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塵も積もれば山となる chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru Even dust if piled can become a mountain

塵も積もれば山となる (chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru), even dust, piled up, becomes a mountain, followed from Tsurayuki's preface of 905 into English.

Japanese Scroll of Even dust if piled can become a mountain (chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Even dust if piled can become a mountain塵も積もれば山となるchiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru

Original art by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

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Abstract

塵も積もれば山となる, even dust, piled up, becomes a mountain, is a Japanese proverb about many small things adding up to something great. Its image is Chinese: a philosopher of the third century BC piling earth into a mountain, a Buddhist commentary's fine dust piled into a mountain of unmovable karma, and a Tang poet's couplet on his study wall, which a Muromachi commentary and a Meiji edition set behind Tsurayuki's kana preface to the Kokinshū of 905. The dictionary of record gives as its first instance the last line of a Noh play it dates about 1430, and the plain proverb follows in the Jesuits' Japanese-Portuguese dictionary of 1603–04, a tract of 1627 on how to become rich, and the first books of sayings. English has kept the literal image since Hepburn's dictionary of 1867, the earliest known; among the books read, an American proverb book of 1965 sets Great oaks from little acorns grow beside a Japanese proverb of a poppy seed holding a mountain, and a dictionary of idiomatic equivalents of 1968 is the first to set it beside the dust.

Overview

The sense. One sense, from Xunzi 荀子 to the modern dictionaries: many small things, kept up, come to something great. What changes is what the small things are. For Xunzi and Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 they are learning and virtue; for the sutra they are sins, and the mountain is the one you cannot move; for Bai Juyi and Tsurayuki they are the steps of a way and the growth of poetry; for the Noh crone they are first the mountain itself and at the end the delusions that have piled up into her; for a tract of 1627 on getting rich they are savings lent out at interest, growing on themselves; for the Edo tale and the savings slogans of modern Japan that a dictionary mentions, they are coins. The Japanese proverb kept the shape and let the content go, which is what a proverb does. No witness read for this history reads the dust as a seed. Japanese has its own proverb of one small thing holding something great, a poppy seed with Mount Sumeru inside it, and it is a different proverb.

The words. 塵, chiri, is dust, the least particle of anything; in Buddhist Chinese the word for the smallest unit of matter is 微塵, fine dust, and that is where the canon line below comes from. 積もれば, tsumoreba, is the verb to pile up, to accumulate in the conditional, if it piles up; the も before it is even: even dust, if it piles up. 山となる, yama to naru, becomes a mountain, with the classical となる that the proverb has kept. Three things vary across the witnesses and none of them touches the design. The verb: 積って, having piled up, is the form of the Noh line as a Meiji edition prints it, of that list as copied in 1790, the Jesuits' dictionary and the tract of 1627, and of Hepburn's dictionary of 1867 and a novel of 1885; つもりて, in the older written form, is the form of the 1638 handbook's list, which is written in kana, and 積りて of the book of sayings of 1656; the conditional 積れば is the form the dictionaries and the catalogue head with, and an English magazine already romanizes it in 1871–72. The even: absent from every witness before 1700 read for this history, present in that magazine and in every modern form. And the spelling of the verb's ending, 積れば against 積もれば, which is one word written two ways; the prewar corpus almost always writes the shorter, and the catalogue's 積もれば is the postwar standard.

The proverb in English. The literal rendering is Hepburn's, in 1867, and every English book keeps it [1]. A magazine's list of Japanese proverbs in 1871–72 has Even dust if gathered up becomes a mountain [2], a dictionary of 1908 even dust heaped up makes a hill [3], and 藤井's 1910 dictionary gives four European equivalents of accumulation, of which ことわざを知る辞典 still gives one, Many a little makes a mickle [4]. Of the American proverb books, Buchanan in 1965 keeps the literal with even and gives Great oaks from little acorns grow to a different Japanese proverb, of a poppy seed [5]; Corwin's dictionary of 1968 is the earliest of the books read to set the acorn beside this line, and Galef's list repeats it in 1987 [6][7]; Zona in 1996 and Trimnell in 2004 keep the literal image close [8][9]. The proverb is not in Galef's second book (2000).

