平家物語と欽定訳聖書 Heike-monogatari and the King James Bible

Following on from a rather disappointing conclusion to the last yojijukugo, I guess I should give an example of a truly righteous one, from the Heike-monogatari. I read the Heike story a few years ago, in translation, so the yojijukugo was hidden from me back then. In truth, I found this a few months ago whilst trawling through some early postings over at no-sword. It's such a fan-dabby-doozy one though, I think there's no harm in revisiting it:

諸行無常
sho gyou mu jou
everything goes, nothing eternal

Just after this wonderful yojijukugo, still in the Heike, there is another one to be found, saying much the same thing:

盛者必衰
jou sha his sui
the prosperous must decay

They are both in the first few lines of the Heike, here:
祇園精舎の鐘の聲、諸行無常の響あり。娑羅雙樹の花の色、盛者必衰のことわりをあらはす。おごれる人も久しからず、唯春の夜の夢のごとし。たけき者も遂にほろびぬ、偏に風の前の塵に同じ。

Here is Helen McCullough's great translation:
"The sound of the Gion Shôja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sâla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind."

As you can see, she has translated 諸行無常 as "the impermanence of all things" and 盛者必衰 as "the prosperous must decline."

I was intrigued by her translation of たけき者も遂にぼろびぬ as "the mighty fall at last", not for any linguistic reasons, as I have virtually no experience of mediaeval Japanese (is that even the right nomenclature?) but because the phrase "the mighty fall at last" had a very familiar ring to it. Of course, it is from that phrase we are all too often apt to utter, "Oh, how the mighty have fallen." This phrase, though, is incredibly elusive. Where does it come from? We use it often enough, but who said it first? Google was loath to offer any help. I searched for the phrase alongside The Iliad, Alexander Pope, and Shakespeare but to no avail. What I did notice, however, was that the searches were throwing up rather a lot of bible-orientated doom-prophesying sites (wtf, right?). Deciding that this phrase must be from the daddy of all books, the King James Bible, I used a brilliant website, http://kjvbible.net/ which let's you search through and read the entire thing. Sure enough, the phrase, or near enough to it, pops up in none other than the book of Samuel. "How are the mighty fallen" is used no less than three times after the death of the first king of Israel, Saul. Now there's a story for you.

Props to The King James Bible, man. Apart from maybe Shakespeare's stuff or Johnson's dictionary, I'd say no book has influenced the English language more.

凡時徹底の由来は何か Where does Bon-ji-tet-tei come from?

Last month I wrote about this phrase, 凡時徹底, which appeared on my school's daily bulletin. Now, these four kanji compound idioms are fairly interesting; their origins are more often than not from Buddhist sutras or old Chinese classics, and it's quite fun if you can find out where they come from exactly.

With this one in particular though, I just couldn't seem to find any leads. All there was were blog entries or company profiles, giving wonderful definitions of the phrase and all saying what a great idiom it was, but with no references as to where it came from.

These two names though, イエロー・ハット(Yellow Hat) and 鍵山秀三郎　(Hidesaburō Kagiyama), kept cropping up everywhere. Yellow Hat Ltd. is a car accessories company, and Mr Kagiyama is its founder. Now, at first I thought it was just another company using it as a motto, but when I looked into it, it appears that Mr Kagiyama has actually written a book with the title 「凡時徹底」. All very well and good, I thought, this guy really loves this aphorism, he's gone and written a book about it. But on further investigation -- that is, after a lot more reading of bloggers gushing about how they will try very hard to do simple things well -- I found one blogger who was gracious enough to say this:

この言葉は、四字熟語ではなく、鍵山秀三郎氏がつくった造語だが、今や四字熟語のように感じる
This phrase is not a yojijukugo; it is a coinage of Hidesaburō Kagiyama's; though it feels like a yojijukugo.

I think I will conclude then that this particular yojijukugo (if indeed it is one. The blogger above, at least, seems to discount modern coinages) is a very recent one, first seen in print in 1994.

Here, to finish, is Mr Kagiyama's authoritative definition of 凡時徹底, and sub-title to his book:

平凡を非凡に勤める
Endeavour with the commonplace, extraordinarily.

The day's schedule: 教務だより: 凡事徹底

Coming into school this morning, I was greeted as usual by a resounding canon of ohayougozaimasu from vice principle & co. and also, as per usual, by a sheet of paper on my desk with the heading 教務だより (kyoumu-dayori) the school's daily schedule. Every day, these are filled with both useful and cryptic messages authored by the movers and shakers of Matsubushi Junior High, foremost among them, the head master. I normally begin the day by taking out my electronic dictionary and decoding the information. 「今日の予定」や「明日の予定」や｢本日の出張」など、そういうものを。It is usually quite boring stuff, made up of groups of kanji with very little or no kana. It is, after all, a bulletin, so brevity is to be expected. For a student of Japanese it is often joyless work, slogging through onyomi and kunyomi, trying to elucidate some meaning from the funny squiggles. Today's schedule, for example, reads, simply, ３年期末テスト(１日目: ①数学②理科③国語④音楽美術) and 企画委員会(１５:２０－: 会議室) which indicate, respectively, that 3rd year students have their finals today in four subjects (quite important, I suppose) and that from 3:20pm there will be a planning committee meeting in the conference room, and I'm not really sure what goes on in those. I mean, I'm not exactly in a rush to find out what they talk about. Probably quite boring, I should imagine.

In a more exciting part of the schedule, near the bottom, was a 四字熟語, a four kanji aphorism, 「凡事徹底」, which reads bon-ji-tet-tei. I tapped away at my dictionary but to no avail. The term is apparently not in common use. I then googled 「凡事徹底　意味」 and my search bore fruit. According to quite a few blogs, the phrase means: 当たり前のことを当たり前のように徹底して行うことです, that is, natural things should be performed in a thoroughly natural way; which, in normal English, I suppose means, what is expected of you should be performed in a way that is second nature. A little more searching through blogs and company profiles who have used the phrase in some capacity brought me to this website where the company in question specifies, 私達にとって当たり前のこととは、お客様に満足していただくことお取引先に信頼していただくことです, that is, "For us, what you would call a natural thing is a customer's satisfaction, or a business partner's trust." So, for that company, those things must be, like, a priori, or axiomatic.

The aphorism has, on the school bulletin, been put in a little box and set apart from the rest of the notices. There is another little box near-by which also states the a priori 当たり前のこと of Matsubushi Junior High. These are: あいさつ, greetings; 服装, uniform; 朝の会, morning meetings; 帰りの会, meetings before going home; and 授業の充実, classroom fulfillment. The first four are disciplinary warnings; the teaching staff have to lay down the law, make sure things happen properly and stuff. The last is obviously telling us to make our lessons as interesting and educational as possible.

[Edit: I talk about the phrase 凡時徹底 again, later, here.]