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法剛柔呑吐 hō wa gōjū o donto su Hard and Soft, Taking In and Giving Out

Gōjū-ryū karate took its name from this line, by its own account, and the line has been read more than one way.

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Japanese Scroll of Hard and Soft, Taking In and Giving Out (hō wa gōjū o donto su) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Hard and Soft, Taking In and Giving Out法剛柔呑吐hō wa gōjū o donto su

Original art by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

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Abstract

法剛柔呑吐 is the third of the 拳之大要八句, the eight maxims of the fist, in the 武備志 (Bubishi), a Chinese boxing manual handed down in Okinawa, and Gōjū-ryū karate, by its own account, took its name, 剛柔 hard and soft, from it [1][2]. Its words are plain, 法 method, 剛柔 hardness and softness, 呑吐 swallowing and spitting, but its grammar has been read three ways [3][4][5]: the earliest printing read, Funakoshi Gichin's of 1922, punctuates it as a subject and two pairs, as it does the sixth maxim on the same page [6]; the school's reading, in print from 1968, 法は剛柔を呑吐す, makes hard and soft what the method swallows and spits [7]; and books since 1976, in English and in Japanese, join the pairs into breath, and McCarthy and 外間 put soft with the in-breath and hard with the out [8][9][10][11]. I read the line as two pairs, the shape its own page gives it, and the school's reading as the one to say before the scroll.

Overview

The words. 呑吐 donto is, in the 精選版 日本国語大辞典 (日国), のみこむことと、はくこと, swallowing and spitting, a noun; デジタル大辞泉 marks it a noun that also takes する, and JMdict glosses it swallowing and spitting out, a noun or a transitive verb [3][5]. 剛柔 gōjū is, in 日国, かたいこととやわらかいこと, hardness and softness, and 字通 gives 陰陽 and 硬軟; JMdict glosses it hardness and softness [4][5]. 法 hō is, among JMdict's senses, law, principle, method, and, in Buddhism, dharma [5].

The reading. hō wa gōjū o donto su, the reading of 法は剛柔を呑吐す, which the school's books print from 1968 [7]. Read aloud character by character, in on-readings, it is hō gōjū donto, as a story in a magazine of 1957 spells it in kana (ほうごうじゆうどんと) [12].

The eight. As Funakoshi prints them in 1922: 人心同天地。血脈似日月。法、剛柔呑吐。身、隨時應變。手、逢空則入。碼、進退離逢。目、要、視四句。耳能、聽八方。 [6]. The naming of the school from the third, and the disagreements in that story's tellings, are told in the house's history of 剛柔流空手道 [2].

The historical record

1922. The earliest printing read. Funakoshi Gichin's 『琉球拳法 唐手』 (1922) prints the eight under the heading 拳之大要八句 on p. 274, with kunten (the marks that guide a Japanese reading of Chinese) [6]. Read at the page: 法 takes a comma, and no return mark (the mark that sends a reader back to a later character) stands in 剛柔呑吐, where 似二日月一, 視二四句一 and 聽二八方一 are marked. The sixth maxim is printed the same way, 碼、進退離逢。, a subject and then two pairs, advance and retreat, separate and meet in Higaonna's English [6][10]. On the next page, under 古法大剛論章, the manual's own text uses 剛柔 of meeting force: 剛柔虛實。剛來柔中剛刮。柔來剛中柔發。 [6]. Funakoshi prints the eight without a gloss, and p. 277 begins a new chapter [6]. The National Diet Library's full-text search, oldest first and at every access level, finds no earlier printing of the line, of 拳之大要八句 or of 拳の大要八句 [13].

1934 to 1940. Mabuni Kenwa and breath. Patrick McCarthy writes that Mabuni published much of the Bubishi in his 1934 book on the kata Seipai, and that Funakoshi had already printed the eight maxims and the three sections after them, word for word, in 1922, and again in 1925 and 1934 [8]. In the search snippets of Mabuni's books read here (those of the 1934 book do not reach the eight), 呑吐 is the word for breath: 氣息の呑吐 in the 1934 book; 呼吸の呑吐 among the 虛實 of a fight in 1938; and in 1940 one of the three elements of kata, (甲)技法の變化、(乙)氣息の呑吐、(丙)重心の移動 [14][15][16].

