Miraculous Comeback

起死回生 (kishi kaisei): a miraculous comeback, a recovery from the brink. Literally it is to raise the dying and return the dead to life, said twice for strength, and the first character is raise, not wake. The verb belongs to the physician 扁鵲. The Records of the Grand Historian tell how the world said he could bring the dead to life, and how he answered: I cannot; this one was going to live, and I made him rise. That correction is why the word fits a recovery and not a funeral. For a thousand years it was a doctor's praise in China: a Tang recipe blown into the nose of a dying man, a coroner's handbook of 1247 hoping its work may have the same use as raising the dead, a Ming minister's preface to the great materia medica. The figure is at least as old as Wang Yangming, who told his students the realm was like a body wasted with long illness and they the ones to raise it, and in Journey to the West Guanyin draws the four characters as a charm in Sun Wukong's palm to revive a withered tree. Japan's first book with the word is Nakae Tōju's of 1650, naming the four great physicians who won the merit of raising the dead, and it stayed with the court doctors for two centuries before a Meiji patent medicine wore it as a brand and Ozaki Yukio used it of the nation. The game-winning home run is the newest sense, a modern dictionary's example, not the word's origin. four-character idiom 起死回生 is composed of the kanji 起 (read ki) meaning "raise", 死 (read shi) meaning "death", 回 (read kai) meaning "return", and 生 (read sei) meaning "life".

This beautiful art makes an excellent gift as a reminder of a great comeback victory or to remind one that where there is a will there is still a way.