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Home › Library › Philology › Fortune, Stipend and Long Life — three wishes China painted as three star gods and Japan made one long-headed old man

福禄寿 fukurokuju Fortune, Stipend and Long Life — three wishes China painted as three star gods and Japan made one long-headed old man

福禄寿 (fukurokuju), fortune, stipend and long life: a Chinese wish and its star gods, followed to the single old man of Japan's Zen temples, the Seven Gods of Fortune and the birthday scroll, and into the English of the books on Japanese art.

Abstract

福禄寿, fukurokuju, joins three words for what a Chinese life wished for: 福, blessing; 禄, an official's stipend; 寿, long life. China wished them together, and by the Ming painted them as three star gods; Japan knew 福禄寿 first as a single figure, a painting hung in its Zen temples, the earliest known a scroll listed in the inventory of a sub-temple of Daitokuji in 1410, and its monks said of him that he was the star of longevity, the Lord of Mount Tai, the old man of the South Pole, or one of the omens a Song minister forged. By the Edo period he was one of the Seven Gods of Fortune, a short old man with a very long head, often confused with 寿老人, painted for birthdays and the New Year, while the three characters kept their first sense as a wish, written out as a phrase and brushed as a charm. English met the three wishes in 1815 and the god in the 1880s, and has called him a god of longevity, of wealth, of wisdom and of popularity.

Overview

The sense. The 日本国語大辞典 gives two senses: 福と祿と寿命, fortune, stipend and life span, and 七福神の一つ, one of the Seven Gods of Fortune, 背が低く、長頭で長いひげをもち、杖に経巻を結び、鶴を伴っている像, short, with a long head and a long beard, a scroll tied to his staff, a crane beside him; it adds that he is said to be the three virtues drawn as one, or the incarnation of a Taoist of the Song, or of the South Pole star, and that he joined the seven in the Muromachi period or after [1]. The 日本大百科全書 says that he came to Japan chiefly as a subject of the ink painting that spread with Zen, 日本に導入されたのは、おもに禅宗の流布と関連する水墨画の題材としてであり, came to be counted among the seven, and was never worshiped as a fortune god in his own right; that he is often confused with 寿老人; and the 世界大百科事典 that in China the three were made as a set of three figures, or as one picture in which a bat, a deer and a pine stand for 福, 禄 and 寿 [1]. The witnesses below hold both senses from the fifteenth century on, side by side: the three things a person hopes to have, and the old man who stands for them.

The words. 福 is blessing, good fortune; 禄 is the stipend of an office, and 福禄, blessing and stipend, is a pair as old as the 詩經 [2]; 寿 is long life, and 寿星, the longevity star, is the Chinese name of Canopus, which seen low in the south was taken for a sign of peace [3]. The compound is read fukurokuju. The 下學集 of 1617 glosses it フクロクジユノヱ, a picture of fukurokuju [4]; the dictionary 言海 of 1889–1891 gives the colloquial form, 俗ニ、フクロクジン [5], and the 日本国語大辞典 dates the spoken fukurokujin to a book of 1802 [6]. Older texts write 福祿壽, with the traditional forms of the second and third characters, and the Edo printers also wrote 福録寿 [7]. The characters are one word in their old and new forms.

The text in English. Robert Morrison's Chinese dictionary of 1815 gives the Chinese triad, Happiness, the emoluments of office, and long life [8]. The god enters English in the books on Japanese art: Fukuroku Jin in 1880 [9], Fuku-roku-jiu, the tall-headed sage, is called the god of longevity, or wisdom in 1886 [10], wealth, prosperity, and longevity in 1889 [11], the god of popularity in 1910 [12]. Kenkyusha's dictionary, in its American edition of 1942, has The God of Wealth and Longevity [13], and JMdict today Fukurokuju; god of happiness, prosperity and long life [14].

The historical record

The Zhou and the Han. The pair and the star. 福祿 stands as one phrase in the 詩經, in the ode 鳧鷖: 公尸燕飲，福祿來成, the impersonator of the dead feasts and drinks, and blessing and stipend come to completion [15]. The star is in the 史記, in the treatise on the heavens: 比地有大星，曰南極老人, near the ground there is a great star, called the Old Man of the South Pole, and the 正義 commentary adds that it answers for the life span of the ruler, 爲人主占壽命延長之應 [16]. Neither text has the three characters.

