心正則筆正 kokoro tadashikereba fude tadashi When the Heart Is Upright, the Brush Is Upright

心 (read kokoro) is the heart, the mind. A Japanese dictionary gives it as what reason, knowledge, feeling and will in a person spring from. 正 (read tadashi) is upright. The Japanese word means straight in shape or direction, not warped or bent, and also in accord with morality, rule, reason and manners. 筆 (read fude) is the brush, and also writing with it and the way it is used. 則 is then. This reading leaves it unread; another keeps it, kokoro tadashikereba sunawachi fude tadashi.

The Tang emperor Muzong said he had seen Liu Gongquan's writing in a Buddhist temple, and made him a scholar attending the emperor's writing. In the Old History the emperor asks how Liu's brush comes to be so good; in the New, the method of using the brush. In both, the emperor changed countenance at the answer. The five characters on the scroll are the ones the two histories share.

Later readers took it in different ways. Su Shi, writing of Liu's calligraphy, said it was not only a veiled remonstrance; the principle holds. The Ming writer Xiang Mu turned it to when the man is upright, the writing is upright. The Qing calligrapher Liang Tongshu wrote: Do not read it as a moralist's saying; it is just that one must hold the brush firm every moment, because the brush is soft. In 1991 Mori Tsuneo argued from the emperor's question that its 筆正, brush upright, means the brush standing straight.

A Qing manual on holding the brush joined the line to archery: the will upright within, the body straight without. Matsura Seizan copied the passage into his talks on the sword, where holding the brush becomes how the sword is held. The calligrapher Morikawa Chikusō wrote: archery and writing are alike: if the form is upright, it surely hits.

In Japan, some of the uses read for our history take it of handwriting. In a letter of about 1468–69, Ōsen Keisan set it where someone had asked for a specimen of handwriting. A commentary on the Tale of Genji, finished in 1528, used it to gloss the young men's rainy-night talk of handwriting. The later Genji commentaries read for our history carry the gloss too. A medieval calligraphy teaching cites it as the text for the saying by one's hand the measure of one's heart is known.

In a memorial sermon of 1548, the monk Daikyū Sōkyū praised a dead lord's brush and painting with the line. In a book of 1710 on teaching children, Kaibara Ekken wrote that the crookedness or uprightness of the hand shows the crookedness or uprightness of the heart, gave Liu's line, and set the aim of writing as plain and upright and easy to read. In his handbook of 1843, the calligrapher Ichikawa Beian set the line at the head of a page of five-character phrases to brush.

Herbert Giles put it into English in 1898: "I guide my pen," replied Liu, "by my heart. I keep my heart correct, and my pen follows." In Giles's English the emperor took the answer as a hint to himself. A book of 1984 on the swordsman Yamaoka Tesshū, read here in its printing of 1994, prints a scroll of the five characters. Its caption gives If your mind is correct, the brush will be correct, and then This holds true for any of the Ways.

Our history reads the five characters, as they are sold, as a saying of the brush that is also a saying of the person. 正 is one word for the posture and the person, and upright is the English word that keeps both. The remonstrance the emperor heard in it is the story the histories tell; the five characters stand without it.

The answer the Tang calligrapher 柳公權 Liu Gongquan (778–865) gave the emperor 穆宗 Muzong when asked about his brush, in both Tang histories: the 舊唐書, the Old History (945), 用筆在心，心正則筆正, the use of the brush lies in the heart; when the heart is upright, the brush is upright, and the 新唐書, the New History (1060), 心正則筆正，筆正乃可法矣, which runs on, when the brush is upright, it can be taken as a model; both say the emperor took it as a remonstrance made by the brush, 筆諫.