The historical record

Third century BC. Xunzi, the chapter 勸學, An Exhortation to Learning. 積土成山，風雨興焉；積水成淵，蛟龍生焉；積善成德，而神明自得，聖心備焉。故不積蹞步，無以致千里；不積小流，無以成江海, pile up earth and it becomes a mountain, and wind and rain rise from it; pile up water and it becomes a deep, and dragons are born in it; pile up good and it becomes virtue, and the spirit's clarity comes of itself. So without piling up half-steps there is no reaching a thousand miles; without piling up small streams there is no making a river or a sea [10]. The image of piled earth is here already, as a figure for learning, and it is the image every later text reuses. Liu Xiang 劉向's 説苑 in the first century BC, 土積成山，則豫樟生焉, say the same thing [11], and Dong Zhongshu's memorial in the 漢書, 眾少成多，積小致鉅, the few become many, the small piled up reaches the great [12]; none of the three uses the word dust.

Early fifth century. The 大智度論, the commentary on the Perfection of Wisdom given to Nāgārjuna, in Kumārajīva's Chinese, fascicle 94. ことわざを知る辞典 dates Nāgārjuna to the second or third century; the date here is the Chinese translation's. The line the modern dictionaries give as the proverb's origin: 譬如積微塵成山，難可得移動, it is like fine dust piled up into a mountain, which cannot be moved. In its column the mountain is the weight of accumulated karma, the deeds a being piles up out of greed and anger until they cannot be shifted, and the 故事成語を知る辞典 says so plainly: even a small anger or desire, repeated, makes the soul hard to save. It is a simile of the same shape as the proverb, with 微塵 and 成山 in one sentence, and its moral runs the other way [13].

Ninth century. 白居易, 續座右銘, A Continued Motto for the Right of the Seat. The poet kept Cui Ziyu 崔子玉's old motto on his study wall, judged it incomplete, and continued it: 千里始足下、高山起微塵、吾道亦如此、行之貴日新, a thousand miles begins under the foot; a high mountain rises from fine dust; my way is like this too, and in walking it what counts is to be new each day. The first line is 老子's, as the 1901 commentary on the Kokinshū preface names it [14]; the second is Xunzi's piled earth in the Buddhist word for dust. This is the couplet Japan took [15].

905. Ki no Tsurayuki 紀貫之's kana preface to the 古今和歌集. Of how poetry grew from small beginnings: 遠き所も、出で立つ足もとよりはじまりて、年月をわたり、高き山も、麓の塵ひぢよりなりて、天雲たなびくまで生ひのぼれるが如くに、この歌も、かくの如くなるべし, as a far place begins from the foot that sets out, and crosses the years, and as a high mountain is made from the dust and mud at its base and grows up until the clouds of heaven trail across it, so must this poetry have been. As 金子元臣 read it in 1908, Tsurayuki has taken Bai Juyi's couplet and made it grander, adding the years to the thousand miles and the trailing clouds to the mountain, and the preface's Chinese twin, the 真名序, says the same in Chinese. The Japanese trail of the proverb runs through this sentence [16][17].

Fifteenth century. The 榮雅抄, a commentary on the preface, as quoted in 1939. 榮雅抄曰、白居易云、千里始足下、高山起微塵。大戴禮曰、積土成山、風雨興焉. The 古今栄雅抄 is among the works the dictionaries give to 飛鳥井雅親, who took the name 栄雅 as a monk in 1473 and died in 1490 [18]. An annotated edition of 1901 makes the same identification: under 遠き所も……高き山も it sets the 白氏文集's 千里始足下、高山起微塵 and the Xunzi's piled earth, and under 遠き所も alone the 中庸, the 老子 (千里之行、始於足下), the 止觀 and the Xunzi again; it cites the 榮雅抄 on the same page for another gloss, so it is not an independent witness to the identification [19][14]. The identification is at least as old as the 榮雅抄, as the 1939 collection quotes it; it is not a modern finding.