The Song. The star's cult and its pictures. The minister Wang Qinruo 王欽若 (962–1025), who led the Emperor Zhenzong 真宗 into the manufactured portents of his reign [17], is recorded in his biography in the 宋史 as having asked for a shrine to the star: 又請置先蠶並壽星祠, he also asked that shrines be set up to the First Sericulturist and to the Longevity Star [18]; the treatise on rites dates the decree to 1006, 景德三年，詔定壽星之祀 [19], and the encyclopedia 玉海 lists the star's sightings under that reign [20]. The star was a picture by then. In Hong Mai 洪邁's 夷堅志, ice in a tin basin on a birthday forms an image: 一壽星坐磐石上，長松覆之，一龜一鶴分立左右，宛如世所圖畫然, a Longevity Star seated on a rock, a tall pine over him, a tortoise and a crane standing left and right, just as the world paints him [21]. A Qing collection of Song anecdotes tells of Chen Zhizhong 陳執中, governor of Bozhou, whose relatives on his birthday presented 老人星圖, pictures of the Old Man Star, by the dozen [22]. None of these names 福祿壽.

The Song to the Ming. The three as a wish, then as three gods. A Song monk's verse already has the four-character phrase 福祿壽考, blessing, stipend, long life and old age [23], the phrase in which the commentators on the 詩經 summed up what a subject wishes his lord. The three stars by the name 福祿壽 are in a Ming record of a Chan master's sermons, at an offering for a sixty-fifth birthday: 福祿壽三星，嬰兒不離母, the three stars of blessing, stipend and long life, like an infant that does not leave its mother [24]. The story of the Taoist at court is in the Ming compilation 天中記: in the winter of 嘉祐八年, 1063, a Taoist of strange appearance came to the capital, drank without limit and never grew drunk; the emperor received him and gave him wine; the next day the astronomers reported that the Longevity Star had drawn near the emperor's seat, 壽星臨帝座, and the Taoist was gone [25]. Xie Zhaozhe 謝肇淛 (1564?–?) [26] did not believe it: 宋嘉祐中，壽星變為道士，飲酒不醉 … 豈有在天之宿，變為人物，下遊人間者哉？野史之誕甚矣, in the Jiayou years of the Song the Longevity Star became a Taoist and drank without getting drunk … how could a lodge of heaven turn into a man and wander among men? The wildness of unofficial histories is extreme [27].

1406. A shogun's gift of a star. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu 足利義満 (1358–1408) [28] received the elders of the Zen monasteries at his Kitayama residence on the twenty-fifth day of the first month of 1406 and gave them gifts. Zuikei Shūhō 瑞渓周鳳 (1392–1473), a monk of Shōkokuji [29], wrote forty-five years later that one of them, the man he calls 先人, my late master, received 壽星像, an image of the Longevity Star [30]. When the shogunate's historians retold the event in the 本朝通鑑, compiled by Hayashi Razan 林羅山 and Hayashi Gahō 林鵞峰 [31], the gift had become a different figure [32]:

丙戌、十三年、春正月、源道義招諸老禪於北山殿、以福祿壽星像授周伸、其餘所授有差。… 其後人人寫其像、其像流傳于世。

In the first month of the thirteenth year, the year 丙戌, Minamoto no Dōgi invited the elder Zen monks to the Kitayama palace and gave 周伸 an image of the 福祿壽 star; the others received gifts of differing rank. … Afterwards everyone copied the image, and it spread through the world. Dōgi is Yoshimitsu's name in religion [28]. The chronicle's own note on the entry speaks of the gift as 壽星 [32]. The confusion of the two figures is already in the state's history, in one entry.

