百千萬載一門春 hyakusen manzai ichimon no haru A Hundred, a Thousand, Ten Thousand Years: Spring for One House

百千 hyakusen is a great number; the characters say a hundred and a thousand. 萬載 manzai is ten thousand years, and 載 here is a year. 一門 ichimon is a family and its line, a household; the characters say one gate. 春 haru is spring.

In Banri's poem, the third line gives the two cranes their gifts: the yang crane offers years, the yin crane fortune. Our history of 福禄寿 fukurokuju gives the whole poem in English and tells who the god is.

The printed text of Banri's collected writings adds two notes after the poem's title; one says there are a yin and a yang crane. Neither of the two manuscripts writes the notes beside the title.

The Ichinomiya City Museum's record describes a painting of two cranes and a lean, seated old man, with Banri's inscription. In the record their background is a great rock, a few stalks of bamboo and a pine branch. The city's survey of 1966 says one crane flies and one stands on the ground seeking food. No image of the painting was found in the museum's record, the city's list or the National Diet Library's search windows. So its inscription is reported from books, not read.

Banri closes other poems on the same wish for one house. In one, for a pavilion, he writes: the one house shares the wealth of many grandsons; an unaging spring should run for countless years.

Our history reads 萬載 here as manzai, not banzai: 載 is a year, and the cheer banzai is a different word. A ruby is a reading printed beside a character. In the National Diet Library's full-text index, the rubies found on 萬 after 百千 all read man, and none ban. They are found mostly in 百千萬歲, the Buddhist count. The 字通 dictionary reads 万載 standing alone bansai, though no edition our history read gives this line ban.

The historian Kita Sadakichi printed the poem in an essay dated 1919. He set it among inscriptions that, he argued, show Fukurokuju and Jurōjin as two pictures of one star of long life. An annotated edition of 1993, read in a search window, gives a reading of the line that our history renders a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years, the spring of one house.

Our history reads the line as a household blessing, and the text says so of itself. The cranes give the house its years and its fortune, and the last line asks that its spring last a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years. As a scroll, our history reads, it is that wish alone, for one house, at the New Year.

The last line of 萬里集九's four-line inscription for a painting of 福禄寿 with a yin crane and a yang crane, which the two manuscripts of his collected writings, the 梅花無盡藏, place in a sequence of New Year poems of 1496 (by its place in the collection); the printed text notes that a layman asked for it, and the Ichinomiya City Museum records a painting carrying the quatrain as owned by 妙興寺.