Fifteenth century. The Noh play 山姥, the mountain crone. The crone opens her sermon with the same image: 夫れ山と謂つば、塵泥より起つて、天雲かゝる千丈の峯、海は苔の露よりしたゞりて、波濤を疊む萬水たり, what we call a mountain rises from dust and mud to a peak of a thousand fathoms that the clouds hang on; the sea drips from the dew on moss to the ten thousand waters that fold their waves. A 1908 commentary turns it back toward the sutra: mountain and sea are small things piled and piled, and in the bodies of living beings small delusions pile and pile into rebirth [20][21]. The play ends on the image: 輪廻を離れぬ妄執の雲の、塵つもつて山姥となれる、鬼女が有様, the dust of the clouds of deluded attachment, never free of the round of rebirth, piled up and become a mountain crone: the demon woman as she is. The same commentator notes 塵つもつて山となると云ふ諺によりて續けたり, it is phrased after the saying "dust piled up becomes a mountain", and the dictionary of record gives this line, which it dates about 1430, as the saying's first instance [20][22]. Whether the play follows a saying already current or the saying grew from the play, the line cannot show; the date is the dictionary's and the reading 大和田's.

The 1580s, as its heading says; written down later. 北條氏直時代諺留, a list of sayings. A short manuscript headed 北條氏直ノ時分ノ諺思合する事ども多キ故ニ書留之, sayings of the time of Hōjō Ujinao; since many come to mind, I write them down. Ujinao led his house through the 1580s. The list's last entry is ちりつもつて山となる. The manuscript, a six-leaf copy in the library of Tokyo University, is known now from 藤井乙男's transcription, which he printed in 1929 because he believed the copy had burned in the earthquake of 1923; the 1929 print sets さ where the 1938 reprint of the same page reads と [23]. Its colophons, printed with it, make the copy one of 1790 from a copy of 1773, call the list the sayings current in Ujinao's time, and report that the lost original was in the hand of Ogyū Sorai's father, 方庵, who was born in 1626 [23][24]. If that is so, the list was written down in the seventeenth century by a hand recalling the sayings of an earlier time, perhaps after the Jesuits' dictionary and the tract of 1627 below; its date rests on its heading [23].

1603–04. Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam, the Jesuits' Japanese-Portuguese dictionary printed at Nagasaki. Chiri tçumotte yamato naru, glossed De pequenas cousas acumuladas se fazem grandes, of small things accumulated great ones are made, as J. L. Álvarez-Taladriz gives it, number 48, in his collection of the dictionary's proverbs; the dictionary's own leaf was not read for this history [25].

1627. 長者教, The Rich Men's Teaching, printed in kana. The first of three rich men tells how he ate half his daily rice as a temple carpenter's apprentice, lent out the rest at ten per cent and then thirty, and kept it working until it multiplied itself: 二をうけ。二三をうく。みじんつもつて。山となり。一おくの長者となる, which G. W. Sargent translated in 1959 One leads to Two, Two leads to Three. Dust piles up and grows into a mountain. In this way I became a chōja worth a hundred thousand koku [26][27]. The saying is already about money, and about money that grows on itself. The second rich man, on the same lesson, sets a ladder climbed one step at a time beside plum trees that grow fast and are never large and camphors that grow slowly into great trees: the tract's figure for patience, and the nearest any witness read here comes to a growing tree [27].

1638. 毛吹草, 松江重頼's handbook of haikai, dated by its preface and printed in 1645. Its list of sayings has 塵つもりて山となる, followed by いさご重じて岩となる, sand grown heavy becomes a rock, as 藤井 printed the list in 1929; he says the 毛吹草 writes its sayings almost all in kana and that he supplied the kanji [23].

