Laughing Buddha Figures Set of 2 Red Resin Budai Hotei Money Bag Coins Feng Shui For Sale

Three laughing Buddha figures in red resin with a bronzed highlight, cast in graduated sizes. The largest carries a money bag over the shoulder and holds a ruyi sceptre aloft, the second holds a string of gold coins across the belly, the third is the smallest of the three. All three have the open mouthed laugh, the bare chest and the heavy robe worked with incised pattern that the subject always carries.

The figure is Budai in Chinese, Hotei in Japanese, and he is not the historical Buddha at all. He was a wandering Chinese monk of the tenth century, remembered for carrying a cloth sack and for giving away whatever was in it, and he was absorbed into popular Buddhism as an incarnation of Maitreya, the Buddha who has not arrived yet. That absorption is the interesting part: the austere figure of the doctrine was unapproachable, so the tradition grew a second one who was fat, cheerful and poor, and it is the second one that ended up in every restaurant and shop in the diaspora. The money bag and the coins are later still, additions from the feng shui trade of the last century, which attached a prosperity reading to a figure whose original point was giving things away.

All three intact with no chips, cracks or losses found to the hands, the ruyi, the coin string or the bases, which are the vulnerable points on a cast figure like this. The finish is complete with light rubbing to the bronzed highlight on the raised edges of the robes. Dust in the recesses. One figure has a small casting seam visible along the back, which is original to the manufacture rather than damage. No repairs found.

The largest stands about nine inches tall, the smallest about six, taken against the tape in the photographs. Three figures, sold together.