和顔愛語 wagan aigo A Gentle Face, Loving Words

Two Buddhist dictionaries define 和顔愛語 as a gentle, smiling face and kind words. The four characters say a gentle face, loving words. The Pure Land and Shin schools read them wagen aigo, and Zen teachers read them wagan aigo.

和顔愛語 is part of a line in the Sutra of Immeasurable Life. There a bodhisattva meets others with a gentle face and loving words, and anticipates their wishes. A commentary on the sutra from 1670 explains that last part with a mother. She attends to her infant before it has said anything.

A Buddhist dictionary says 和顔愛語 is now familiar as a school motto and on hanging scrolls. Books printed in the 1880s ask it of brothers, and of a son toward his parents. A talk printed in 1915 told post-office staff that with a gentle face and loving words no quarrel arises.

The four characters are the first half of a line in the Sutra of Immeasurable Life, the scripture of the Pure Land schools, traditionally dated to a translation into Chinese of 252, where the bodhisattva who became Amida meets every being, through ages of practice, with a gentle face and loving words and answers what they wish before they ask; the same four characters stand, in other practices, in the sixty-fascicle Flower Garland Sutra translated in 418–420.

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