灯台下暗し tōdai moto kurashi It Is Darkest at the Foot of the Lamp

A large Japanese dictionary explains the proverb by the old lamp-stand of a room: just below it, it is dark. The stand was wood, with a dish of oil on top; a tall one was called 長檠, a short one 短檠. In our history's reading, the light itself makes the dark. The dish lights the room, and the stand's own foot lies in its shadow.

In a record of the sayings of the Shin Buddhist reformer Rennyo's circle, one item cites the proverb: as they say, it is dark at the foot of the lamp-stand. Those who hear the Dharma all the time, it says, think of it as an everyday thing and grow careless of the teaching. People from far away long to hear it and seek it as precious.

In a book of essays that its author, Nyoraishi, dated 1636, the people of Kyoto are weighed against the samurai of the east. Kyoto has the court poets and the temples of the Five Mountains at hand. Yet hardly one in a hundred there, the writer says, has any skill. The writer asks whether they rest on the original words, it is dark at the foot of the lamp-stand.

In a book of 1692, Ihara Saikaku tells of Sakai. The town sends its fine sea bream up to Kyoto and makes do with shore fish, though the sea is at its door. In all things, he writes, it is dark at the foot of the lamp-stand. An editor of 1934 notes that the proverb points also at what follows. There the god of the year's luck walks into a showy merchant's house without knowing what awaits him.

The Confucian scholar Muro Kyūsō gave the proverb a chapter, written in 1732 as the dictionaries date it, and printed in 1750. On a summer evening he points at a candle-stand and asks his pupils what the proverb means. They answer with Mencius, the Way is near, and one seeks it far, with a nun's poem from a Song Chinese book, and with Nobunaga and Akechi. Kyūsō says each of them has taken the proverb in a bad sense, and he hears a good one in Han Yu's couplet: the tall stand, eight feet, is tall for nothing; the short stand, two feet, is handy and bright. Then he grants that the true sense is his pupils', and offers his own as one more view, for now.

In the English our history read, the proverb begins with a candlestick: the bottom of the candlestick is dark, in a London magazine on Asia in 1872. In Japanese, 灯台 came to mean lighthouse with the Western lighthouses of the late 1860s. In what our history read, the lighthouse comes into English in 1908. For decades the candle and the lighthouse lived side by side.

Our history reads the proverb as the Shin record and the book of 1636 use it. Those who stand nearest a good see least of it, because they stand so near. On a scroll, our history says, the words say what they said in the Shin record, in a copy dated 1580. The foot of the lamp is dark, and the dark is the lamp's own. A reader who sees a lighthouse sees the same truth with a newer lamp.

A Japanese saying, already cited as a known saying, with no speaker named, in records of the sayings of the Shin Buddhist reformer Rennyo's circle, the oldest dated copy read being his son Jitsugo's fair copy of 1580; its 灯台 is the old oil lamp-stand of a room, not a lighthouse.