Daruma doll
A round, legless doll of Bodhidharma, the monk said to have brought Zen to China, usually red and sold with its eyes blank. Its owner paints in one eye when making a wish and the other when the wish comes true.
Meaning
Daruma is the Japanese name of Bodhidharma, a semi-legendary Indian monk whom JAANUS, a dictionary of Japanese art, credits with bringing Zen (Chan) to China; at the Shaolin monastery he is said to have meditated facing a cave wall for nine years. JAANUS records that he was popularly shown as bright red, legless dolls, developed in the sixteenth century and used in the Edo period as a charm against smallpox. The Embassy of Japan in Singapore describes the doll today: papier-mâché, round so that it rights itself when knocked over, like the proverb “fall down seven times, get up eight”, and usually red, a colour for good fortune and against evil spirits. Its eyebrows are drawn as cranes and its nose and moustache as turtles, the two animals of long life. Most of them are made in Takasaki, in Gunma prefecture.
Origin and history
The Embassy’s account traces the doll to Shōrinzan Darumaji, a temple in Gunma prefecture that handed out pictures of Bodhidharma as charms. When famine struck about 200 years ago, a monk there made a mould so that farmers could sell dolls as winter work; silk farmers, whose living depended on luck, liked them. The first dolls still had a waist between head and body, and the round shape came only in the early Meiji era. Takasaki, in Gunma, makes about 80 per cent of Japan’s daruma today.
Why the eyes are blank
The doll is sold with blank eyes for its owner to paint in, the Embassy explains. There is no fixed order, but it is said that the left eye is painted first while making a wish, and the other once it comes true; after a good year with no mishaps the second eye can be painted anyway. Henri Joly, cataloguing Japanese art in 1908, saw a deeper root. He describes the toy “sometimes with one eye open and one shut”, and comic prints of the doll coming to life as its eyes were marked, a play on the popular belief that holy images come alive, or start to work, when priests “open their eyes”.
No legs and no eyelids
Two legends shaped the doll. After nine years of sitting, Joly writes, Bodhidharma’s legs were said to have rotted away, and the Embassy too says he lost his limbs from meditation; netsuke carvers showed him legless, wrapped in his robe like a bag. Having once fallen asleep in meditation, he cut off his eyelids, and artists, JAANUS notes, draw him with large, staring, lidless eyes. In Joly’s version the eyelids, thrown on the ground, grew into the tea plant.
Burning the old daruma
In Maebashi, also in Gunma, a festival called Hatsuichi Matsuri has been held every January since the 1600s, the Embassy records. People bring their old daruma to burn on a bonfire, give thanks for what they achieved, pray for luck in the new year and buy a new doll.
Bodhidharma in painting
JAANUS describes the Bodhidharma of Zen painting as a monk with a large nose, bushy eyebrows, curly hair and beard and large earrings. Japanese painters drew him crossing the Yangzi on a reed, gazing at the wall, or carrying the single shoe left in his empty tomb.
Read next
- Next in Japanese symbolsTorii (shrine gate)The gateway at the entrance to a Shinto shrine: two upright posts joined by a cap beam and a tie beam. It marks the border between the shrine’s sacred ground and the everyday world outside.
- Both are Japanese good-luck figures bought for a wishLucky cat (maneki-neko)A Japanese figure of a seated cat with one paw raised to beckon, kept in shops and homes to invite good fortune. Japanese collectors say a raised right paw beckons money and a raised left paw beckons people and customers.
See also
Crane (tsuru) and the thousand paper cranes, Komainu (guardian lion-dogs), Amaterasu (the sun kami), Raijin and Fūjin (thunder and wind), Kamon (family crests) and the mitsudomoe, Chrysanthemum seal (imperial crest).
Sources
- Daruma (JAANUS), JAANUS: Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System, “Daruma”, JAANUS (Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System), entry text
- Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art (1908), Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art: A Description of Historical Episodes, Legendary Characters, Folk-lore, Myths, Religious Symbolism Illustrated in the Arts of Old Japan, London: John Lane, 1908, John Lane (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), no. 164, “Daruma”
- Embassy of Japan in Singapore, Have you heard of the lucky daruma?, Japan Creative Centre, Embassy of Japan in Singapore, E-Magazine, April 2023: daruma, Embassy of Japan in Singapore, article text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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