1656. 世話尽, a book of sayings in kana. 塵積りて山となる, dust, having piled up, becomes a mountain, at the head of a column that runs on to the judgments of hell too depend on money and a rich house has no second generation. The verb form of the 1638 list, without the even the modern form carries [28].

Edo, reprinted 1912. A tale of a merchant of Sakai, in the collection 雑史集. 遠き所もいで立つ足もとよりはじまると古人の申置きしも立身の肝要 … 山もふもとのちりひぢより起つて天雲のたな引く迄おひのぼるがごとし。されば堺にもずや宗安といひてうとくなる人有り, the ancients said that a far place begins under the foot that sets out, and that is the heart of making one's way; a mountain rises from the dust and mud at its base until the clouds trail across it. Now in Sakai there was a wealthy man, もずや Sōan. Tsurayuki's sentence, put to work as a lesson in getting on [29].

Edo, in prints of 1830 and 1900. The dictionaries. 谷川士清's 倭訓栞, under やま, in a volume printed in 1830: 塵積りて山となるといふ諺は古今集の序に高き山も麓のちりひぢよりなりてと見え … 説苑に土積成山と見えたり, the saying "dust piled up becomes a mountain" is seen in the Kokinshū preface, "a high mountain is made from the dust and mud at its base", and in the 説苑's "earth piled up becomes a mountain" [30]. 俚言集覧, in its Meiji typeset, files 塵積て山となる and 微塵て山となる under four Edo collections of sayings, 和漢古諺, 世話盡, 毛吹草 and 野語述說, and sets the preface and the 説苑 beside them [31]. The Edo lexicographers had already put the proverb beside the preface.

1867. James Curtis Hepburn, A Japanese and English Dictionary, first edition, page 496. Under the verb: TSZMORI … Chiri tszmotte yama to naru, (prov.) dust heaped up becomes a mountain. The earliest English rendering among the books read for this history and in the Internet Archive's full-text index, marked as a proverb, in the spoken form without even [1]. The second edition, 和英語林集成 of 1872, prints it again at page 567 under TSUMORI [32].

1871–72. The Phœnix, a monthly magazine for India, Burma, Siam, China, Japan and Eastern Asia, volume 2, page 191. In a numbered series of Japanese proverbs: (43) Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru. Even dust if gathered up becomes a mountain. The modern conditional and the even together, the earliest English with even in the same two searches [2].

1885 and 1908. 三遊亭円朝's 塩原多助一代記 has 微塵積つて山となるの譬の通り, just as the saying goes, fine dust piled up becomes a mountain, with the Buddhist word for dust [33]; a Japanese-English dictionary of 1908 has Chiri mo tsumotte yamato naru, 塵も積つて山となる, Even dust heaped up makes a hill [3].

1910. 藤井乙男, 諺語大辞典. Three entries. Under 【塵ツモリテ山トナル】 he gives the two other headwords, 微塵積って山となる and 砂長じて巌となる, sand grows into a boulder, which is the image of the national anthem; then his sources in order: the Kokinshū preface first, the 説苑, Bai Juyi's couplet, the 大智度論, another Zen text, and Dong Zhongshu; then four European proverbs, Drop by drop fills the tub, French; Many a little makes a mickle; Little and often makes a heap in time, German; Little brooks make great rivers, French. Under 【微塵積ツテ山トナル】 the preface and the 説苑 again, and under a headword for the Noh, the crone's line with Xunzi beside it. He puts the Japanese preface before the Chinese sutra, which is the right order for the Japanese proverb [4].

The dictionaries today. デジタル大辞泉: 《「大智度論」九四から》ごくわずかのものでも、数多く積もり重なれば高大なものとなることのたとえ, from the 大智度論, fascicle 94: a figure for how even the slightest things, piled up in numbers, become something high and great. ことわざを知る辞典 gives the same sense and a second, hortatory one, 小さな努力でもたゆまず続けていくと、いつか大きな成果が得られる, small efforts kept up without slackening bring a great result one day; it names the sutra as origin, the Kokinshū preface as the old Japanese form, the Edo period as when the present form came into common use, and the Edo いろは karuta as carrying it, and it gives Many a little makes a mickle as the English. The 故事成語を知る辞典 quotes the sutra in Japanese and says what it meant there [22].

