Chapter 7 China 271sound,” the one who hears the cries of the suffering world and responds with
compassion. In India she was the male bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara who
merged with an early Daoist goddess to become Guanyin. In Japan she
became Kannon. The other well-known Chinese Buddha, the slightly ridicu-
lous “laughing Buddha,” developed in late imperial times. He began as the
Buddhist messiah Maitreya who became identified with a tenth-century monk
named Budai (Pu-tai), “Hemp Sack,” who had claimed to be an incarnation of
Maitreya. “Hemp Sack” replaced Maitreya in the popular imagery of the pot-
bellied Buddha who resembles the Hindu elephant-god Ganesh more than he
does the great Buddha-to-come. Perhaps due to his statue’s ubiquity in the
West, the plump tenth-century monk is often incorrectly identified in popular
culture as being the Gautama Buddha, or Siddhartha Gautama, the original
“awakened one” and first teacher of Buddhism, who of course lived 1,500
years earlier.
The Tiantai (Tien-t’ai) sect made the Lotus Sutra the most beloved of all
Buddhist texts in East Asia. Though the central narrative of the Lotus Sutra is
the Buddha Sakyamuni revealing a new, more authentic truth, the text was not
written in India but in Central Asia some time before 250 B.C.E. This new truth
is that there is only one path to salvation, not three as previously revealed. The
one path lies in the heretofore unrevealed fact that everyone—not just monastic
virtuosos—have the Buddha-nature and all will be saved and become Buddhas.
Nirvana gets redefined; it is not extinction of existence at death, but extinction
of ignorance in this life; that is, Enlightenment. And this enlightenment comes
in the simplest of ways, by casting one’s faith in the Buddha. Long passages of
the Lotus Sutra describe the people who have already received Buddhahood.
There are the traditional hard ways: learning the law, practicing charity, per-
fecting self-discipline, enduring forbearance and humiliation. But there are sim-
pler ways: boys at play, making Buddha pagodas in the sand; installing Buddha
images in the home; embroidering Buddha pictures; or singing the glory of the
Buddha, even with a small sound. The simplicity of these teachings brought
Buddhism to the common people and made the Lotus Sutra an icon as much
as a sacred text.
One other development needs mention, since it became so important when
borrowed by the Japanese. Early in the sixth century a mysterious Indian med-
itation master named Bodhidharma visited China. Whatever it was he taught
quickly blended with a fundamental Daoist idea: that ultimate truth is beyond
words. “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.” But how can one
reach that ineffable truth beyond words, beyond rationality, beyond the ten
thousand things that distract us? Obviously all the words printed in books, even
sacred ones, are beside the point; in fact, they obstruct the truth. Bizarre new
forms of meditation were devised to break through the constructed world of
words and reason to reach the intuitive, wordless, “no-mind” reality beyond.
They meditated on paradoxes and non sequiturs in an effort to unravel the
intellect in a sudden, explosive, obliterating breakthrough to radical unity of