1942. Miyagi's essay. Miyagi Chōjun, the school's founder, published an essay titled 「法剛柔呑吐－空手雑藁－」 in 『月刊文化沖縄』 in 1942 [17]; it was printed again in a book of 1985, whose contents in the search snippets list it with the subtitle 空手雑稿 [18]. In the snippets of the reprint read here he writes of his school's basic kata: 私共の剛柔流では、いう所の(戰)(サンチン)をもってこれに当てている, and of the moment 体を持して呼吸を調えた時; he closes on lines from a 武備志 he calls 茅元儀's, the Ming military treatise that the house's 剛柔流 history sets apart from the Okinawan manual [18][2]. The snippets read do not gloss the line his essay is titled with.

1968. 法は剛柔を呑吐す. The earliest known printing of this reading, in the National Diet Library's full text read oldest first, is 宮城敬 Miyagi Takashi's 『正統空手道』 (1968): 「武備誌」の拳の八句にある「法剛柔呑吐(法は剛柔を呑吐す)」という一句より「剛柔」の二字をとり, taking the two characters 剛柔 from the line … in the eight maxims of the fist in the Bubishi [7]. Among the twenty-five items that search finds for 剛柔を呑吐, the other tellings of the naming whose snippets reach the line give this reading or its plain form, 呑吐する, from 1975 to 1998 [7][19]; one book of 1991, read below, reads the line otherwise and argues against this reading. The same 1968 book, in its kata instructions, puts breath where its reading puts 剛柔: 呼吸を呑吐しながら, and 呼吸の呑吐、力の強弱、重心の移動 [7]. As Japanese, X を呑吐す is ordinary long before 1968: 『地球全圖』 (about 1796) writes 地中海の潮を呑吐する, 『小笠原島新誌』 (1876) 海潮ヲ呑吐スル, and 日国's first instance, from the 正法眼蔵, 涓滴の巨海を呑吐する [3][20].

1972 to 1991. Other glosses. 『空手入門』 (1972) explains the を reading as 正しい武術は剛技と柔技が一体となっている, right martial art is hard technique and soft technique made one [19]. 『精説沖縄空手道』 (1977) gives two readings in one book: 法は剛柔兼備である, the method has both hard and soft, in a gloss of all eight, and 法は剛柔を呑吐す in the naming story [19]. 『合気道の科学』 (1990) gives the を reading and takes 法 as 力の集中法, the method of concentrating force [19]. 外間哲弘 Hokama Tetsuhiro's 『沖縄空手道の歩み』 (1985) gives the を reading and explains it by breath: 拳法というものは、息を吸うことによって柔となり吐きだすことによって剛となる, in boxing one becomes soft by drawing breath in and hard by breathing it out [11]. 佐藤金兵衛 Satō Kinbee's 『柔と拳と道』 (1991) reads the line in his own kundoku as 法は剛柔と呑吐なり, the method is hard and soft, and swallowing and spitting, and argues against the を reading from the order of the characters: 原文をみると、「法剛柔呑吐」となっているので、どうしてもそうは読めない。法は剛柔を呑吐すというならば原文は、「法呑吐剛柔」でなければならないはずである, the original reads 法剛柔呑吐, so it cannot be read that way; if it meant that the method swallows and spits hard and soft, the original would have to be 法呑吐剛柔 [21]. He takes 呑吐 as breath, writing 呑吐(呼吸) [21]. His reading of the sixth maxim, 進退を碼りて離れ逢う, makes 碼 a verb, so he does not read the sixth in the 1922 shape [21]. Each is read in a search snippet.

The English, 1976 to 1999. Toguchi Seikichi, a pupil of Miyagi, 1976: quoted from the Chinese Eight Poems of the Fists: Everything in the universe is breathing hard and soft..., and When preparing to block, the body is soft and inhaling. When attacking or punching, it becomes hard and exhaling [9]. Higaonna Morio, 1985, p. 29, beside the eight in characters: 3. The way of inhaling and exhaling is hardness and softness [10]. McCarthy, 1995, Article 13, The Eight Precepts of Quanfa: 3. Inhaling represents softness while exhaling characterizes hardness, and of the article, This is the only written explanation about the eight precepts in the Bubishi [8]. Mark Bishop, 1999: Miyagi replied by quoting his favourite clause from the Kenpo Haku, namely 'go-ju, don-tosu' (hard-soft, spit-swallow or exhale-inhale) [22].

Today, in Chinese boxing. 吞吐 is a pair in the vocabulary of Fujian crane boxing, in the phrase 吞吐浮沉, swallowing, spitting, floating, sinking. A Quanzhou local-history article on Yongchun White Crane (posted 2016) writes 这就要求拳家"吞吐浮沉，子午分明" … 刚柔相济, this requires the boxer to swallow and spit, float and sink, … hard and soft helping each other; the Chinese Wikipedia's article on White Crane boxing speaks of 吞吐浮沉技法 and of 吞吐氣力合一, swallowing and spitting, breath and force as one [23][24]. Both are present-day pages and neither dates the usage.