What is not a source. The 大智度論 is the origin the modern dictionaries name, and it is a real parallel in the canon, the one text that has fine dust and becomes a mountain in a single line; but its mountain is the weight of bad karma, and the Japanese trail runs through the Kokinshū preface, whose source the commentators named as Bai Juyi five hundred years ago. The honest order is the preface as the Japanese source and the sutra as the canon parallel. 砂長じて巌となる, sand growing into a boulder, is the anthem's image, which 藤井 sets beside the proverb as the same thought; 積少成多 is the Chinese four-character form the dictionaries print beside it, and 티끌 모아 태산 the Korean. Great oaks from little acorns grow, an English proverb about one small thing growing by its nature, is not a rendering of this line; the next section shows where it entered the English tradition.

The proverb in English

1888. Basil Hall Chamberlain, A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese, page 81. Not in his proverb list but in his grammar, as the example for the particle と: Chiri mo tsumotte yama to naru. "Dust accumulating becomes a mountain." (A proverb used to inculcate the importance of little things.), and again under the next section [34].

1955. Okada Rokuo, Japanese Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, first published 1955, read in the printing of 1958, page 34. Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru. Even dust, when piled up, may form a hill. This is the Japanese way of saying, "Many a mickle makes a muckle." [35]

1965. Daniel Crump Buchanan, Japanese Proverbs and Sayings, University of Oklahoma Press, page 158. Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru: "Even dust when accumulated makes a mountain." English parallel: Little and often makes a heap in time. The literal, with even for も, and 藤井's German proverb as the parallel [5]. Ninety pages earlier, under Detail, he gives Keshi no naka ni Shumisan ari, "The small beginning of great things." (Lit., "In a poppy seed is Mount Sumeru.") English parallels: A forest in an acorn. Great oaks from little acorns grow. The acorn is already in the English tradition of Japanese proverbs, set beside the proverb of one small thing [5].

1968. Charles Corwin, A Dictionary of Japanese and English Idiomatic Equivalents. Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru ちりも積もれば山となる Great oaks from little acorns grow [6]. The earliest of the books read to set the acorn beside the dust, three years after Buchanan set it beside the poppy seed; Galef's 1987 equation is already here.

1987. David Galef, Even Monkeys Fall from Trees, Tuttle, number 32, page 78. Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru. Even dust amassed will grow into a mountain., and in his list of English equivalents, Great oaks from little acorns grow. It repeats Corwin's acorn of 1968 [6], in a newspaper game Galef's own preface describes; it is the one equivalent in the whole lineage that is about one thing growing rather than many things piling [7].

1996. Guy Zona, Even Withered Trees Give Prosperity to the Mountain, Simon and Schuster, page 14. Even dust, when accumulated, makes a mountain. No Japanese, no source [8].

2004. Edward Trimnell, Tigers, Devils, and Fools, Beechmont Crest, page 21. Dust, when accumulated, makes a mountain, then This proverb encourages people to be patient when accumulating savings or combining many small efforts. Zona's wording without the even, and the savings reading the Japanese dictionaries also record. The proverb is not in Galef's second book, Even a Stone Buddha Can Talk (2000) [9].

Today. The house translation, Even dust if piled can become a mountain, stands in Hepburn's and Buchanan's line: literal, even for も, piled for the verb, can become softening となる. What a rendering must keep: the dust as many, and the piling as the act; even is worth keeping, and can is a courtesy the Japanese does not need.

