Benzaiten, in her Japanese setting, is the goddess of everything that flows, water, words, music, eloquence, and also of wealth and good fortune, and she holds a distinctive place in Japanese popular religion as the only female member of the Shichifukujin, the Seven Lucky Gods whose cheerful company is invoked for happiness and prosperity, especially at the new year. Although she entered Japan as a Buddhist deity of Indian origin (a form of the goddess Saraswati), in Japan she was thoroughly assimilated into the native religious world, blurring the line between Buddhist and Shinto worship in the characteristic Japanese manner. She was identified and merged with local kami, notably a serpent- or dragon-associated deity of water and harvest, Ugajin, sometimes shown as a small white snake with an old man's head coiled in her headdress, which is why serpents and dragons are so strongly connected with her. Her most famous shrines stand by water, on islands and beside the sea and lakes: Enoshima near Kamakura, Chikubushima in Lake Biwa, and the island of Itsukushima are her celebrated sites, and countless smaller shrines to her sit beside ponds and springs across Japan. She is usually depicted holding the biwa, the Japanese lute, marking her as a patroness of music and the arts. In Japanese folk devotion Benzaiten is turned to for artistic skill and eloquence, for good fortune in money, and for the blessings of water, and her worship is one of the clearest everyday examples of the fusion of Buddhist and Shinto elements in Japanese religious life.