A reading

The line has three readings in print, and each has its footing. The first is the page's own. Funakoshi's 1922 kunten print 法、剛柔呑吐 as a subject and two pairs, and the sixth maxim on the same page, 碼、進退離逢, has that shape, which Higaonna renders advance and retreat, separate and meet [6][10]. 佐藤金兵衛 read the line so in 1991, 法は剛柔と呑吐なり, and argued that the other reading would need the order 法呑吐剛柔 [21]. Read so, the line says that the method is hard and soft, swallowing and spitting: two pairs side by side, neither the object of the other. The second is the school's: 法は剛柔を呑吐す, printed from 1968, good Japanese, in which the method takes in and gives out hard and soft [7][3]. The third is breath: the English from Toguchi to McCarthy, and 外間 in Japanese in 1985, McCarthy and 外間 putting soft with the in-breath and hard with the out, and Toguchi, in his own account of technique, joining soft to inhaling and hard to exhaling [8][9][10][11]. It is not a reading of the grammar so much as the school's practice set inside the line. Mabuni wrote of 氣息の呑吐 as one of the three elements of kata in 1940, and the 1968 book uses 呑吐 of breath in its kata instructions [16][7]. Present-day Fujian crane boxing uses 吞吐 for force and breath at once, so the breath reading may be older than karate's books; what I read does not show that [23][24]. I read the text as the page gives it and as 佐藤 reads it, two pairs after a subject, and the school's を reading as the one to say aloud before the scroll, since it is the reading of the people who took their name from it. Hung on a wall, the line says what all three say: in a fight, as in breath, the method holds both hard and soft. Signed, 典.

Notes

The text. The eight are a passage of the Okinawan 武備志, a manuscript tradition; no manuscript of it is opened here, and the line is read in Funakoshi's printing of 1922 and in McCarthy's translation [6][8]. Funakoshi's text writes 碼 for the sixth maxim's subject and 四句 in the seventh, where some later printings read 四面 or 四方 [6][10][13]. The leaf's third character is a form of 呑 whose top stroke is not settled at the scan's resolution between 呑 and 吞, which are one character; the scroll is written 呑.

What is not read. Miyagi's 1942 essay is read only in snippets of its reprint, and the 1968 book only in snippets [18][7]. Mabuni's 1934 book is read in snippets that do not reach the eight [14], and 外間's and 佐藤's books in snippets [11][21]. No Chinese boxing text earlier than the present-day pages is read for 吞吐 [23][24].

The naming. That Miyagi named his school from this line is the school's own account, told with disagreements over the year, the place and the pupil's improvised name; the house's history of 剛柔流空手道 gives the tellings and their sources [2].

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Japanese Scrolls by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

Japanese Scroll of Hard and Soft, Taking In and Giving Out (hō wa gōjū o donto su) in a block font by Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase
法剛柔呑吐VB5JBlock
Japanese Scroll of Hard and Soft, Taking In and Giving Out (hō wa gōjū o donto su) in a cursive font by Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase
法剛柔呑吐VC5JCursive
Japanese Scroll of Hard and Soft, Taking In and Giving Out (hō wa gōjū o donto su) in Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase's own style (Eri's Choice)
法剛柔呑吐VD5JEri's Choice
Japanese Scroll of Hard and Soft, Taking In and Giving Out (hō wa gōjū o donto su) in a semi-cursive font by Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase
法剛柔呑吐VS5JSemi-Cursive

