Hotei — known in China as Budai — was almost certainly a historical figure, a wandering Chan monk of the late Tang dynasty whose eccentric generosity and inexhaustible good humor made him legendary in his own lifetime. He carried an enormous cloth sack (his name literally means "cloth bag") filled with whatever he had been given or found — candy for children, small treasures for those who needed them, the whole miscellany of a life lived on the road. He had no fixed abode, no doctrinal allegiance, no institutional affiliation. He slept where he landed. He ate what was offered. He laughed at everything, including himself. In Chinese Buddhist folklore he became associated with Maitreya, the future Buddha, which is why he is sometimes called the Laughing Buddha in Western contexts — though he is not the historical Gautama Buddha and the two should not be confused. In Japan he joined the Seven Lucky Gods as the deity of contentment and abundance, his rotund belly symbolizing not gluttony but the fullness of a person who lacks for nothing essential.

The philosophy embedded in Hotei's image is more radical than it appears. His laughter is not the laughter of someone who has been shielded from difficulty — it is the laughter of someone who has met difficulty and found it, ultimately, workable. The sack he carries is traditionally described as bottomless: he gives and gives and the sack never empties. This is not a description of magical supply but of the nature of genuine generosity — that giving from a place of real abundance (which is first an interior state) does not deplete but replenishes. His contentment is not passive resignation but an active relationship with reality, a continual practice of finding sufficiency in what is actually present. In a culture that relentlessly generates dissatisfaction as its economic engine, Hotei represents the counter-force: the person who looks at what they have and says, with genuine feeling rather than mere stoicism, that it is enough. Rubbing his belly in temples and homes is not superstition but a small ritual reminder — a way of touching that quality of enoughness and asking it to become one's own.