First opened Sunday, July 31, 2005
仏
ほとけ
- flat (heiban)
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 3
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
Buddha
Hotoke, “Buddha”, most likely comes from Proto-Koreanic *Pwutukye, related to modern Korean 부처 (Bucheo).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 仏
In a sentence
知らぬが仏。
Ignorance is bliss.
仏の顔も三度。
You can only go so far.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “*⟨poto₂ke₂⟩ → */pətəkəi̯/ → /ɸotoke/ → /hotoke/”
- Hedged“From Old Japanese, most likely from Proto-Koreanic *Pwutukye, hence related to modern Korean 부처 (Bucheo), Manchu ᡶᡠᠴᡳᡥᡳ (fucihi); see the Proto-Korean entry for more. The word was presumably disseminated by the Baekje people of southwestern Korea, who first introduced Buddhism to Japan. The first two syllables are ultimately from Sanskrit बुद्ध (buddhá), via Middle Chinese 佛陀 (MC bjut da) or some similar Sinitic form. Thomas Pellard speculates that the final element is an ancient Koreanic word for "king; lord".”
- Hedged“The more traditional explanation still given in Japanese dictionaries is that the final ke element might be the Chinese-derived suffix 気(け) (ke, “spirit”), but a Koreanic explanation is more plausible.”
- “First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 仏 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 仏 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ほとけ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ぶつ
- “From Middle Chinese 佛 (MC bjut), shortened from 佛陀 (MC bjut da), itself a transliteration of Sanskrit बुद्ध (buddha).”
ふつ
- “Short form of ateji spelling 仏蘭西 (Furansu).”
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.