The character for oni, 鬼 (pinyin: guǐ; Jyutping: gwai2) in Chinese also means a dead or ancestral spirit, and not necessarily an evil specter. Accordingly, Chinese (Taoist) origins for the concept of oni has been proposed by Takahashi Masaaki [ja]. Particularly powerful oni may be described as kishin or kijin (literally “oni god”; the “ki” is an alternate character reading of “oni”), a term used in Japanese Buddhism to refer to Wrathful Deities.