掬水月在手 mizu o kiku sureba tsuki te ni ari The Moon in Your Hands

In 掬水月在手, 掬 kiku is to scoop up water with both hands. 水 is water, 月 the moon, 在 to be in, and 手 the hand. The moon in your hands is the moon in the water you hold.

Read aloud in the Japanese way of reading Chinese, the line is mizu o kiku sureba tsuki te ni ari. The Zen phrase book marks it so in its print of 1889, and so does a handbook for calligraphers of 1913.

The Japanese dictionary site kotobank has no general entry for the line. The dictionary 字通 quotes it with its pair, under 掬水, to scoop up water. In 1907 a book of set phrases by 簡野道明 Kanno Dōmei gave it one gloss: said of a fine thing gained of itself.

The poem the line comes from is 春山夜月, A moonlit night in the spring hills. The man in it is so pleased with the hills at night that he forgets to go home. The line after this one is play with flowers and their scent fills your robe. Nothing in the poem is doctrine.

A monk asked the master Baling whether the meaning of the patriarchs and the meaning of the teaching are the same or different. Baling answered: when chickens are cold they go up into the trees; when ducks are cold they go down into the water. The Chan master 五祖法演 Goso Hōen said that Baling had said just half, and gave the two lines as his answer.

In Japan the two lines are in a sermon of 徹翁義亨 Tettō Gikō of the temple Daitokuji, who died in 1369. At a memorial he struck his staff and said them with the flower line before the moon line. In the sources our history read, no Japanese use is known from a master who died earlier.

In the recorded sayings our history read, four Rinzai masters of the fourteenth to sixteenth century give the couplet. They give it as an answer, and also in a verse and at a funeral. Later lives of Sōtō masters, in the collections our history read, tell of two who answered with it. They died in 1482 and 1516.

A monk put a story to 大休宗休 Daikyū Sōkyū (1468–1549) and asked what it meant. 趙州 Jōshū had told a monk go and wash your bowl, and the monk woke at once. Daikyū answered with the two lines.

A handbook of subjects for calligraphers, of 1913, lists 掬水月在手 and the line after it as two separate entries. So by then the line could stand alone, without its pair. In a book of 1931 the poet 相馬御風 Sōma Gyofū writes that he likes to write it: the moonlight on the water I have scooped in my hands!

Our history knows the monthly tea journal 茶道月報 from the short passages the National Diet Library shows of it. In them the line hangs in the alcove at September gatherings, as reported in issues of 1929 and 1936. In an issue of 1939, an account headed with the line opens on the harvest moon. The poem is of spring; in these passages the line hangs in autumn.

In Ritsurin Garden at Takamatsu, the great tea house on the South Lake is the 掬月亭 Kikugetsutei, the pavilion of the scooped moon. The city history of 1933 says its name is taken from the poetic feeling of this line. The present building is of the work of 1745. Who named it, and when, the sources our history read do not say.

J. C. Hepburn's Japanese–English dictionary of 1872 prints the line in romaji, untranslated, as its example for 掬 kiku. Our English, scoop up water and the moon is in your hands, is R. H. Blyth's line of 1942 less one word. It is also Isshū Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki's of 1965 less a comma.

Our history of the line offers a reading, signed as a reading and not as a finding. In it, the moon comes without being reached for. The act is small, a double handful of water, and what comes into the hands is the whole moon. 簡野道明 Kanno Dōmei's a fine thing gained of itself is the nearest gloss in Japanese print. A spring line, made by Zen into an answer and, in the tea passages we read, into an autumn scroll: both are true of it.

The third line of a poem of a spring night in the hills by the Tang poet Yu Liangshi, of the eighth century, kept in an imperial anthology of 987; a Chan master, Goso Hōen, took it with the line after it as a couplet to answer with by 1104, and his heirs after him; Japanese Zen had it by the fourteenth.