母なる自然 haha naru shizen Mother Nature
母なる自然 (haha naru shizen), Mother Nature, is the English figure rebuilt from Japanese parts. Its oldest page in the National Diet Library's full-text search is an account of the American educator Francis Parker, of 1900. This study follows it through a devotional, a Froebel and a Wordsworth to the bilingual dictionary.
Abstract
母なる自然, haha naru shizen, Mother Nature, is a calque: the English figure rebuilt from Japanese parts, 母, mother, the classical copula なる, that is, and 自然, nature. The oldest page the National Diet Library's full-text search finds is a Japanese account of the American educator Francis Parker, of 1900; a Russian Orthodox devotional of 1903, a Japanese Froebel of 1909 and a Wordsworth of 1915 follow, and the bilingual dictionary carries the phrase as an expression.
Overview
The sense. Nature as a mother. The phrase is literary, with the classical copula なる: nature, which is a mother.
The words. 母 haha, mother: デジタル大辞泉's second sense is 物事を生み出す根源, the source from which things are born, with the dictionary's own example 母なる大地, mother earth; 精選版日本国語大辞典 cites that figurative sense from the 続日本紀 of 774, 諸仏之母也, the mother of all buddhas, and from Nakamura's Self-Help, 窮困は創造の母なり, want is the mother of invention [1]. なる is the classical form of which is, so 母なる自然 is nature, which is a mother; the construction is literary. 自然 shizen, nature: デジタル大辞泉 山や川、草、木など、人間と人間の手の加わったものを除いた、この世のあらゆるもの, everything in the world except human beings and what their hands have made; 精選版日本国語大辞典 山、川、海、草木、動物、雨、風など、人の作為によらずに存在するものや現象, what exists without human contrivance, cited from the 色葉字類抄 of 1177–81 [2]. The bilingual dictionary carries 母なる自然 as an expression, Mother Nature [3]. Word for word: nature, which is a mother.
The text in English. Mother Nature and 母なる自然 are the same figure; the Japanese is a shade more written, because of なる.
The historical record
1900. The oldest page. The oldest page the full-text search finds is an account of the American educator Francis Parker, where a school's copybook drill is faulted for going 母なる自然の法則に違つて, against the law of Mother Nature [4].
1903. The first whole sentence. A Russian Orthodox devotional translated for the Tokyo youth society, addressed to a child with a lily: おん身と花とは母なる自然の懐に宿る兄弟よ。見ませ、春を盛りに咲く此百合の花をば, you and the flower are brothers lodged in the bosom of Mother Nature; look at this lily blooming in the height of spring [5].
1909 and 1915. Froebel's Education of Man, in the 1909 Japanese version, pairs the figure with its counterpart: 母なる自然と父なる神とは世の親達を導くに違ない, Mother Nature and Father God will surely guide the parents of the world [6]; and a 1915 Wordsworth gives the daisy 母なる自然の保護の下に奔放に、四季を通じて歡喜又は悲哀の子なり, under Mother Nature's protection, unconstrained, a child of joy or of sorrow through the four seasons [7]. The full-text search finds the phrase in 85 books, dated 1900 to 1955 [8], and the bilingual dictionary carries it now [3].
What is not a source. The English is the source, and in Japanese the phrase has no author. The four pages read here are translations of Western authors or an account of one; the phrase was made to carry a Western figure. The Japanese encyclopedia's article on it tells the European history of the figure, with the same 1266 English date and the same Mycenaean Ma-ka as the English article, and nothing of the Japanese phrase [9].
Today. Mother Nature is the personification of nature as a life-giving mother; the encyclopedia dates nature in English, in the sense of the whole of the world's phenomena, to 1266, and the earliest mother-earth figure to Mycenaean Greek [10]. What a rendering must keep is なる, which is what makes the phrase a personification and not maternal nature.
A reading
母なる自然 is the English figure rebuilt in Japanese, and the pages read here show who built it: the translators and interpreters of Parker, of an Orthodox devotional, of Froebel and of Wordsworth. The bilingual dictionary now carries the phrase as an expression, with more than a century of print behind it.
References
- 「母」, デジタル大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/母
- 「自然」, デジタル大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/自然
- JMdict (EDRDG), 「母なる自然」, at jisho. https://jisho.org/word/母なる自然
- 『パーカー氏統合教授之学理』, 市川源三解説, 育成会, 1900, scan 78. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/810643/1/78
- 『宗教と自然美』, 昇曙夢等訳, 正教青年会, 1903, scan 17. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/824530/1/17
- フレーベル, 『人之教育』, 原田助閲, 警醒社, 1909, scan 169. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/809248/1/169
- 畔上賢造訳註, 『ウヲルヅヲス詩集』, 聖書研究社, 1915, scan 63. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/954124/1/63
- National Diet Library next-generation full-text search on 母なる自然, searched again 26 September 2026: 85 books, dated 1900 to 1955, 78 of them to 1946. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/api/book/search?searchfield=contentonly&keyword=母なる自然
- "母なる自然", Japanese Wikipedia. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/母なる自然
- "Mother Nature", English Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Nature