1410. The earliest known 福祿壽 in Japan: a scroll in a temple inventory. The 如意庵 is a sub-temple of Daitokuji in Kyoto. The inventory its keepers handed on, dated the second month of 應永十七年, 1410, lists under the heading 繪部, paintings, a Buddha by Zhang Sigong 張思恭, a Bodhidharma with an inscription, Korean and Chinese Kannon, the calligraphy of the temple's founders, and among the Chinese genre subjects [33]:

福祿壽　一幅　仲默筆

Fukurokuju, one scroll, from the brush of Zhongmo 仲默. The registers of Chinese painters name a 仲默: the 古今圖書集成, among the painters of the Yuan, quotes the 書畫史 for 釋宗瑩，字仲默。畫蘭蕙竹石，亞於雪窗, the monk Zongying, styled Zhongmo, painted orchids, bamboo and rocks, second only to Xuechuang [34]. Whether the inventory's 仲默 is that monk, the inventory does not say, and a figure painting by a painter known for orchids and bamboo would be unusual. A century later, in the same temple's inventory of 1509, a 福祿壽 of one scroll hangs in the guest hall in the same company [35].

1438 and 1441. The wish in a New Year letter, and a scroll lent between houses. The New Year wish in the diary 看聞日記 sets the halves apart, in 1438 and again in 1443: long years, and blessing and stipend in full [36]. A monk's New Year letter of 1441, which survives because the diarist Madenokōji Tokifusa 萬里小路時房 (1395–1457) [37] reused its paper for his diary, wishes his house 家門繁榮・增崇福祿壽算, the prosperity of the house and an ever greater blessing, stipend and span of years, beside 龜鶴之齡, the age of the tortoise and the crane [38]: 福祿 and 壽算 run together, the formula's two halves, not yet the three words as one name. Another sheet of the same year, in Tokifusa's name, asks [39]:

人形二幅・福祿壽・羅漢、以上四幅渡此使給候哉

Two figure paintings, a 福祿壽 and an arhat, four scrolls in all: will you hand them to this messenger? A 福祿壽 scroll, sent or lent between houses in 1441.

1444, read in a copy of 1541. A dictionary's painting subject. The 下學集, a dictionary of common words in eighteen classes compiled in 1444 by a monk who signs himself 東麓破衲 [40], lists among things made, after 琴碁書畫, the lute, go, calligraphy and painting, the entry 福禄壽畫, a picture of fukurokuju, and then the 朝陽對月 picture of two lines of verse [41]. The manuscript of 1541, the oldest dated copy whose leaves are published, has the entry at that place; so do a manuscript of the late Muromachi period and the print of 1617, both with the reading フクロクジユノヱ [42][4]. 福禄寿 was a subject a painter was asked for.

1451. The first story told of him in Japan. Zuikei kept a diary of which only a selection survives, the 臥雲日件録抜尤 [43]. Under the twenty-fourth day of the fourth month of 寶徳三年, 1451, he wrote [30]:

希世侍者來過。話次。及福祿壽之事。希世曰。吾少年聞惟肖説。曰。宋真宗時。王欽若勸封禪。故撰諸異事。福祿壽其一也。後又聞或説。曰。此事見于旁堅志云々。

The attendant Kisei came by. In the course of talk we came to the matter of 福祿壽. Kisei said: "When I was young I heard Ishō say: in the time of the Song emperor Zhenzong, Wang Qinruo urged the feng and shan sacrifices, and so fabricated all sorts of marvels; 福祿壽 was one of them. Later I heard someone else say that the matter is in the 旁堅志." Kisei Reigen 希世霊彦 (1403–1488) [44] heard it from Ishō Tokugan 惟肖得巌 (1360–1437) [45]. The print writes 旁堅志 for what can only be Hong Mai's 夷堅志. Zuikei goes on to Ishō's poem on a 壽星 painted on a fan, 老人星是太平祥。現則時清王封昌, the Old Man Star is the omen of great peace; when he appears the times are clear and the king's realm flourishes; to the 壽星像 Yoshimitsu gave in 1406, of which, he says, 凡壽星像在々有之。大略寫予先人所藏也, there are images of the Longevity Star everywhere; most are copies of the one my late master owned; and to the small hall he and his fellows built at Shōkokuji in 1440 and named 壽星 [30]. The 日本国語大辞典 gives this entry as its first example of the word [1]. In the first known telling the god is a Song forgery, and he is spoken of in the same breath as the star.

Before 1463. A Zen inscription on a 福祿壽 painting. A list of 1543 records where the writings of Nankō Sōgen 南江宗沅 (1387–1463), a Zen poet devoted to Ikkyū Sōjun 一休宗純 [46], were kept, and among them one sheet of 繪贊, inscriptions on paintings, with 福祿壽 on it [47]. The inscription itself is not known from the list.