A reading

Great oaks from little acorns grow is a proverb about one small thing becoming great by its nature. This proverb is about many small things becoming great by number. The Japanese witnesses read here say so, from Xunzi's piled earth to the tract of 1627, whose dust is savings lent out and multiplying; so do the English equivalents the dictionaries and proverb books chose: drop by drop, little and often, many a little, many a mickle. The dust is not a seed. Japanese has a seed proverb, the poppy seed with Mount Sumeru inside it, and the earliest English book read that reaches for the acorn sets it there, not here; the tract of 1627 has its slow camphor, and it stands for patience, beside the piling, not for the dust. What can be said instead is the chain, which is true: an image of piled earth in a Chinese philosopher of the third century BC; a Tang poet's couplet on his study wall; the preface to Japan's first imperial anthology, using it for how poetry itself grew; a Noh crone using it for the mountain she haunts and for what she has become; and the proverb in a tract on getting rich in 1627, and in the books of sayings after it, on a karuta card since, and in the savings slogans of modern Japan. On the sutra: it is named, as the dictionaries do, for what it meant there, which is a mountain of sins, not a mountain of savings.

References

  1. James Curtis Hepburn, A Japanese and English Dictionary, first edition, 1867, p. 496, s.v. TSZMORI. Internet Archive japaneseenglishd00hepb, leaf n513. https://archive.org/details/japaneseenglishd00hepb/page/n513/mode/1up
  2. The Phœnix: A Monthly Magazine for India, Burma, Siam, China, Japan and Eastern Asia, vol. 2, 1871–72, p. 191, "Japanese Proverbs", no. 43. Internet Archive, leaf n202. https://archive.org/details/the-phoenix-a-monthly-magazine-for-india-burma-siam-china-japan-eastern-asia-vol-ii-1871-1872/page/n202/mode/1up
  3. 『和英新辞典』(会話作文), 1908. National Diet Library pid 903158, scan 300. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/903158/1/300
  4. 藤井乙男『諺語大辞典』, 有朋堂, 1910, 【塵ツモリテ山トナル】, 【微塵積ツテ山トナル】 and the 山姥 headword. National Diet Library pid 862766, scans 337, 494 and 533. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/862766/1/337
  5. Daniel Crump Buchanan, Japanese Proverbs and Sayings, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1965, p. 158, and p. 68 for Keshi no naka ni Shumisan ari.
  6. Charles Corwin, ed., A Dictionary of Japanese and English Idiomatic Equivalents, Kodansha International, 1968, s.v. chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru.
  7. David Galef, Even Monkeys Fall from Trees: The Wit and Wisdom of Japanese Proverbs, Charles E. Tuttle, Rutland and Tokyo, 1987, no. 32, p. 78.
  8. Guy Zona, Even Withered Trees Give Prosperity to the Mountain, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996, p. 14.
  9. Edward E. Trimnell, Tigers, Devils, and Fools: A Guide to Japanese Proverbs, Beechmont Crest Publishing, 2004, p. 21.
  10. 荀子『勸學』, 3rd century BC, at ctext.org. https://ctext.org/xunzi/quan-xue/zh
  11. 劉向『説苑』建本, 1st century BC, at ctext.org. https://ctext.org/shuo-yuan/jian-ben/zh
  12. 『漢書』董仲舒傳, at ctext.org. https://ctext.org/han-shu/dong-zhong-shu-zhuan/zh
  13. Kumārajīva tr., 『大智度論』卷九十四, early 5th century, at CBETA (T25n1509, p. 720b09–11). https://cbdata.dila.edu.tw/stable/juans?work=T1509&juan=94
  14. 『古今和歌集序析義』, 1901, pp. 17–18: 〔參照〕 at 遠き所も……高き山も (〔白氏文集〕, 〔荀子〕) and the notes at 遠き所も. National Diet Library pid 873291, scans 17–18. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/873291/1/17
  15. 白居易, 續座右銘 并序, 『白氏長慶集』卷39, at Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/白氏長慶集/卷039
