ぼさつ實がいればうつふく 人間實がいればあをのく bosatsu mi ga ireba utsubuku, ningen mi ga ireba aonoku Rice Bows When It Fills; a Man Looks Up

ぼさつ (read bosatsu) is 菩薩, the bodhisattva, and here it means rice. A Japanese dictionary gives another name for rice among its senses. Its instance of 1614 says people call rice so because an old Buddha's relics changed and became rice. 實 (read mi) is the grain, and when the grain fills, it ripens. うつふく (read utsubuku) is to hang the head forward, to turn the face down. あをのく is to turn the face up. 人間 (read ningen) is a man, as our history renders it. 實 is the older form of 実.

A memoir by Ōkubo Tadataka, a bannerman of the Tokugawa house, written for his descendants, parallels the saying. Encyclopedias date it between 1622 and about 1626. In it a man raised from a servant's rank to steward over more than twenty villages plots against his lord. He tells his wife she will be called my lady. She answers: they say the 佛法 tilts when it fills, and a man bends back when he fills. That is you. After that she says nothing more. Our history reads her 佛法, the Buddha's law, as the rice, and her words, with other verbs, as the same saying.

A handbook of haikai poetry sets the pair in two lines in its list of common sayings: the bodhisattva, when its grain fills, bows its face; a man, when he fills, looks up. The bodhisattva there is the rice.

Nishikawa Joken (1648–1724), a scholar of astronomy and geography from Nagasaki, cites the saying in the two of his books read for our history. In a book of moral instruction for townsmen, printed in 1719, he writes that wealth laid up gives no reason to be proud before others. The common saying too, he goes on, is, they say, a good admonition.

Joken's book of moral instruction whose title names farmers, with a preface of 1721, tells a story he had at second hand. A farmer who had built a new house and moved into it asked a Shinto practitioner for a prayer charm. Under the formula of a Shinto blessing, the practitioner wrote the pair in kana, in two lines. Joken gives it as so it is said, the account of one who saw it. No charm, he writes, can surpass this rustic saying, and still more for farmers. The two lines on the charm are the words on this scroll.

In 1776 a book of popular fiction, printed in Kyoto, still quotes the saying as a proverb. It names the man before the rice, and its verbs are the later ones, うつむく and あをむく.

The proverb the more the rice ripens, the lower it hangs its head keeps the rice and leaves out the man. A Japanese dictionary of proverbs reads that verse as this saying's observation taken one step further, and marks it probably. Nothing read for our history shows the verse coming from the pair.

Our history reads the saying as being about what fullness does: the same filling that bows the rice lifts the man's chin. The rice is the measure, and the man is the one measured. Our history also reads the bodhisattva's name for the humble thing in the saying as part of the point. The English title is our history's own rendering.

A common saying, whose earliest parallel read here is a wife's rebuke to her husband in the memoir 三河物語 (mikawa monogatari), drafted in 1622, with other words for the rice and the verbs; the haikai handbook 毛吹草 (kefukigusa), with a preface of 1638 and printed in 1645, lists it among other sayings, and the words the title follows are those of Nishikawa Joken's 百姓嚢 (hyakushō bukuro), with a preface of 1721.