The 1490s. Banri Shūku 萬里集九 (1428–?) writes the god twice. Banri, a monk of Shōkokuji and a leading poet of the late Gozan [48], wrote an inscription for a painting of the god, 福禄壽賛, which the two manuscripts of his collected writings, the 梅花無盡藏, place among pieces of 1493 and 1499 [49][50]:

在彼蒼則称太山府君、出厚地則名福禄壽星、趙宋聖明之時現形、命畫工啚其休矣、吁偉哉、以二十八言賦之云 一星千百億分身　瓢様頭長髪帯春　壽命経脩杜羅是　尚添福禄祝塵々

In the blue heaven he is called the Lord of Mount Tai; come out on the broad earth he is named the 福禄壽 star; he took form in the sage reign of the Zhao Song, and a painter was ordered to draw his form. Ah, how great! I set it out in twenty-eight words: one star, a hundred billion bodies; a gourd-shaped head, long hair wearing the spring; the Sūtra of Long Life is his scripture; and he adds blessing and stipend, a wish for every speck of dust. Both manuscripts write 休 where the sense wants 體, form, which the print of 1909 reads [51]; and both write 脩杜羅, which one copyist glosses シュトロ, for 修多羅, sūtra. The 古事類苑 sets the inscription in its section on the rite of 泰山府君, beside an Edo antiquary's note that he is a god the yin-yang masters worship, 陰陽師の方にて祭る神也 [51]. In a New Year poem of 1496 by its place in the collection, Banri gives him another identity [52][53]:

蓬莱仙録記星辰　南極定応斯老人 陽鶴献齡陰鶴福　百千萬載一門春

The immortals' register of Penglai records the stars; the South Pole must be this old man. The yang crane offers years, the yin crane fortune: a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years, spring for one house. In a preface for a painting made for an old man past ninety, the three characters stand as a wish, 子々孫々護老丈而福禄壽, may children and grandchildren keep the old man, with blessing, stipend and long life [54]. Banri held the god's identity open in his own verse, and kept the three words as a wish beside him.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Zen poets' old man of the Song. The anthology of the Gozan poets, the 翰林五鳳集, gathers inscriptions on 福祿壽 and on the Longevity Star [55]. Ten'in Ryūtaku 天隠龍沢 (1422–1500) [56], on a portrait of the god: 首與身雖分一半。福兼祿共得雙金。有人若問壽多少。屢見黃河五百年。, his head and his body each take half; blessing with stipend, he has gold twice over; if anyone asks how long he has lived, he has seen the Yellow River's five hundred years many times over. Ninjo Shūgyō 仁如集堯 (1483–1574) [57]: 長首短身稱壽星。圖來南極老人形, long head, short body: he is called the Longevity Star, painted in the form of the Old Man of the South Pole, and 南極老人元祐生, the Old Man of the South Pole was born in the Yuanyou years [55]. The star poems around them set the old man's appearance at the Song court in 元祐, 1086 to 1094, where the 天中記 sets it in 嘉祐: 現形元祐太平間。百壺未醉宋宮酒, he took form in the great peace of Yuanyou; a hundred jars of the Song palace's wine did not make him drunk [55]. Daikyū Sōkyū 大休宗休 (1468–1549) [58] wrote on a 福祿壽 painted by Sesshū 雪舟 (1420–1506) [59][60]:

賛福祿壽雪舟圖　曾降塵土。南極老人。向北斗裏。藏長法身。福海無底。壽山嶙峋。眉毛生也。珍重萬春。

Inscription on Sesshū's painting of 福祿壽: once he came down to the dust, the Old Man of the South Pole; turned toward the Northern Dipper, he hides his long Dharma body. The sea of blessing has no bottom; the mountain of long life is steep. His eyebrows are growing: treasure ten thousand springs.

