautama Sddhartha did, so a starving image isn’t appropriate.
Nah, the god of wealth is neither plump nor happy. There are actually several gods of wealth but none is supposed to be plump and happy.
First of all, it’s Buddha, not Buddah. Just as it’s Gandhi, not Ghandi. (Why is the Sanskrit dh so hard for Dopers to spell? I haven’t seen anyone misspelling John Walker Lindh as “Lhind” or something like that.)
The round bellied Ho Tei was of the Chan (Dhyana) school of Buddhism, the Chinese origin of what became known as Zen in Japan. Here’s a Ho Tei Zen story.
Ho Tei was carrying a big sack full of sweets. A Zen master asked him, “What is the meaning of Zen?” Without a word, he plopped the sack down on the ground. Then they asked him, “So, what is the actualization of Zen?” Smiling, he picked up the sack and went on his way.