初心忘る可からず shoshin wasurubekarazu Never Lose Your Beginner's Spirit

初心忘る可からず carries two senses, and both are true. In everyday Japanese it is advice to a beginner: keep the humility and seriousness you started with. The fuller sense is a master's rule: every stage of a life has its own beginning, and old age is the last. The first reading is not wrong; the second is the larger half. The last word is written with 可 standing for the syllable べ, a spelling a reader who knows the source will recognize. Whether it is for a first year of training or the fortieth is yours.

Zeami wrote the line in 1424 at the close of his treatise 花鏡, The Mirror of the Flower, naming it the one maxim his school held good in every art; the same teaching stands in his earlier 風姿花伝 in other words, and the treatises lay unpublished until 1909.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 初心忘る可からず.

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