稽古とは一より習ひ十を知り 十よりかへるもとの其一 keiko to wa ichi yori narai jū o shiri jū yori kaeru moto no sono ichi Practice: learn from one, know ten, and from ten come back to the first one

Word for word: 稽古とは, practice is; 一より習ひ, learning from one; 十を知り, knowing ten; 十よりかへる, coming back from ten; もとの其一, that first one, at the origin.

稽古 is training or practice, said especially of the martial arts and the performing arts. The characters' own older sense, to consider the ancient, is not the poem's.

The copies dated before 1901 that were read for the poem's history write the verb as an order, 十をしれ or 十を知れ, know ten. The running 十を知り, one sentence from one to ten and back, is in print by 1901 and has been the common form since.

The copy of 1623 calls its poems the essentials of chanoyu, the way of tea, and ends its hundred on this one. A historian of poetry allowed that its year may not be believed. No source read dates its hand or its paper.

A dictionary of tea of 1940 says that of the Jōō hundred and the Rikyū hundred, which is genuine is not known. Many called a hundred, it adds, hold ninety-odd poems. A guide of 1895 had said the teaching poems do not number a hundred, but the round number is taken.

In 1904 Tanaka Senshō, a pupil of the Urasenke house of tea, held that the Rikyū hundred must be a composition from after Rikyū's death. A book of 1907 records his view.

In the Urasenke print of 1903, the hundred closes ten poems after this one on the verse that names 守破離 (shu ha ri): keep the rule and the manner to the end, and though you break them, though you leave them, do not forget the root. Gengensai's own hundred of 1845 does not carry that verse, and in the copy of 1623 this poem is itself the end.

From 1907 this poem went beyond tea, into Noh, flower arrangement and the sword. A teacher of flower arrangement, Yamane Suidō, closed a book with it in 1928: This book is a reference for learning from one until you know ten; and knowing ten is the way back to the first one.

Dennis Hirota's English of 1995, in Wind in the Pines, introduces it as a poem attributed to Rikyū and reads: Practice involves beginning to learn from one and coming to know ten, then returning from ten to the original one.

The oldest dated copy of the poem read here is one whose colophon dates its copying to 1623 and names Rikyū as the maker of its hundred poems; the same poems also stand under the names of Takeno Jōō and Katagiri Sekishū, and a study of tea's hundreds places the first under Rikyū's name around 1690.