  16. 窪田空穂 校註『古今和歌集』, 1938. National Diet Library pid 1031921, scans 6–7. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1031921/1/6
  17. 金子元臣『古今和歌集評釈』第1, 1908. National Diet Library pid 873304, scan 16. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/873304/1/16
  18. 「飛鳥井雅親」, デジタル大辞泉・日本大百科全書・デジタル版 日本人名大辞典+Plus, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/飛鳥井雅親
  19. 榮雅抄, quoted in 『紀要別冊文献蒐載』, 1939. National Diet Library pid 1186341, scan 7. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1186341/1/7
  20. 大和田建樹『謡曲評釈』, 1908, 山姥. National Diet Library pid 876568, scans 74–75 and 77. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/876568/1/74
  21. 『謡曲狂言』, 1921. National Diet Library pid 942796, scan 75. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/942796/1/75
  22. 「塵も積もれば山となる」, デジタル大辞泉・精選版 日本国語大辞典・ことわざを知る辞典・故事成語を知る辞典, at kotobank, and 精選版 日本国語大辞典 at 「塵積もりて山となる」. https://kotobank.jp/word/塵も積もれば山となる · https://kotobank.jp/word/塵積もりて山となる
  23. 藤井乙男『諺の研究』, 1929, pp. 229–233 (北條氏直時代諺留), p. 238 (the colophons, 安永二 1773 and 寛政二 1790), p. 240 (毛吹草と世話盡, his note that he supplied the 毛吹草's kanji) and p. 281 (the 毛吹草 list). National Diet Library pid 1452761, scans 121–123, 126, 127 and 147; the 1938 reprint, pid 1453442, scan 125. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1452761/1/123
  24. 「荻生方庵」, デジタル版 日本人名大辞典+Plus, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/荻生方庵-1062703
  25. J. L. Álvarez-Taladriz, "Cacería de refranes en el 'Vocabulario da Lingoa de Japam'", Monumenta Nipponica 10, no. 48 of the list. Internet Archive, a lending copy. https://archive.org/details/monumentanipponi0010unse
  26. 『長者教』, 寛永4 (1627). National Diet Library pid 2541843, scan 5. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2541843/1/5
  27. G. W. Sargent, tr., The Japanese Family Storehouse, or, The Millionaires' Gospel Modernised, Cambridge University Press, 1959, appendix 2, pp. 239–240, the translation of 『長者教』 from the 1627 text as reproduced, his note says, in Saikaku Shinkō (Noma Kōshin, 1948).
  28. 『世話尽』, 1656. National Diet Library pid 2554768, scan 8. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2554768/1/8
  29. 『雑史集』, Edo text reprinted 1912. National Diet Library pid 925907, scan 361. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/925907/1/361
  30. 谷川士清『倭訓栞』, the volume printed 文政13 (1830), s.v. やま. National Diet Library pid 2562810, scan 25. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2562810/1/25
  31. 『俚言集覧』 中巻, 1900, s.v. ちり. National Diet Library pid 991570, scan 320. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/991570/1/320
  32. James Curtis Hepburn, 『和英語林集成』, 2nd ed., 1872, p. 567, s.v. TSUMORI. National Diet Library pid 993689, scan 301. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/993689/1/301
  33. 三遊亭円朝『塩原多助一代記』, 1885. National Diet Library pid 891318.
  34. Basil Hall Chamberlain, A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese, Trübner, 1888, p. 81.
  35. Rokuo Okada, Japanese Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, Japan Travel Bureau, Tokyo, 1955; read in the 1958 printing, p. 34.

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios, LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

Checked · grok-4.6 (xAI), 2026-09-05, citations (the s35 draft's state of that date; superseded by the s153 paper form, the s270 gate and the ten-s751 coding) · gpt-6-astra (OpenAI), 2026-09-05, citations (the s35 draft's state of that date; superseded by the s153 paper form, the s270 gate and the ten-s751 coding)

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 塵も積もれば山となる (chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/chiri-mo-tsumoreba-yama-to-naru.