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The unluckiness of the number four is one such example, as the Japanese word for "four" 四 romaji: shi is a homophone for "death" kanji: 死. The same is true for Chinese, hanzi: 死 pinyin: sǐ, is also homophonous to "death."
Even though the kijin and onryō of Japanese Buddhist faith have taken humans' lives, there is the opinion that there is no "death god" that merely leads people into the world of the dead. [6] In Postwar Japan, however, the Western notion of a death god entered Japan, and shinigami started to become mentioned as an existence with a human nature ...
Yūrei from the Hyakkai Zukan, c. 1737. Yūrei are figures in Japanese folklore analogous to the Western concept of ghosts.The name consists of two kanji, 幽 (yū), meaning "faint" or "dim" and 霊 (rei), meaning "soul" or "spirit".
Oni, written in kanji as 鬼, is read in China as guǐ , meaning something invisible, formless, or unworldly, in other words, a 'ghost' or the 'soul of the dead'. On the other hand, the Japanese dictionary Wamyō Ruijushō ( 和名類聚抄 ) written in Japan in the 10th century explained the origin of the word oni as a corruption of on/onu ...
In Buddhism, the symbol of a wheel represents the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth that happens in samsara. [6] The symbol of a grave or tomb, especially one in a picturesque or unusual location, can be used to represent death, as in Nicolas Poussin's famous painting Et in Arcadia ego. Images of life in the afterlife are also symbols of death.
In Shinto and Buddhism in Japan, an ofuda (お札/御札, honorific form of fuda, ' slip [of paper], card, plate ') or gofu (護符) is a talisman made out of various materials such as paper, wood, cloth or metal.
The kanji that are sometimes used to transcribe Yomi actually refer to the mythological Chinese realm of the dead called Diyu or Huángquán (黄泉, lit. "Yellow Springs"), which appears in Chinese texts as early as the eighth century BCE. [ 3 ]
Many of the numbers are homophones or near-homophones of other words and have therefore acquired superstitious meanings. The Chinese avoid phone numbers and addresses with fours because the pronunciation in "four" and "death" differ only in tone, especially when a combination with another number sounds similar to undesirable expressions.