The Ch'an Master Pu-tai

AS NOT ONLY interesting in itself, but also important as an explanation of the transformation of the tall, well-formed Maitreya of Indian, of Japanese, and of early Chinese Buddhist art, into the ' who, with his protruding stomach and jolly smile has greeted the visitor to almost every Buddhist temple in China from Ming times up to the present day, I offer the following translation from the Ching-te chuan, teng llu, a collection of biographies of monks of the Dhyana, or Meditation (in Chinese, 4il Ch'an; in Japanese, Zen) sect of Buddhism. I have appended a translation of a passage from the Che-chiang t'ung chih, the official history of Chekiang province, which gives a part account of the history of the temple with which Monk Pu-tai was associated, and explains another name of his, Ch'ang-t'ing-tzui. The identity of the two figures has long been recognized, but I believe that this is the first time an account has been published in a European language which shows how and why the Laughing Buddha derives from the fat monk Pu-tai. It will be seen that in the death-poem which he made for himself, shortly before he entered Nirvana in A. D. 916

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Bodhisattva · Buddhism · China · Gautama Buddha · Identity (music) · Literature · Meditation · Poetry · Theology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy

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