天は自ら助くる者を助く ten wa mizukara tasukuru mono o tasuku Heaven Helps Those Who Help Themselves

天は自ら助くる者を助く (ten wa mizukara tasukuru mono o tasuku): Heaven helps those who make the effort themselves, without relying on others.

Word for word, the Japanese closely follows the English line Heaven helps those who help themselves, Heaven included: ten is Heaven, mizukara is oneself, by one's own hand, and mono is those who. It says Heaven where much English says God. Tasukuru is a classical form of the verb tasuku, to help, so the line is in the literary language.

English print carries the line, in one shape or another, from the sixteenth century on. Richard Taverner's Erasmus in English, in its printing of 1569, has The Goddes do helpe the doers. George Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs of 1640 has Helpe thy selfe, and God will helpe thee. Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government of 1698 has God helps those who help themselves. Benjamin Franklin printed God helps them that help themselves as a saying of Poor Richard.

By the 1890s, Japanese books credited the maxim to five sources: a Western proverb, Poor Richard, Samuel Smiles, the English, and a translated book. In a play printed in Osaka in 1896, a merchant giving capital to a man who had resolved to die calls it a precious holy word that a man could not use up in a lifetime.

In the 1920s, Japan's national ethics textbook for sixth-graders set the maxim under a lesson on Benjamin Franklin's life, called standing on one's own. A teacher's manual of 1923 explained it as help that Heaven gives to none but those who apply themselves to their own work.

In a survey reported in 1912, 24% of 193 pupils at one Kyoto elementary school named this maxim, third among thirty-four ethics-textbook maxims. Among the older pupils alone, 70% named it. A line like this, the report adds, does not go into a young child's head.

In the cursive design, Eri writes 自ら as 自から, a spelling also printed in a self-help book of 1892.

An old Western maxim, which Samuel Smiles quoted, never as his own, in the first line of the first chapter of Self-Help (1859); Nakamura Masanao's Japanese of it opens his translation, the Saigoku risshi hen 西國立志編 of 1870–71, and the spelling with 者 is that of the maxim books from 1874 and of the national ethics textbook of the 1920s.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 天は自ら助くる者を助く.

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Eri Takase was born and raised in Osaka, Japan, and holds the rank of Shihan, the highest rank in Japanese calligraphy, from the Bokuteki-kai and the Bunka-shodo. About Master Takase