夏はいかにも涼しきやうに冬はいかにも暖かなるやうに natsu wa ikanimo suzushiki yō ni, fuyu wa ikanimo atatakanaru yō ni In Summer, as Cool as Can Be; in Winter, as Warm as Can Be

The weight of 夏はいかにも涼しきやうに冬はいかにも暖かなるやうに falls on いかにも ikanimo: not just cool, but as cool as can be. A large Japanese dictionary gives いかにも, mostly before a word of will or wish, as somehow, by all means, as far as possible. Our history reads it in that sense here. Each half ends in やうに yō ni, so that, so each names an aim, not a thing.

As the Nanpōroku tells it, a man asks Rikyū for the heart and the secret of tea in summer and in winter. Rikyū answers with the two seasons, then the charcoal, so that the water boils, and the tea, so that it is good to drink. With that, he says, the secret is done.

In the Nanpōroku's telling, the man is displeased with Rikyū's answer and says everyone knows it already. Rikyū replies: Then try doing it so, and I will come as your guest and become your pupil. The priest Shōrei is there. He likens the answer to the bird's-nest monk's reply, do no evil, practice every good.

By his own colophon, Tachibana Jitsuzan met a descendant of Nanbō Sōkei at Osaka in 1690 and copied the Nanpōroku's last two books. That year, he notes, was the hundredth since Rikyū's death. The same colophon says the other five books had been kept secret in the Sen house. Whether Rikyū said the line cannot be shown from the witnesses our history read.

Jitsuzan tells the answer again in a book of his own, the Talks at the Hearth in the Gourd, dated 1700 in its printed postface. There the tea leads, then the charcoal, then the flowers as the flower is, and summer and winter come last. The ikanimo is gone, and the book gives the telling as the Record's. A book of tea talk printed at Kyoto in 1803 tells it in the same order, with the flowers.

A list of seven rules ascribed to Rikyū, with summer and winter among them, is in print by 1909, in a book of household cookery. Our history found the list in no print it read before that year. In 1912 the educator Ebara Soroku said he owned a rare book of the seven in Rikyū's own hand. Our history found no copy of it. The line, in its own words, is not one of the seven.

In a paper of 1878 for the Asiatic Society of Japan, W. G. Dixon has Rikyū speak of a house built so as to ensure coolness in summer and warmth in winter. Dixon names no source; his three clauses follow, in order, the Chinese preface of a book printed at Kyoto in 1803. Makoto Ueda's English of 1967 follows the Nanpōroku itself: Entertain your guests so that they feel warm in winter and cool in summer.

Our history reads the line as the plain half of a lesson whose point is the other half. The verse Shōrei likens the answer to is, in our history's words, one a child can say and few can live. The historian Kumakura Isao reads the answer as Rikyū dismissing tea men who take a secret to be something subtle and difficult. Our history calls that the same lesson from the other side.

The first half of an answer the Nanpōroku, a book of tea ascribed to Rikyū's disciple Nanbō Sōkei, gives to Rikyū; the book is known from the copy Tachibana Jitsuzan made of its first five books in 1686, and the dictionaries report the view that he compiled it himself.