愛語よく廻天のちからあることを学すべきなり aigo yoku kaiten no chikara aru koto o gakusubeki nari Learn That Kind Words Have the Power to Turn the Heavens

愛語 aigo is kind words. A Japanese dictionary gives it as a bodhisattva's heartfelt, gentle words to others, one of four ways of guiding people. A large Japanese dictionary gives 廻天 kaiten as changing the course of the times; its characters say, literally, turning heaven. The dictionary's examples of the word open with this line. 学すべきなり gakusubeki nari is one should learn.

The line closes Dōgen's paragraph on kind words, in the fascicle on the bodhisattva's four methods of winning people over. Kind words heard face to face, he writes, gladden the face and the heart. Heard behind one's back, they are engraved on the liver and the soul. Kind words arise from a loving mind, and a loving mind has compassion as its seed. The words after the line are it is not only praising ability.

The phrase the power to turn heaven is Chinese and older. In the Tang histories, the minister Zhang Xuansu argued against the emperor Taizong's rebuilding of the palace at Luoyang, and the work was stopped. The minister Wei Zheng said that when Lord Zhang argues a matter, it has the power to turn heaven: the words of a humane man. In the story, heaven is the emperor.

Dōgen's Gakudō yōjinshū has the phrase, in its second section, in a sentence of his own. When a loyal minister offers one word, he writes, it often has the power to turn heaven. When the buddhas and ancestors give one word, there is no one whose heart is not turned.

The Sōtō school's Shushōgi of 1890 took the line from the Shōbōgenzō into its twenty-second section. Two commentaries, printed in 1893 and 1896, read it two ways. One, printed in 1896, reads it as remonstrance: praising ability alone is not kind words, and direct remonstrance and the like are kind words too. An editor of the Shushōgi read it in 1893 as conversion: kind words turn all beings, steeped in greed, anger and delusion, toward awakening.

A typeset of the poet-monk Ryōkan's writings, dated 1918 in the library's record, prints the paragraph under the heading 愛語, kind words. In a book dated 1928 in the library's record, the scholar Igarashi Chikara found in the line the spiritual power of words. A teachers' guide to a school reader is dated 1933 in the library's record. It says that Ryōkan, it is said, wrote the line out and kept it by his seat.

In the English our history read, Arthur Lloyd's rendering of 1894 has no heaven: kind words have a great and powerful influence. Sōgen Yamakami's of 1912 brings the heaven in: the power to make the heavens revolve. Ed Brown and Kazuaki Tanahashi, in 1985, put the destiny of the nation where the line has heaven.

Our history reads the line through Dōgen's own sentence of the Gakudō yōjinshū. The minister's word that turns the ruler and the ancestors' word that turns the heart are its two halves. In our history's reading, the two commentaries' readings, of 1896 and 1893, follow them. So, in our history's reading, kind words can turn a ruler from his course and a hearer toward the way. That is a power of kind words, not of praise. The scholar Mizuno Hakuryū cited the minister's word from the Gakudō yōjinshū and the line together in 1972, as instances of Dōgen's vocabulary of heaven in government. Reading the line as both halves of Dōgen's sentence is our history's own.

Written by the Zen master Dōgen in the Shōbōgenzō fascicle on the bodhisattva's four methods, which its colophon dates to 1243; the phrase 回天之力, the power to turn heaven, is the one a Chinese story gives to a minister whose remonstrance turned an emperor, and Dōgen had used it in his own Chinese in a work two of whose sections are dated 1234.