柳緑花紅 yanagi wa midori, hana wa kurenai The Willow Is Green, the Flower Is Red

In the phrase, 柳 is the willow, 緑 green, 花 the flower and 紅 crimson. The four characters are read in Japanese as the line yanagi wa midori, hana wa kurenai, and in the Sino-Japanese reading as ryūryoku kakō. The dictionaries also give the phrase as a figure for each thing having its own character.

The デジタル大辞泉 and the 日本国語大辞典 credit the line to the poet Su Shi. Other reference books give a Song monk's song, a commentary on the Diamond Sutra, or no source. Su Shi's collected poems, prose, song lyrics and notes, searched whole in nine texts, do not have the phrase in either order. A public library's search in 2014 and a scholar's thesis of 2000 did not find it either. That is a finding about the editions searched.

Asked what the dharma-realm of one taste is, the hermit of Dingshan, Weisu, answered: The flower red, the willow green.

A compilation made at the end of the Song records the song of the drinking monk Jiuxian Yuxian, who died in 1009: autumn comes, the hills cold, the water chill; spring comes, the willows green, the flowers red.

Yefu Daochuan's capping words on the Diamond Sutra read: before the eyes there is no dharma, so let the willow be green and the flower red.

In four Japanese Zen records the phrase is spring and the New Year, and the plain world before the eyes. At Dazaifu, on the opening day of the third month, a monk asked Nanpo Shōmyō: flowers red, willows green: how is this kōan made manifest to be weighed? Nanpo answered: the spring day is long, the spring light lovely. At a New Year sermon Nanpo said: the sun warm, the wind mild, the flowers red, the willows green: the buddha-dharma of the new year is all made manifest.

Rankei Dōryū, preaching while the builders' axes sounded, said: the willow green and the flower red: is this not form? You all see it; why is this mind not clear?

Zeami's sayings, written down by his son, teach the line's foot-stamps in the Noh: the basic way is two stamps at "the flower". In the play Yamanba, the mountain crone sings: where there are beings there is the mountain crone; the willow green, the flower red, each its own color. In Tōgan Koji, the lay preacher, asked what sermon there will be, answers: all things are the world before your eyes: the willow green, the flower red. Ah, the delight of the spring scene. In Hōkasō and Bashō, the line is grasses and trees showing the buddha.

Kiyohara no Nobukata, lecturing on the Nihon shoki, said: the willow green, the flower red: this is nature's own writing. The lectures were printed in movable type in the Kan'ei years, 1624 to 1644.

Ekū's commentary on the Noh, dated 1683 by its colophon, glosses the line: the willow green and the flower red is the form of things just as they are.

A guide to the Ise pilgrimage, printed in 1797, notes a 柳緑花紅 marker stone beside the notice board at Ōtsu Oiwake. There the road to Uji and Fushimi leaves the road to Kyoto.

A book of tales about Ikkyū, by a compiler of the late Edo period, gives him a deathbed verse that it calls hearsay: the willow green, the flower red. Kwatz! The willow not green, the flower not red.

In 1898 P. Ehmann's German collection of Japanese proverbs entered the line with the note Bedeutung zweifelhaft, meaning doubtful. Daisetz Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927) gives The flower is red and the willow is green. Miura and Sasaki's The Zen Koan (1965) gives The willows are green, the flowers are red, and Sōiku Shigematsu's A Zen Forest (1981) gives Willows are green; flowers, red.

The image is Chinese, a Tang poet's spring banquet with the flowers red and the willows green, then a Zen answer in a book given its imperial preface in 1036 and a capping word in a commentary on the Diamond Sutra of 1179; in Japan the four characters are in the Zen records from the thirteenth century, and the line in Japanese, yanagi wa midori, hana wa kurenai, was sung on the Noh stage by 1430, while the attribution to Su Shi is first read as a head-note in a phrase book printed in 1688.