人間万事塞翁が馬 jinkan banji saiou ga uma All is Saiou's Horse

All is Saiou's Horse in Japanese is 人間万事塞翁が馬 which is read jinkan banji saiou ga uma

人間万事塞翁が馬 (ningen banji saiō ga uma): everything in this world is the old man's horse.

Good luck and bad turn into each other without warning, so neither is to be rejoiced at or grieved over yet. The story is a Han parable in the 淮南子: an old man by the frontier fort loses his horse, gets it back with another, sees his son break a leg on the new one, and sees that leg keep the son out of the war, declining to react at each turn.

A Zen monk of about 1300 gave it these seven characters in a line of verse, and it stands in the first Japanese proverb book of 1638. 人間 is read ningen, as every Edo witness has it; jinkan is a learned modern choice.

The seven characters are the seventh line of a poem by the Yuan Zen monk 晦機元熙 (Huiji Yuanxi), about 1300, 寄徑山虛谷陵和尚; a Confucian scholar's 1763 essay corrected the proverb books, which for three centuries had credited the couplet to Su Dongpo. Behind the line stands a much older Chinese parable, the 淮南子's second-century-BC chapter 人間訓, which the monk's couplet distills rather than retells.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 人間万事塞翁が馬.

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The scrolls are 12 1/4" W × 43" H (31 × 109 cm) with real silk borders and Japanese paper that are layered so the scroll hangs straight and will not warp over time. The scrolls themselves are made by Sankō (株式会社三幸) in Gifu prefecture, which has been making high quality scrolls since 1947, and we have worked with Sankō for over two decades.

Eri Takase was born and raised in Osaka, Japan, and holds the rank of Shihan, the highest rank in Japanese calligraphy, from the Bokuteki-kai and the Bunka-shodo. About Master Takase