1509. The 如意庵 inventory of 1509 lists 福祿壽 一幅 among the paintings of the guest hall [35].

Compiled 1528; the text we have was rewritten in 1534. The three as a wish in a commentary on Genji. The 細流抄 records the lectures of Sanjōnishi Sanetaka 三条西実隆 (1455–1537) [61] on the Tale of Genji as his son Sanjōnishi Kin'eda 三条西公条 (1487–1563) put them together [62][63]. At the words それにかへて in the chapter 若菜下, where Genji tells Murasaki that his life has had its griefs and that in exchange for them, perhaps, he has lived longer than he expected, it says [64][65]:

〽それにかへて　福禄寿をそなふる事はかたきと也

"In exchange for that": it is hard to have all of blessing, stipend and long life. The three, here, are not a god but the three things a person cannot all have at once. The manuscripts that keep their colophons, among them the 内閣文庫 copy and the copy of the 松浦史料博物館, carry two: the first of the eighth year of 大永, 1528, and a second of 天文甲午, 1534, which says that the copy first made was lost in a fire and the text written out again [66][67]. The commentaries that quote it in the Edo period, the 首書源氏物語 of 1640 and the 湖月抄 of 1673, carry the gloss under its mark 細 [68][69].

1643, 1688, 1695. The god in popular print. A storybook of 1643 names him in a roll of fortune gods, 本地大聖不動明王の分身。福禄寿。または布袋 [70]. In a New Year sheet of 1688, Hattori Ransetsu 服部嵐雪 (1654–1707) [71] wrote 福禄寿いたゞきそむる霞, haze beginning to crown Fukurokuju, where いたゞき is both to receive and the crown of the head [72]. A children's encyclopedia of 1695 gives the two figures separate entries and separate pictures: ○福禄壽 ●福神なり, a god of fortune, and the incarnation of a star, drawn as a tall-headed old man with a staff and a deer; and ○壽老人 ●福神なり。老人星の化現なり, a god of fortune, the incarnation of the Old Man Star, with a crane [73].

1712. A scroll in place of Confucius. The Ryukyuan chronicle 球陽 records under the third year of King Shō Eki 尚益 [74]:

改用福祿壽御掛物于王殿大庫理。大庫理此宮女所座，原掛孔夫子聖像。王上恐凟至聖 … 乃題代用福祿壽御掛物。

A 福祿壽 hanging scroll was put up instead in the palace hall 大庫理. The 大庫理 is where the women of the palace sit, and a portrait of Confucius had hung there. The king feared that the sage was being profaned … and ordered a 福祿壽 hanging scroll used in its place.

Before 1724. The three wishes of the four classes. Nishikawa Joken 西川如見 (1648–1724) [75] writes in 百姓嚢: 福祿壽の三ッは、四民のねがふ所にて、正月元旦にも、第一に崇め祝ひて祈念す, blessing, stipend and long life are what all four classes wish for; on New Year's Day they are the first thing celebrated and prayed for, and Chinese and Japanese painters take the portrait of 壽老人 as the immortal of 福祿壽 [76].

1720 and the eighteenth century. The picture with crane and tortoise, and the three made one. Yamaoka Matsuake 山岡浚明 (1726–1780) [77], in his encyclopedia 類聚名物考, writes [78]:

福祿壽は即壽老人なるを、近代繪にはそのさま異なり。是南方老人星の精なるよし云ひ傳へたり。西土の畫には福祿壽三人にわかち書るも有り。予が家に琉球の織畫を藏む。三人にして壽老の人その頭長し。今は三人を略て一にして書なす事なり。

福祿壽 is the same as 壽老人, but in recent pictures he looks different. It is handed down that he is the spirit of the southern Old Man Star. In Chinese pictures 福祿壽 is sometimes drawn divided into three persons. In my house I keep a woven picture from Ryukyu: three persons, and the old man of longevity among them has a long head. Now the three are shortened to one and drawn so. He quotes from the comic-verse collection 雅筵醉狂集 a poem on a picture of 福祿壽, つくゝと見ればみじかきあたま哉 命長きに思ひくらべて, look at it long and the head is short, set beside so long a life, and one written in 1720 for a picture of 福祿壽 with a crane and a tortoise beside him, the inscription asked for by its owner: 養老のころよりやなれ來りつる末の齢は龜にちぎりて, you have been used to it since the Yōrō years; pledge the rest of your age to the tortoise, with the poet's note that Yōrō began a thousand years before [78].

1759 and 1762. At court and in Edo. The court noble Hirohashi Kanetane 広橋兼胤 records a gift to the emperor in 1759 of a triptych on silk, its center 福祿壽, its sides landscapes in rain and in snow, by a painter of the Kanō house, beside a colleague's triptych centered on the Queen Mother of the West [79]; and in 1762, among farewell gifts in Edo, 伊部燒香呂〔福祿壽〕, a Bizen incense burner of the 福祿壽 kind [80].

