小立課程 大作工夫 chiisaku katei o tate, ōi ni kufū o nasu Set the Schedule Small, Make the Effort Great

小 (read chiisaku) is small. 立 (read tate) is to set up. 課程 (read katei) is the stint. 大 (read ōi ni) is great. 作 (read nasu) is to make or to do. 工夫 (read kufū) is effort. Read as our history reads them, the eight characters become chiisaku katei o tate, ōi ni kufū o nasu.

A Japanese dictionary gives 課程 as the study or work assigned to be done in a set span of time. It cites a book of 1710 on teaching children, which says a father or elder brother should set the daily stint of reading. In everyday Japanese today, 工夫 means thinking out a good way. Here it is nearer the dictionary's second sense, wholehearted effort, as in Buddhist practice.

Around it in the Zhuzi yulei, the Conversations of Master Zhu, stand sayings of the same kind. The one after it reads The effort must be pressed; the time allowed must be generous. After two more sayings comes set the course of work strictly, keep the mind easy, and in time it will have its savor.

Elsewhere, if you can read two hundred characters, Zhu Xi says, read just one hundred, and put fierce effort into those: understand them in detail, recite them until they are known.

To a gifted friend whose search, he writes, seemed too high and what he kept too simple, Zhu Xi wrote: now set the stint small and keep to it firmly. In Japan the letter stands in the Korean scholar Yi Hwang's selection of Zhu Xi's letters, in a print with Japanese reading marks. The National Diet Library dates its copy 1871.

A Kyoto print of the Zhuzi yulei, with a postface of 1668, gives the line Japanese reading marks. A Qing writer's collection of sayings was printed at Ōgaki, with a postface of 1859. In a snippet of its 1974 facsimile, it answers a scholar's carelessness with sit quietly. It then quotes this line and a second saying from the same chapter of the Zhuzi yulei. In that snippet it calls the sixteen characters the whole method of learning.

Our history found one English rendering, in Daniel K. Gardner's Learning to Be a Sage, of 1990. It read the wording in the archive.org full-text index's fragments of the book's scan, not at its pages. By the order of the sayings in chapter eight, our history places Gardner's Set up a limited curriculum, but exert great effort on it at this line. A search of our archive.org harvest and our shelf's text layers, in English and in romanization, found no other.

Our history reads the line as a rule of quantity and intensity. In that reading, 小 measures the stint and 大 the effort. The stint is small so that it can be done whole, and the effort great so that what is done goes deep.

A saying of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) recorded by a pupil in the 朱子語類, completed in 1270 (the 日国 gives 1271), in its eighth chapter, under the heading on the method of learning in general; a like thought stands in his letter 答方耕道, and a like rule in the tenth chapter, on reading.