173. All Days are Lucky Days (mina, yoi hi ya de)

Oyasama taught Naokichi Takai:

“There is not a single day which you ought to complain about. All days are lucky days. People choose a lucky day for a wedding or for raising a house. But the luckiest day is the day when everybody is spirited in mind.”

First: It Begins

Second: Abundance

Third: Nourished

Fourth: Happiness Comes

Fifth: Providence Comes Forth

Sixth: Peace Settles

Seventh: Nothing to Worry About

Eighth: Expanding in All Directions

Ninth: Suffering Disappears

Tenth: Sufficiency

Eleventh: Sufficiently It Begins

Twelfth: Sufficiently Abundant

Thirteenth: Sufficiently Nourished

(and so forth)

Twentieth: Sufficiently Abundant Abundance

Twenty-first: Sufficiently Abundantly It Begins

(and so forth)

Thirtieth: Sufficiently Abundant, Abundant Abundance

Thirty days make a month, twelve months make a year.

And not one day in the year is unlucky.

Anecdotes of Oyasama, pp. 138-139

My take

The phrase “People choose a lucky day for a wedding or for raising a house” is most likely an allusion to the rokuyo calendar system that supposedly determines which days are auspicious or unlucky to hold a particular event. To get to the heart of what Anecdotes 173 is trying to get across: One’s state of mind is most important in determining whether a day is auspicious or not.

Yet Anecdotes 173 also happens to be a primer into Tenrikyo numerology, as Oyasama is portrayed here explaining the qualities certain numbers allegedly have. (See Anecdotes 60 for another similar example.)

It is particularly notable in how good qualities are given to numbers four (shi) and nine (ku), which are often considered unlucky in Japanese because they respectively happen to be homonyms for “death” and “suffering.” One may also note how Friday the 13th would be rendered as a day when one may become “sufficiently nourished.”

Further reading

Sato Koji’s Omichi no joshiki: All Days Are Lucky Days