Printed in the late Edo period. The Ryukyuan monks. Amenomori Hōshū 雨森芳洲 (1668–1755) [81] tells in his 橘窓茶話 what a monk told him: at a retreat in a temple of Mino he befriended two Ryukyuan monks, and when they saw a 福祿壽 hanging in the hall they leapt for joy [82]:

我國每代必生一異人、身首相半、笑容可掬、與堂上所窠毫髮不爽、稱曰福祿壽、以爲國瑞。

"In our country, in every generation, a strange man is born without fail, his body and head of equal length, his smile so warm you could scoop it up, the image in the hall to a hair. He is called 福祿壽, and held a sign of the realm's good fortune." If he is born a commoner he is raised in the palace; the present one, they said, is named 壽水 and is past a hundred, with a child's face [82]. Tanigawa Kotosuga 谷川士清 (1709–1776) [83] sets five accounts of the name side by side in his dictionary 倭訓栞: the portrait called both 壽老人 and 福祿壽; the three stars of the astrologers combined; the deer and crane as a pun, 鶴音福、鹿音祿; the Ryukyuan monks, from which he infers that the name came from Ryukyu, いづれば琉球より傳へたる名なるべし; and a castaway's report of 1774 that in Zhejiang a picture of the three stars 福祿壽三星 is hung for the New Year [84].

1819. A birthday scroll. Irako Taishū 伊良子大洲 (1763–1829) [85] put into Chinese, for a friend, an inscription for a 福禄壽 portrait sent to a man turning fifty [86]:

此像也吾不詳其爲何人也體貌如常人而自眉以上至頂挺長殊甚崒然指天世人稱之謂福禄壽云蓋福禄與壽皆人之所欲也

Who this figure is I do not know. His body is like any man's, but from the brows to the crown he rises very long and points steeply at the sky. The world calls him 福禄壽: and indeed blessing, stipend and long life are all things people want. Long life without blessing and stipend is life to no purpose, he goes on, and blessing and stipend without long life end the same way; only the three together are whole. In the spring of 文政己卯, 1819, the friend had a painter make the picture, had it mounted as a hanging scroll, 裝潢成軸, and sent it to accompany the wine at the birthday feast [86]. In the same collection Taishū asks of another 福禄壽 picture, 世俗所圖傳豈亦有所本耶, the picture the world hands down: does it have any source? [87].

1829. A scholar who did not know. The Confucian Tsukada Taihō 冢田大峯 [88], in his 隨意錄, printed in 1829, writes 世俗所謂七福神者。我未知其所由來, what the world calls the Seven Gods of Fortune, I do not know where they come from, and of two of them [89]: 壽老人。稱南極老人星云。獨福祿壽。未審何神也, 壽老人 is said to be the Old Man Star of the South Pole; only 福祿壽, I do not know what god he is.

About 1849. The three as a rebus. The third volume of the 富嶽百景 of Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760–1849) opens with a preface that says the old man is now past ninety, 聞翁の齢今九十を踰て, so it belongs to the last year of his life and not to the 1834–1835 of the first two volumes, which the library's record gives for the set [7]. Its plate titled 福録寿 shows a spotted deer on a crag looking up at three bats in the clouds, with Fuji behind [7]. By my reading it is a rebus: the bat for 福, as the Chinese pictures used it [1], the deer for 禄, and Fuji for 寿, its name 不二 sounding like 不死, deathless. The god is not in it.

1889–1891. The dictionary. 言海 gives the two figures two origins and sends the reader from one to the other. Under 壽老人: 支那、宋ノ元祐中ノ人ニテ、壽星ノ化身ナリトイフ, in China, a man of the Yuanyou years of the Song, said to be the incarnation of the Longevity Star, three feet tall, his head half his length, with the note 福祿壽ノ條、見合ハスベシ, compare the entry 福祿壽. Under 福祿壽: 宋ノ嘉祐中ノ道士、天南星ノ化身ナリト云, a Taoist of the Jiayou years of the Song, said to be the incarnation of 天南星, short, long-headed and bearded, a sūtra tied to his staff, with a crane [5].

