Maitreya Buddha

By the entrance of a pagoda sits a Buddha cross-legged, with a round, tight belly and a smile so wide that the eyes are squeezed into two thin lines. A small child tugs at a grandmother's sleeve and points up at the statue. The child whispers a question: why is this Buddha laughing, and why is his belly so big? The grandmother smiles, sits the child down on the step, and begins the story.

The laughing Buddha is called Maitreya, or Di Lặc in Vietnamese. Maitreya is the Buddha of the future. He has a second name, Từ Thị, and that name means compassion, a love that reaches everywhere.

There is something unusual about this Buddha. He has not yet come down to our world. According to Buddhist scripture, he is still a bodhisattva, living in a very high heaven called Đâu Suất. A bodhisattva, in Buddhism, is one who seeks awakening, someone on the path to becoming a buddha. Maitreya sits there quietly and waits. That is why people call him the Buddha of tomorrow, of a day that has not yet come.

The child's eyes go round, and the child asks when he will come down. The grandmother says that, according to the Di Lặc Hạ Sinh Sutra, he made a vow. He will wait until a day very far away, when hearts have grown kinder and the world is truly ready for a clear and simple joy. On that day he will step down and become the Buddha who brings a smile to the whole world.

Then the grandmother lowers her voice and tells an old story. It is a folk tale that people pass on, she says, and not something the scriptures record as history. They say that in the time of the Later Liang dynasty of China, more than a thousand years ago, a monk wandered from place to place. He was round and fat, with a big belly, and he was always laughing. Over his shoulder he carried a huge cloth sack.

The sack held everything people had given him. When he met children, he opened it and shared gifts among them. He slept on porches, ate cold rice without complaint, and never grew angry or argued with anyone. People loved him and called him the Venerable Bố Đại, which means the monk with the cloth sack. Wherever he went, he brought laughter and joy.

The child asks where the monk went in the end. One day, the grandmother says, he sat down beside a stone on the porch of a pagoda and spoke some strange lines. "Maitreya, true Maitreya, divides into hundreds of thousands of millions of bodies." The words meant that the real Maitreya had taken countless forms and lived among people day after day, and no one knew him. When he finished speaking, the monk passed away in peace.

Only then did people stand stunned. The monk with the sack, who had laughed so much and given so freely all those years, was, as the story goes, an incarnation of Maitreya. He had been right beside them for years, and no one had known. The verse was later written down in an old book of the Zen school, the Cảnh Đức Truyền Đăng Lục.

The grandmother looks at the child and speaks softly. The big belly and the sack, she says, tell us something precious. The sack reminds us to be generous and to share whatever we have. The round belly reminds us to be tolerant, because the wider the heart, the more it holds, and the lighter anger becomes. The eyes narrowed by the smile remind us to keep a gentle joy inside.

That is why the Buddha sits at the gate of a pagoda. Before people enter the quiet place within, they pause before that smile. All the worries, irritation and tiredness they carried along the road can be left here, tucked into his cloth sack. Then they walk in with a light heart.

The child listens, then looks up at the statue once more. This time the child laughs too, because that smile really does seem to spread. The child takes the grandmother's hand, and the two of them walk through the gate into the cool courtyard. Behind them the Buddha still sits, round-bellied and narrow-eyed, and his laughter seems to follow every step, warm and never ending.