無病息災 mubyō sokusai Good Health, Free from Harm

Japanese dictionaries define 無病息災 as being healthy, without falling ill. The dictionaries define a state, and people use the phrase as a wish. It is prayed for at shrines and at the New Year. The four characters say without illness, calamity stopped.

無病息災 joins without illness to 息災. 息災 is a Buddhist word for stopping calamity, and by the eleventh century it also meant being well. The Hakone shrine's account of itself is dated 1191 by its colophon and known from copies of the fifteenth century. In the account, the vase of the Medicine Buddha is tilted to give good medicine to those who seek 無病息災. A tale of Jizō printed in 1653 says the Medicine Buddha pours medicine over the world each day. Those who believe, the tale says, will be 無病息災.

By 1676 無病息災 was the sixth line of a New Year counting song. The song belonged to the Daikoku dancers, described by one translator as New Year street performers in the masks of the god of luck. The seventh line reads nothing amiss. In 1901 Lafcadio Hearn printed the same sixth line in a children's ball-song.

A Japanese phrase, which CBETA's full text of the Chinese Buddhist canon does not carry in the Taishō canon or the 卍續藏: 無病, without illness, joined to 息災, the name of the esoteric Buddhist rite for stopping calamity, which had come to mean being well. Its oldest dated witness in the Diet Library's full text is the Hakone shrine's account of itself, dated 1191 by its colophon and known from copies of the fifteenth century, in which the precious vase of the King of Healing, the Medicine Buddha, is tilted for those who seek to be 無病息災.

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