What is not a source. The three wishes of the 莊子, in which the border guard of Hua asks for Yao 堯 壽、富、多男子, long life, wealth and many sons [90], are a different set of three, set beside 福禄寿 in later writing. So are the 五福, the five blessings of the 書經 [91]. The 福禄神 of the Ming 三教源流搜神大全 is a governor of Daozhou who freed the dwarfs his district sent to the palace as tribute and was painted as the district's god of fortune, 以為福禄神也 [92]; Kotosuga cites it as 福祿神, not 福祿壽, and it is a different figure [84]. The story of the drinking Taoist at the Song court is told in the Ming compilations; its Song source, if it has one, is not known.

The name in English

1815. Robert Morrison, A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, part I, vol. I, p. 15. Under 三星, Three stars: Fuh, luh, show. … "Happiness, the emoluments of office, and long life." [8] The triad in English before the god.

1880. William Elliot Griffis, Japanese Fairy World, pp. 81–82. Daikoku frolics with Fukuroku Jin, and rides on his head [9].

1881 and after. George Ashdown Audsley and James Lord Bowes; Bowes alone. Keramic Art of Japan, 1881, p. 257, describes a Figure of FUKUROKUJIN, in brown Bizen stoneware [93]. Bowes's Japanese Marks and Seals, p. 187, reading three potter's marks: No. 437.—Jiu, Longevity. The three words together are read Fuku-roku-jiu, and signify Good fortune [94]. The three characters as a mark on a pot, and their sense as one wish.

1886. James Curtis Hepburn, A Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary, third edition, read in the fourth of 1888. Under SHICHI-FUKUJIN, the gods of good fortune or wealth, viz., … Benzaiten, Fukurokujin, Ebisu, Hotei … [95]: the colloquial form.

1886. William Anderson, Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of a Collection of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum, pp. 27 and 29. Fuku-roku-jiu, the tall-headed sage, is called the god of longevity, or wisdom, and: Fuku-roku-jiu is of purely Taoist origin, and is perhaps a personification of Lao-Tsze himself; Ju-ro-jin is almost certainly a duplicate of Fuku-roku-jiu [10]. The identification with Laozi has no Japanese or Chinese witness among those above. Griffis printed Anderson's sentence in quotation marks in The Religions of Japan in 1895 [96].

1888. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, April 1888, p. 714. Of a netsuke: a compound pun, or Fuku-roku-jiu, which means paradise and bliss [97]. Paradise renders none of the three characters.

1889. Marcus B. Huish, Japan and Its Art, p. 48. Fuku-roku-jiu, which translated means "wealth, prosperity, and longevity," … is at once known by the sugar-loaf shape of his head, his vast brain having necessitated a capacious cranium [11]. The head as wisdom is Huish's own explanation.

1902. Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese, fourth edition, pp. 306–307. Fukurokuju, distinguished by a preternaturally long head … typifying longevity and wisdom … Jurojin, a sort of repetition of Fukurokuju, both being often accompanied by a stag and a crane. The Seven Gods of Luck have been swept together from many incongruous sources … Their union in one group is the result of nothing more recondite than popular ignorance and confusion of ideas, and can be traced no further back than the time of Ieyasu (about A. D. 1600) [98]. The date is an error: the 日本大百科全書 records a procession of the seven gods in 1420 [99], and 福禄寿 stands among the fortune gods in print by 1643 [70].

1908. Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art, no. 216. Old and bearded, he is the God of Longevity, and as such, usually accompanied by the crane and the tortoise. His name means Wealth, Prosperity, Longevity … some see in him a presentment of LAO TSZE … other writers would identify him with Jurojin [100].

1910. E. Papinot, Historical and Geographical Dictionary of Japan. One of the 7 Fukujin, the god of popularity. He is represented with a bald, unusually high skull. A crane is found at his side, on account of which some probably think him to be the god of long life [12]. Papinot's popularity has no footing in any Japanese witness above.

1942. Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, in the American edition reproduced from its printing of 1939. Fukurokuju … The God of Wealth and Longevity [13].

