Given the little I know of the story of the Buddha and his teachings, it seems that the statues I often see portraying the Buddha are great misrepresentations. IIRC, the Buddha fasted for significant periods of time in quest for enlightenment, which certainly doesn’t match the rotund forms I see in many asian eateries. Also, didn’t he teach that joy came from getting away from the suffering of mortality, and that true joy came from escaping to Nirvana? It doesn’t seem to match the smiling bejeweled statues I see.
We’ve discussed this several times on the Board, but it’s rarely discussed elsewhere. The jolly, happy Buddha so familiar from statues and restaurants isn’t any aspect of the many Buddhas common in Asia. You’ll look in vain for him in Alice Getty’s The Gods of Northern Buddhism (which I think of as “A Field Guide to the Buddhas”) In fact, some carvings of the “Historical Buddha” Gautama Siddhartha depict him as thin and emaciated, as he was when he tried to obtain enlightenment through fasting, before he discovered the eightfold way.
One book I’ve read claims that the happy Buddha is Mi-Lo-Fo, one form of the Maitreya Buddha that has gotten used as a good luck symbol. Another says that the fat Buddha is a combination of one of the forms of Buddha with the God of Wealth (But the GoW is in Getty’s book, and he’s not normally fat).
IANAB, but I think Prince Siddhartha ≠ The Buddha. Not in quite the same way that Muhammed ≠ Allah, but at least in the sense that the Buddha can be found in everything not just Prince Siddhartha finding the Buddha within himself etc
Not exactly. The closest you get to that concept is in some of the viewpoints about “the Buddha-nature” in some of the Mahayana schools, but that’s still different than what you describe. (Actually, the closest you get to the concept you’ve described is in bad movies where the hero or heroine discovers that greatness was in him ALL ALONG.)
“Buddha” means “enlightened one”, and is used to describe someone who’s achieved “nirvana”, which is a kind of mental state where you’ve become aware of the world and your place in it and have gotten rid of feelings of desire, self preservation, fear, etc…all the emotions that Buddhists say are destructive and trap people in ignorance. Now, Siddhartha, according to Buddhists, was the first person to reach that state…the first Buddha, and so Buddhists try to emulate his life and his teachings in order to become like him and to attain the status of Buddhaness for themselves.
Hmm, there are some Chineses detities, which may be mistaken for Buddha. They look like monks, and are dressed like monks, but are usually jolly and laughing, with large bare pot-bellies.
Gautama Siddhartha is “The Historical Buddha”, which is why I phrased it that way in my post. Not all Buddhas are SG, of course, but he is usually the one people mean when they speak of “The Buddha” doing things in India all those years ago:
Some have claimed that the use of “Buddha” to refer to both SG and other enlightened Buddhas has caused him to be credited with things he didn’t, in fact, do. But the Maitrea (who is apparently Mi-Lo-Fo) is the “Buddha yet to come”, and can’t have been S G.
Gautama Siddhartha is “The Historical Buddha”, which is why I phrased it that way in my post. Not all Buddhas are SG, of course, but he is usually the one people mean when they speak of “The Buddha” doing things in India all those years ago:
Some have claimed that the use of “Buddha” to refer to both SG and other enlightened Buddhas has caused him to be credited with things he didn’t, in fact, do. But the Maitrea (who is apparently Mi-Lo-Fo) is the “Buddha yet to come”, and can’t have been S G.
By the way, this site also gives yet another interpretation of the “fat” Buddgha:
Just a tidbit of info: This year Buddha’s birthday (the historical Buddha, of course) falls on May 5. It’s different every solar year because it’s determined by the lunar calendar. And because it falls on May 5, we get “shorted” one holiday in Korea (May 5 is already the Children’s Day holiday).