References

  1. Patrick McCarthy, Bubishi: The Classic Manual of Combat, Tuttle, 2016, Article 13 and the caption to Yagi Meitoku's calligraphy (which places Article 13 at p. 261), read on the house's shelf (EPUB text, without page numbers).
  2. 典 Ten, "剛柔流空手道 · gōjūryū karatedō · Gōjū-ryū karate-dō", Philology, Takase Studios, 2026. https://takase.com/library/philology/gojuryu-karatedo
  3. 「呑吐」, 精選版 日本国語大辞典 and デジタル大辞泉, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%91%91%E5%90%90-586770
  4. 「剛柔」, 精選版 日本国語大辞典 and 字通, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%89%9B%E6%9F%94-495576
  5. JMdict (EDRDG), entries 1457530 呑吐, 2450700 剛柔 and 1517150 法, read in the house's local copy of JMdict; online at jisho.org. https://jisho.org/search/%E5%91%91%E5%90%90
  6. 富名腰義珍『唐手』 (角書 琉球拳法), 武侠社, 大正11 (1922), pp. 274–277, scans 166–167, at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/971654/1/166
  7. 宮城敬『正統空手道』, 西東社, 1968, full-text search snippets (the item is readable in Japan only), at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2517128
  8. Patrick McCarthy, The Bible of Karate: Bubishi, Tuttle, 1995, Article 13 and the introduction, read on the house's shelf (an EPUB of a 2015 printing, without page numbers).
  9. Seikichi Toguchi, Okinawan Goju-Ryu: Fundamentals of Shorei-Kan Karate, Ohara Publications, Burbank, 1976, "The Origin of Goju-Ryu", read in the Internet Archive's text. https://archive.org/details/okinawan-goju-ryu-fundamentals-of-shorei-kan-karate
  10. Morio Higaonna, Traditional Karate-do: Okinawa Goju Ryu, vol. 1, The Fundamental Techniques, Minato Research, Tokyo, 1985, p. 29, read on the house's shelf.
  11. 外間哲弘『沖縄空手道の歩み』, 1985, full-text search snippets (the item is readable in Japan only), at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/12145607
  12. 『読切倶楽部』, August 1957, a full-text search snippet (the item is readable in Japan only), at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1723053
  13. 剛柔呑吐, and also 拳之大要八句 and 拳の大要八句, in the full-text search, oldest first, at every access level, at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/search/searchResult?keyword=剛柔呑吐&fulltext=true&sortKey=ISSUED_ASC
  14. 摩文仁賢和『功防自在空手拳法十八の研究』, 1934, full-text search snippets (the item is readable in Japan only), at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1915276
  15. 摩文仁賢和『空手道大観』, 昭和13 (1938), a full-text search snippet (the item is readable in Japan only), at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1104139
  16. 摩文仁賢和『攻防拳法空手道入門』, 1940, full-text search snippets (the item is readable in Japan only), at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/3456304
  17. 嘉手苅徹『沖縄空手の創造と展開―呼称の変遷を手がかりとして―』, doctoral dissertation, 早稲田大学, 2017, p. 132, note 6. https://waseda.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/40324/files/Honbun-7673.pdf
  18. 宮城長順「法剛柔呑吐－空手雑稿－」, reprinted in 『中国・沖縄空手古武道の源流 : 中国・沖縄武術交流録』, 1985, full-text search snippets (the item is readable in Japan only), at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/12145652
  19. 法は剛柔を呑吐 and 剛柔呑吐 in the full-text search, oldest first: 『空手入門』 (1972), 『精説沖縄空手道』 (1977), 『沖縄空手道の歩み』 (1985), 『合気道の科学』 (1990) and others, snippets, at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/search/searchResult?keyword=剛柔を呑吐&fulltext=true&sortKey=ISSUED_ASC
  20. 呑吐す in the full-text search, oldest first, among them 『地球全圖』 (about 1796) and 『小笠原島新誌』 (1876), snippets, at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/search/searchResult?keyword=呑吐す&fulltext=true&sortKey=ISSUED_ASC
  21. 佐藤金兵衛『柔と拳と道 : わが武道五十年を語る』, 創栄出版, 1991, full-text search snippets (the item is readable in Japan only), at the National Diet Library. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/13301111
  22. Mark Bishop, Okinawan Karate: Teachers, Styles and Secret Techniques, second edition, A & C Black, London, 1999, the chapter on Miyagi Chōjun, read in the text layer of the copy on the house's shelf.
  23. 「拳圃一奇葩」, 泉州文史资料全文库, 闽南文化生态保护区, posted 16 August 2016. http://www.mnwhstq.com/szzy/qzwszlqwk/201608/t20160816_101976.htm
  24. 「白鶴拳」, Chinese Wikipedia, read 24 October 2026. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%99%BD%E9%B6%B4%E6%8B%B3

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5, Takase Studios, LLC)

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

Checked · Takase Studios (an address check by script), 2026-10-24, citations — the cited web addresses opened and the quoted words looked for at each, and the earliest-printing searches checked for their first result; all 20 addresses answered with the words sought; the four books held here carry no address; nothing found to differ · two fresh-context readers (Claude), 2026-10-24, every claim in the page's summary block traced to its source, claim by claim: both failed the first round on a date for the Ming treatise that nothing cited carried, struck; both passed the second; their wordings applied, among them breath given a direction only where McCarthy and 外間 give one, the three elements of kata rather than of every kata, and 佐藤 credited with his own reading of the sixth maxim

Research depth: step 3 of our 10-step ladder, foundation complete · October 2026

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 法剛柔呑吐 (hō wa gōjū o donto su)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/ho-wa-goju-o-donto-su.