Page 125 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols 118
As a rule he is shown in a sitting posture, a corpulent man with a bare chest, holding a
sack and always laughing. Often he is surrounded by children, who sometimes catch him
in a net, only to set him free. He is a symbol of naive geniality. In view of its
revolutionary nature, the Maitreya cult had been bloodily suppressed by earlier rulers; but
good old Fat-belly drew its teeth by dismissing ‘all the misery and unhappiness in the
world as nothing more than illusion; a monumental trivialisation’ (Wolfgang Bauer),
which, no doubt, made the future quite safe for the ‘Buddha yet to come’.
The ‘Buddha of Pleasure’ (huanxi fo) has nothing to do with Fat-belly; this is a
euphemism for sexual intercourse.

Fate

ming

Basically, the word ming means ‘command’ in the special sense of ‘divine decree’, ‘will
of God’. In a restricted sense, it is used to mean human fate or destiny. What is meant is
not exactly ‘predestination’: we arrive at our ‘destiny’ if we ‘go along with it’.
An example may make this clearer. Suppose a soothsayer tells me that I am going to die
on a certain day – all he has done is to outline a ‘tendency’, and I can take steps to
counteract it. It is particularly in connection with the death of a child that one says,
‘That’s fate’ – a phrase which closes the subject. ‘Predestination’ can always be
circumvented by means of prayer and sacrifice.
Another word for fate is yun = revolution, i.e. ‘movement round’, and hence ‘turn of
fate’, ‘luck’. Things move in this or that direction, and the person caught up in this
‘movement’ cannot really be held responsible either way. A proverb says: ‘When yun
withdraws, yellow gold loses its colour; but when the right time comes, even iron shines
in splendour.’ The connection here between ‘fate’ and ‘time’ is instructive: a man may be

disposed to do something good, but if the time is wrong, his good intentions come to
naught. The concept of the ‘proper time’ is fundamental in Chinese thought; everything
must be done at the right time, irrespective of whether good or evil is intended.
This concept of the ‘right’ time is already present in the Yi-jing, whose whole
structure it informs. This very ancient oracle text has had hundreds of imitations right
down to the present day. None of them do anything more than identify the situation in
which the enquirer actually finds himself, i.e. at the moment of enquiry. As regards the
future, there was another method of foretelling it, a method made famous by a book
which was long banned, as it foretold the fate of the Emperor in pictures accompanied by
enigmatic rubrics (tui bei tu). Pictures in this book which have to do with past events can
now be deciphered with some certainty; but some pictures refer to the future, and no
regime has looked kindly upon attempts to expound them. Widely differing
interpretations of the text and pictures alike are current in Taiwan, Hongkong and in
various parts of China proper.