First opened Sunday, August 17, 2008
盆
ぼん
- flat (heiban)
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
Festival of the Dead; tray
盆 is short for 盂蘭盆 (Urabon), which some dictionaries trace to Sanskrit ullambana, purportedly “hanging upside-down”.
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 盆
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “From Middle Chinese 盆 (MC bwon). Compare modern Mandarin 盆 (pén).”
- “Short for 盂蘭盆 (Urabon) or 盂蘭盆会 (Urabon'e), from Middle Chinese 盂蘭盆 (hju lan bwon) or 盂蘭盆會 (hju lan bwon hwajᴴ) (compare modern Mandarin 盂蘭盆 /盂兰盆 (yúlánpén) or 盂蘭盆會／盂兰盆会 (yúlánpénhuì)), a transcription of Pali ullumpana (“raising, helping”), present participle of Pali verb ullumpati (“to raise up, to help”).”
- “A number of Japanese dictionaries state that this term derives from Sanskrit उल्लम्बन (ullambana), purportedly meaning “hanging upside-down” in reference to the souls of the dead being tortured in hell by being strung up by their feet.”
- Hedged“However, this meaning doesn't match the semantics very well, given that the urabon ceremonies are about helping the dead, closer in meaning to the “helping” sense of the Pali verb. This suggests that explanations of the dead hanging upside-down in hell are more likely to be folk etymologies based on a mistaken connection to the Sanskrit verb, rather than a more direct semantic link to the Pali. Alternatively, Junjirō Takakusu (apud Ashikaga, 1951) propounded that the origin was in fact Pali ullumbana, a colloquial corruption of Pali ullumpana (“raising up; saving; helping”), and that the etymology was mistakenly attributed to Sanskrit.”
Source: Wiktionary: 盆 (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 盆 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ぼん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ぼに
- “Alteration from bon, where the final moraic n changed to ni. Compare the Japanese given name 紫苑 with similar development of reading Shioni from Shion.”
- “Obsolete reading.”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.