What is the Laughing Buddha laughing at?

To answer the question in the title we must first ask the question “What am I?”

A human being is comparable to a wave in the ocean. A wave is brought into being by a series of causes external to itself and is dependent on those causes for it’s own existence. In other words it has no independent existence of it’s own and is not an isolated, stand alone entity. Instead it is a phenomenon than occurs as a result of a combination of prior causes acting on each other to cause the temporal occurrence of a wave which forms, exists in an ever changing state and eventually breaks. In a similar way a human being can be said to be the equivalent of a wave, formed by a myriad of preceding causes, existing in an ever changing state for a period of time and then finally breaking and dissipating. Since all phenomena is dependent on preceding causes we might say that the entire universe is our very own preceding cause and since we are not isolated entities with an any independent existence of our own then we can say that we are in fact a manifestation of the universe, “made from star dust” as the atheist community often puts it or “one with everything” to use the classic hippy parlance. Buddhists, Hindus & Daoists tend to refer to this as “Monism” or Non-Dualism” which means a state in which the concepts of “self” and “other” merge and become indistinct from one another.

The comedian Bill Hicks talked about the “laughter of recognition”which occurred when his audience recognized something fundamental about themselves in one of his statements. This is something that we experience when we fully realize (as opposed to giving intellectual assent to) the fundamental dependence of the phenomena of “me” upon everything else in reality, resulting in our recognition of “me” in everything around us in all of our prior causes. This is what the Laughing Buddha is laughing at.