1971. Daisetz T. Suzuki, Sengai: The Zen Master, no. 19, p. 63. Suzuki translates the inscription on a painting by Sengai 仙厓 (1750–1837) [101], printing the god's name with its middle syllable in brackets of his own: Not a soul in the world Is in possession of all three: If the top is long, The bottom is short, and explains, Fuku is luck, roku wealth, and ju longevity. These three are the ideals of the Chinese people [102]. Sengai's joke is the 細流抄's thought: no one has all three.

1973. Nakata Yūjirō, The Art of Japanese Calligraphy, p. 75. Of the painter Tomioka Tessai 富岡鉄斎 (1837–1924) [103]: a calligraphy by the painter Tomioka Tessai in which the three characters fuku-roku-ju (luck, wealth, long-life) are skillfully fitted together into one character [104].

1993. Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Under the Seven Gods: Fukurokuju (sometimes identified as Jurōjin), and Fukurokuju the deity of long life [105].

2022. John Stevens, The Art of Budo. Of the three characters brushed by Yamaoka Tesshū 山岡鉄舟 (1836–1888) [106]: Calligraphy of the three characters, as in this example, is more of a graphic good luck charm, although there is still an erotic element to the name. Fukurokuju calligraphy was a favorite theme for Tesshu, and many people … petitioned him for a specimen [107]. Stevens also reads the god's elongated head as phallic; no Japanese witness above says so, though the Edo comic verse makes a long joke of the head.

Today: JMdict gives 福禄寿 as Fukurokuju; god of happiness, prosperity and long life [14]. Fortune, stipend and long life renders the three characters word for word; 禄 was an official's stipend, and prosperity is what it has come to mean. What a rendering must keep is that the three are wishes, and that in Japan they are also the name of an old man with a long head.

A reading

The three characters are older than the god, and they never stopped being a wish. China had the pair 福祿 from the 詩經 and the star from the 史記, and Song households hung the Longevity Star with his pine, crane and tortoise as a birthday picture; the three stars by the name 福祿壽 are Ming. Japan's 福禄寿 is something else: one figure, and the oldest known witnesses put him on a wall in a Zen temple, a single scroll in a sub-temple's inventory of 1410, listed among the Chinese genre subjects, a painting subject in a dictionary of 1444, a scroll lent between two houses in 1441. The monks who looked at him did not agree on who he was. In 1451 he was one of Wang Qinruo's forged omens; to Banri in the 1490s he was the Lord of Mount Tai and the star of the South Pole; to the anthology's poets he was the old man who drank at the Song court; to Daikyū he was the star come down to the dust. No one of these stories is the source, and the dictionaries that give him a Song Taoist for an origin are passing on what the poets told. What the witnesses do settle is how he was used, and that use has not changed: a picture with a crane and a tortoise, asked for with an inscription, mounted as a scroll and sent for a birthday, in 1720 and in 1819; a scroll a Ryukyuan king hung where Confucius had been. Beside him, all along, the three words kept their first sense: a New Year letter of 1441 wishes them to a house, the 細流抄 says no one has all three, Taishū says that only the three together make a whole, and Sengai drew the god to say the same thing with a joke. A scroll of the three characters carries both: the god whom the Japanese eye sees in them, and the wish that is older than he is.

Notes

Sources not seen

A manuscript of the 下學集 in the 静嘉堂文庫, Tokyo, which the 国書データベース dates to 文明11 (1479) and lists without an image; the 日本国語大辞典 gives 1485 as the date of the oldest manuscript whose copying is dated [40]. Reading its 器財門 would settle whether 福禄壽畫 stands in a copy some sixty years older than the oldest that can be seen.

The 細流抄 in the hand of Sanjōnishi Sanetaka's circle held by the 龍谷大学 library, which the 国書データベース dates to 大永6–7 (1526–1527) in four volumes and lists without an image. Reading it at the chapter 若菜下 would settle whether the gloss on それにかへて stood in the text before the fire, or only in the text written out again in 1534.

戸田禎佑, plate commentary on a 懸崖雙清図 signed 仲黙筆, 『美術史』 65, 1968, National Diet Library, persistent identifier 12530327 (https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/12530327), which is served only within Japan. Reading it would settle on what evidence the art historians take the 仲默 of the 1410 inventory to be the Yuan monk-painter.

A reader with access to any of these is invited to write to Takase Studios at Tim@Takase.com.

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Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5, Takase Studios LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

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