Budai, and the Hope of the Dharma Renewed

Devotion to Maitreya has taken many forms. In East Asia he became enormously popular, and from around the tenth century he was widely identified with the jovial, big-bellied Budai (Hotei in Japan), the laughing wandering monk of Chinese folklore whose image is the familiar Laughing Buddha. Belief in his coming has also carried a political charge: at several points in Chinese history movements proclaiming that Maitreya's advent was at hand fed millenarian and rebel currents. In Buddhist art he is often shown seated in the European fashion, both feet on the ground as if ready to descend, or standing; and across the Buddhist world he presides as the embodiment of hope, the promise that the teaching, however far it declines, will one day be renewed.

Among the most monumental images of Maitreya anywhere is the Leshan Giant Buddha in Sichuan, China, a seated stone figure some 71 metres tall carved directly into a cliff face over some ninety years, from 713 to roughly 803 CE, and generally identified by tradition and inscription as Maitreya rather than Shakyamuni; it remains the largest stone Buddha statue in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage site, a scale of devotion that reflects how central hope for Maitreya's eventual coming became in medieval Chinese Buddhism, quite apart from the later, more informal popularity of the separate laughing Budai image in folk religion.