Chinese names

Chinese language lingzhi compounds ling 靈 “spirit, spiritual; soul; miraculous; sacred; divine; mysterious; efficacious; effective” (cf. Lingyan Temple) and zhi 芝 “(traditional) plant of longevity; fungus; mushroom; excrescence”. Fabrizio Pregadio explains, “The term zhi, which has no equivalent in Western languages, refers to a variety of supermundane substances often described as plants, fungi, or “excresences”.”Zhi occurs in other Chinese plant names such as zhima 芝麻 “sesame”, and was anciently used a phonetic loan character for zhi 芷 “Angelica iris”. Chinese differentiates Ganoderma species between chizhi 赤芝 “red mushroom” G. lucidum and zizhi 紫芝 “purple mushroom” G. japonicum.

Lingzhi 靈芝has several synonyms. Ruicao 瑞草 “auspicious plant” (with rui 瑞 “auspicious; felicitous omen” and the suffix cao “plant; herb”) is the oldest; the (ca. 3rd century BCE) Erya dictionary defines qiu 苬 (interpreted as a miscopy of jun 菌 “mushroom”) as zhi 芝 “mushroom” and the commentary of Guo Pu (276-324) says, “The [zhi] flowers three times in one year. It is a [ruicao] felicitous plant.” Other Chinese names for Ganoderma include ruizhi 瑞芝 “auspicious mushroom”, shenzhi 神芝 “divine mushroom” (with shen “spirit; god’ supernatural; divine”), mulingzhi 木靈芝 (with “tree; wood”), xiancao 仙草 “immortality plant” (with xian “(Daoism) transcendent; immortal; wizard”), and lingzhicao 靈芝草 or zhicao 芝草 “mushroom plant”.

Since both Chinese ling and zhi have multiple meanings, lingzhi has diverse English translations. Renditions include “[zhi] possessed of soul power”, “herb of spiritual potency” or “mushroom of immortality”,”numinous mushroom”, “divine mushroom”, “divine fungus”, “magic fungus”, and “Marvelous Fungus”.

Japanese names

Japanese language reishi 零芝 is a Sino-Japanese loanword from lingzhi. This modern Japanese kanji 零 is the shinjitai “new character form” for the kyūjitai “old character form” 靈.

Reishi synonyms divide between Sino-Japanese borrowings and native Japanese coinages. Sinitic loanwords include literary terms such as zuisō 瑞草 (from ruicao) “auspicious plant” and sensō 仙草 (from xiaocao) “immortality plant”. A common native Japanese name is mannentake 万年茸 “10,000 year mushroom”. The Japanese writing system uses shi or shiba 芝 for “grass; lawn; turf” and take or kinoko 茸 for “mushroom” (e.g., shiitake). Other Japanese terms for reishi include kadodetake 門出茸 “departure mushroom”, hijiridake 聖茸 “sage mushroom”, and magoshakushi 孫杓子 “grandchild ladle”.

English names

English lingzhi or ling chih (sometimes misspelled “ling chi” from French EFEO Chinese transcription) is a Chinese loanword. The Oxford English Dictionary gives Chinese “líng divine + zhī fungus” as the origin of ling chih or lingzhi, and defines, “The fungus Ganoderma lucidum, believed in China to confer longevity and used as a symbol of this on Chinese ceramic ware.” The OED notes the earliest recorded usage of the Wade-Giles romanization ling chih in 1904, and of the Pinyin lingzhi in 1980. In addition to the transliterated loanword, English names include “glossy ganoderma” and “shiny polyporus”

courtesy wikipedia.com

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