果報は稲で待て kahō wa ine de mate Wait for Good Fortune in the Rice

果報は稲で待て kahō wa ine de mate keeps the waiting of the proverb 果報は寝て待て kahō wa nete mate, and moves where to look for the fortune: in the rice. The proverb says good fortune comes of itself, so wait for it patiently. 果報 kahō is good fortune, in Buddhist use the fruit of one's deeds; 稲 ine is rice in the field, and 待て mate is wait.

In Nagaidō Kiyū's comic novel Seken nakōdo katagi, the narrator finds the proverb wait for good fortune asleep a saying that does not quite make sense. He sets aside a form someone had reasoned out, nen de, by the years, and finds it, too, a little off. An old man settles it on ine de, in the rice, because rice bows its head when its grain fills. The three steps, nete, nen de, ine de, each sound close to the last, and the joke is in the steps.

The narrator adds that, they say, farmers had an old saying: next year's fortune, wait for it in this year's rice. A dictionary of 1919 explains that saying as next year's fortunes foreseen from this year's harvest, good or poor. Our history reads the farmers' saying as part of the joke's machinery, though a saying of that shape among farmers is not impossible.

Then a story proves the saying. An honest townsman never forgets the teaching of wait in the rice, and walks with his eyes down. At the year's end, a plan is agreed to sell his daughter to the pleasure quarter. Then he finds a purse holding a lottery ticket that has won the top prize.

The honest man will not claim the purse, and finds its owner, a masterless samurai, through the pawnshop. He had meant to split the prize with its owner, and the two collect it together. The families join, and the honest man ends a retainer on a stipend, under a new name built on the saying.

Edo tales and plays had long put the proverb Kiyū turned in the mouths of people who would not work. In a book of comic tales of 1679, a fool quotes it when told to take up a trade. He sells everything he owns, goes days without food, and cries that Heaven is killing a man.

In Chikamatsu's puppet play Shusse Kagekiyo, staged in 1685, a brother sees a reward posted for his sister's lover and quotes the proverb. In a kyōgen printed in 1700, a husband who has let his fields go for linked verse quotes it to his wife. A book of worldly tales of 1713 calls taking asleep as idleness the height of folly.

Kiyū himself used the proverb straight in a book of 1762, and quibbled with it in one of 1770. So, our history reads, he did not invent the doubt; he gave it a punch line. Another writer of the same years, Kōkodō, gave the sleeping form a made-up past: the village of Sound Sleep, in the district of Nap. Whether his book came before or after Kiyū's novel is not known.

The rice in the punch line is not idle, our history reads. The old man joins it to a saying already among the old sayings of the haikai handbook Kefukigusa: the bodhisattva, when he fills, bows; man, when he fills, looks up. The verse of the full ear that bows has its own history in our library, which counts this chapter among its witnesses. Neither the verse nor the chapter is the source of the other.

No English rendering of 果報は稲で待て kahō wa ine de mate is known; wait for good fortune in the rice is our history's. For the proverb it turns, Brinkley's dictionary of 1896 gives retribution comes upon him who lies down and waits. Lafcadio Hearn, in 1899, has If you wish for good luck, sleep and wait. Okada, in 1958, reports nette, cultivating one's skill, sometimes put for nete: a near-echo again puts work back into the proverb.

The novel's claim that the rice form is true and the sleeping form a slip is the joke, not a fact about the proverb. Kefukigusa, whose preface is dated 1638, already has the sleeping form. Our history reads 果報は稲で待て as a writer's joke that carries a real lesson, to be read as both. The full ear bows its head, and the honest man who walks with his eyes down is rewarded.

The saying is first known from 1776, in the comic novelist Nagaidō Kiyū's Seken nakōdo katagi, where the old proverb "wait for good fortune asleep" appears turned into "wait for good fortune in the rice" by a near-echo of one word; every later witness known for it cites his novel, except one farming magazine of 1917 whose search window shows it with no source named.