Siddartha Gautama ≠ Hotei

On the left is a picture depicting the Buddha, Siddartha Gautama, during his time of fasting. As you can imagine, the depiction of an emaciated spiritual leader would not have had as much of a "draw" to potential supplicants who habitually suffer from starvation, and may be looking for a benevolent spiritual savior. Still, if you want to learn more about the history of Siddhattha Gotama (aka Buddha), then I would suggest that you check out Osamu Tezuka's 8-part graphic novel of the Buddha's life.

It is just a little pet peeve of mine that people in the US and Europe all associate the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) with the recharacterization of the Chinese Bo Dai Luohan/Shinto god Hotei (shown on the right), which - except for tertiary characteristics - are not very similar at all.

To many Americans (and possibly Westerners in general), there is little to no understanding of who the Buddha was, to such an extent that many equate a Chinese Taoism-derived deity with an historical person from northern India. To put this in analogous terms, this would be like saying that the Christian God (the Father, as depicted famously on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) was interchangeable with the Greek god Zeus.

Admittedly, the depiction of God in the Sistine Chapel is based on a Classical patriarchal figure, most commonly characterized by Zeus, however, most people would be able to say that the old man painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is not Zeus.

To complicate things just a little, though, in East Asian Buddhism (i.e., in China and Japan), many Taoism-derived deities, including Hotei, were folded into the Buddhism of those regions as Bodhisattvas. However Bodhisattvas are not the same as the Buddha, and Hotei was and remains a completely separate individual from the Siddhartha Gautama. This really shouldn't be too difficult to understand, especially given the ways in which characters found in Western mythos are derived from different roots. Good examples are the names of the archangels (whose names and features were derived from Babylonian mythos) and the Norse mythology, which is an amalgamation of two different Germanic pantheons, named the Aesir (with the famous gods Thor, Odin, and Baldr) and Vanir (with the less-famous gods Freyr and Freya).

But all you have to do is just look at the statues depicting the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, with one deity-cum-Bodhisatttva (Hotei). They are different entities.

Rant over.