How to Read “Poverty is harder than four hundred and four illnesses”
Shihyakushibyō yori hin no kurushimi
Meaning of “Poverty is harder than four hundred and four illnesses”
This proverb means that the suffering of poverty is more painful than any disease. It expresses countless human illnesses as “four hundred and four illnesses” and declares that poverty is worse than all of them combined.
Illness is certainly painful, but in many cases there’s a possibility of recovery through treatment. The suffering is limited to the illness itself.
However, poverty affects all the basics of life: eating, housing, and clothing. It also causes loss of social trust, damages relationships, and destroys hope for the future. It’s a comprehensive suffering.
This proverb is used when expressing the serious impact that economic hardship has on people. It goes beyond simply not having money.
It’s used when you want to convey how poverty affects human dignity and the will to live. Even today, we can understand the weight of this proverb when we consider how economic difficulties threaten both mental and physical health.
Origin and Etymology
There doesn’t seem to be a clear written record of this proverb’s origin. However, the term “four hundred and four illnesses” itself is thought to come from Buddhist terminology.
In Buddhism, human illness is explained as arising from “imbalance of the four elements.” From these combinations, there were said to be four hundred and four illnesses, or even eighty-four thousand diseases. In other words, it was used as a term representing all diseases that humans could suffer from.
When we consider the lives of common people during the Edo period, we can see the background of how this proverb was born. At that time, medicine wasn’t well developed, and illness was a serious life-threatening problem.
Yet poverty was still expressed as being worse than illness. This was because poverty was a persistent suffering that affected every aspect of daily life. Illness could be cured, but escaping poverty was extremely difficult within the class system of that time.
Also, poverty doesn’t just affect the individual but involves the entire family. It influences social standing and human relationships too.
A state where you lack even food to eat and can’t hold hope for tomorrow involves mental anguish beyond physical pain. This proverb is thought to emphasize the comprehensive suffering of poverty by contrasting it with all illnesses.
Interesting Facts
The number “four hundred and four illnesses” comes from the classification of diseases in Buddhist medicine. The four great elements that make up the human body—earth, water, fire, and wind—were each said to produce one hundred and one diseases, totaling four hundred and four.
It wasn’t the actual number of diseases, but a symbolic number representing all illnesses that humans could suffer from.
In Edo period literature, there are texts that expressed poverty as a “long illness.” The idea was that while disease is temporary, poverty is like an endless illness with no end in sight.
This proverb can be said to emphasize the persistence and seriousness of poverty from a similar perspective.
Usage Examples
- When you see situations where people must give up treatment because they can’t pay medical costs, you realize how true “Poverty is harder than four hundred and four illnesses” really is
- Even if you can cure the disease, it’s meaningless if you can’t make a living—truly “Poverty is harder than four hundred and four illnesses”
Universal Wisdom
The reason this proverb has been passed down is that it identifies what the most fundamental suffering is for humans. We humans are sensitive to physical pain like illness and injury.
But our ancestors knew from experience that mental and social suffering actually torments people far more deeply and for much longer.
The essential suffering of poverty isn’t simply material deprivation. It strips away human dignity, connection to society, hope for the future, and even the sense of self-worth.
With illness, you might receive sympathy and support from those around you. But poverty sometimes has the nature of being abandoned by society and deepening isolation.
What’s even more serious is that poverty can chain across generations. A parent’s poverty robs children of educational opportunities and affects their future too.
While illness is a temporary problem for an individual, poverty is a suffering that spreads both through time and space.
This proverb shows the truth that human suffering has layers. The most serious is having your foundation for survival threatened.
No matter how much medicine advances, people cannot find true peace without an economic foundation. This universal understanding of humanity is what has kept this proverb alive to this day.
When AI Hears This
The pain of illness is processed in specific brain regions, mainly the somatosensory cortex. In other words, pain has a clear location and cause, like “my right foot hurts” or “my stomach hurts.”
In contrast, the suffering caused by poverty is processed completely differently in the brain.
According to neuroscience research, social exclusion and economic anxiety simultaneously activate multiple regions: the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex.
The prefrontal cortex calculates future anxiety, the amygdala triggers fear responses, and the insula produces discomfort connected to visceral sensations.
In other words, poverty causes simultaneous firing in the brain of the survival crisis of “can’t eat today,” the loss of safety from “no place to live,” the lack of belonging from “can’t meet people,” and the denial of recognition from “being looked down upon.”
What’s more important is the time axis. The pain of a broken bone has an endpoint called healing, but poverty has no clear end in sight.
This “unpredictability” becomes the greatest stress factor for the brain. Chronic stress hormone secretion shrinks the hippocampus and reduces judgment and memory.
In other words, poverty is experienced not as mere suffering but as a whole-body crisis that changes the brain’s structure itself. If illness is a point, poverty is a surface that completely covers a person.
Lessons for Today
What this proverb teaches us today is that we must not underestimate the importance of economic stability. Taking care of your health is certainly important, but building an economic foundation is also an extremely important life challenge.
In modern society, personal responsibility tends to be emphasized. But this proverb also suggests the need for society as a whole to recognize the seriousness of poverty.
Anyone can fall into economic difficulty, and it’s a structural problem that can’t be solved by individual effort alone. That’s precisely why we need understanding and support systems for people in trouble.
You can apply this lesson to your own life planning too. Learn financial literacy from a young age and save and invest systematically.
And above all, keep developing the ability to earn income—skills that society needs. This isn’t just for monetary wealth, but to protect your dignity and freedom of choice.
Economic stability becomes the foundation for you to challenge what you really want to do, protect those you care about, and maintain peace of mind.
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