I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit today. A recording follows the talk.

This is the “Happy Chinaman,” story 12 in 101 Zen Stories by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Rep:

Anyone walking about Chinatowns in America will observe statues of a stout fellow carrying a linen sack. Chinese merchants call him Happy Chinaman or Laughing Buddha.

This Hotei lived in the T’ang dynasty. He had no desire to call himself a Zen master or to gather many disciples around him. Instead he walked the streets with a big sack into which he would put gifts of candy, fruit, or doughnuts. These he would give to children who gathered around him in play. He established a kindergarten of the streets.

Whenever he met a Zen devotee he would extend his hand and say: “Give me one penny.”

Once as he was about to play-work another Zen master happened along and inquired: “What is the significance of Zen?”

Hotei immediately plopped his sack down on the ground in silent answer.

“Then,” asked the other, “what is the actualization of Zen?”

At once the Happy Chinaman swung the sack over his shoulder and continued on his way.

Let’s talk about Zen and happiness.

Zen isn’t particularly known for its cheerfulness. We turn toward suffering. We contemplate the First Noble Truth — dukkha, or dissatisfaction with our experience — and sit with it long enough to truly feel it. We remind ourselves of sickness, old age, and death whenever we chant. We try to see the three poisons of greed, anger, and delusion clearly in ourselves. Bundling these and other teachings together, it’s hard to deny that we tend to linger with what hurts.

But Hotei, the wandering, gleeful, gift-giving, master in our story, appears in the last of our Ten Oxherding Pictures as the exemplar of complete realization. As what Zen is all about.

So why all this attention to difficulty?

Because we can’t put something down until we know we’re holding it. We can’t put something down that has a grip on us. We can only thrash about and try to escape.

Hotei embodies this realization. Lore has it that he was the Chinese monk Pu-tai, who had a reputation for being especially benevolent and fond of children—not to mention having a big belly. Our collective memory of him became molded into an icon over time: the round, beaming fellow we see in some Asian restaurants, his broad smile, bright eyes, big belly, and out-stretched arms expressing a kind of cosmic yes. This is the Laughing Buddha. I have a ceramic image of him on the bookshelf to my left. 

This is not Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha. Hotei is someone different, and perhaps more relatable for us. Hotei is a portrait of what becomes possible when we can see what we’re carrying and set it down. He’s what ordinary people like us are more likely to become through practice: more easy-going, happier, more connected versions of ourselves, rather than a globally-visible wisdom teacher.

But here’s the thing about Hotei: he doesn’t just put the bag down, he also picks it back up. He knows we can’t separate from our suffering or our histories—our baggage, so to speak. We can just carry them differently; relate to them differently.

When another master asks, “What is the significance of Zen?” — Hotei just puts the bag down. Everything in that bag, all of it, accounted for and gently set down. That’s the significance of Zen: the possibility of recognizing we are not completely subject to the suffering we experience. We have the potential for considerable agency in relation to it.

“What is the actualization of Zen?,” Hotei is then asked.

Hotei swings the sack back over his shoulder and walks on.

We are always carrying that bag. It’s a bag full of gifts—the whole mess. The bag of this one precious, impossible life. Inside it, along with the donuts, fruit, candy, the love and the joy, are worry and grief and boredom and loss, all mixed together, somehow inseparable. The medical bills. The relationships that aren’t what we hoped for. The unfinished work. The departed loved ones. And, mixed in with all of that, the sweetness. The cup of coffee on the patio as the morning sun shines and birds chatter. A friend’s laugh. All the stuff of my life. All of it right here, right now.

These seemingly dour Buddhist teachings are meant to help us see our suffering and its sources clearly, and to transform our relationship to it all.

We can put it down, metaphorically, and pick it up again and hold it with a lighter touch. We don’t cling to or compound the suffering that is part of this sweet life. We hold it, and ourselves, and others more gently. Suffering is no longer holding us.

I think Buddhism’s teachings about suffering are misunderstood—or maybe it’s all a clever bait-and-switch designed to draw us toward practice. We hear the Third Noble Truth—that it’s possible to end suffering—as an almost mechanistic guaranty that Buddhism is a cure for every toothache, worry, and all that’s worse. That’s not the promise. That’s not the liberation it offers. What practice offers instead is a new relationship to life and its inevitable hardships, and a reduction in the optional hardships our delusive perspectives and behaviors impose upon oneself and others. That’s the liberation we’re offered.

To sit is to put the bag down. When the bag is on the ground before us, even for a moment, something else may come forward. Clarity. Lightness. Things just are, presenting themselves fully, right here, right now, without need to name them.

This ease within full engagement, which Hotei embodies, is what we call the samādhi of play.

Not play as frivolity, or escape. Play as full presence. Watch children completely absorbed in a game and you see it: time disappears, nothing is held back, the game is the whole world. This is samādhi. And it is, paradoxically, exactly what the Buddha was pointing to in and through all that suffering. The whole, seeming catastrophe, the bag and everything in it: this is the field of liberation. This is where happiness lives. Not as a reward for having finally sorted things out. Not as the absence of difficulty. Happiness as the completeness of just doing the thing you’re doing, without the extra burden of wishing it were otherwise.

Realizing this, we can actualize it.  We can pick the bag back up and carry it differently.

We return to and accept our lives. We come back to life differently. Not crushed under it or resigned to it. We pick it up the way Hotei picks it up his bag: laughing, walking, giving candy to the children.

Sickness is still sickness. Old age is still old age. Death is still death. The three poisons still arise — 

which is why the Second Great Vow doesn’t say “delusions will eventually end.” It says delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to transform them. They don’t disappear. We just stop being ruled by them.

And in that freedom happiness arises by itself. Like sunlight when the clouds move. The sun wasn’t gone.

“Give me one penny.”

Hotei kept asking for a penny from anyone who wanted him to teach. This response, which is a kind of joke, is his teaching. It’s a finger pointing at what was already there in the person asking for his teaching. Zen’s proverbial lost coin has been in your pocket all along. 

The whole bag is ours — the weight and the delight of it. 

What practice offers us is the moment of putting it down.

And the opportunity to pick it up, chuckle, and keep walking.