修行会

107「天かけり光の神は降りたちぬかがやきわたる海の底にも。」- 植芝盛平

Original Waka¹

天かけり
‎‎‎光の神は
降りたちぬ
かがやきわたる
海の底にも

植芝盛平 (Ueshiba, 1977)

Translation

“Soaring across the heavens, the kami of light descended, completely alighting; shining across the seas’ entire reach, even to the ocean’s floors.” – Morihei Ueshiba

Waka Translation

Riding heavens’ lengths,
as for the kami of light:
descended alight—

radiance spread everywhere,
even to the oceans’ floors.

Morihei Ueshiba

歴史的仮名遣い（語構成を明示）

天翔り（あまかけり）

光の神は（ひかりのかみは）

降り立ちぬ（おりたちぬ）

輝きわたる（かがやきわたる）

海の底にも（うみのそこにも）

植芝盛平

Bungo Romanization

ama‑kakeri
hikari‑no‑kami wa

oritachinu
kagayakiwataru
umi‑no soko ni mo

Ueshiba Morihei

Notes

¹ Some editions print 降りたちぬ without the “立” kanji; in bungo, 降り立ちぬ (to “alight/land down”) is the canonical compound and the perfective ぬ is unambiguous. The two classical spellings are both licit; the choice does not affect meter or interpretation.

Translation, Notes, Commentary, and Research by Latex G. N. R. Space-Coyote

Ueshiba, M. (2025). 植芝盛平道歌–107: Riding light descends (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. https://shugyokai.org/s6t2 (Original work compiled 1977)

天（あま; ama）— heaven, sky, space; the sound ama also evokes ama 海女 “sea woman / diver,” attested since early Japanese poetry, given that the shimo-no-ku ends in 海の底 “sea bottom,” you can hear a faint sound‑level pivot linking heaven (天) and sea (海) via homophony in ama and the eventual immersion into the sea depths. It’s not a classical textbook kakekotoba like hi 日/火/思ひ, but it’s very much the same style of multi‑layer sound play (cf. Shirane, 2005; Bouchikas, 2017).

翔り / かけり（kakeri）— comes from 天翔ける / 天翔る (amakakeru), “to soar / race across the heavens,” a classical collocation used for swift celestial movement of gods or heavenly bodies.

天かけり（あまかけり; ama kakeri）— “riding the heavens”; “to soar across the heaven”; classical diction evoking swift movement across the sky; Shinto-poetic idiom, it marks a vertical axis between the High Plain of Heaven (Takamagahara) and the human world; a Manyō‑style diction especially associated with deities and celestial movement. This functions like a mini‑jokotoba 序詞: a preparatory image of motion “across the heavens” that sets up 光の神 in line 2. It also introduces the vertical axis (heaven ↔ sea) that the rest of the poem will trace.

光（ひかり; hikari）— “light, radiance”.

神（かみ; kami）— deity; divine; divine being; divinity; god(s).

光の神（ひかりのかみ; hikari no kami）— “kami of light”; “god of light”; a luminous kami suggestive of solar radiance; readers often hear an echo of Amaterasu Ōmikami, though Ueshiba keeps the referent open while invoking Shintō imagery. Ueshiba’s writings often allude to Shinto mythology and Omoto‑style cosmology, where light is simultaneously physical, moral, and salvific (misogi, purification).

降り（ori）— “to descend”.

立ち（たち; tachi）— “to stand / alight”.

ぬ（nu）— perfective auxiliary; in classical usage, ぬ after the verb’s 連用形 marks completion / perfective aspect, not negation (that’s a different ぬ / ず paradigm). It often carries an emphatic “has indeed done X” flavor in waka (IMABI, n.d.; Shirane, 2005).

降りたちぬ（おりたちぬ; oritachinu）— perfective descent; classical suffix perfective auxiliary (終止形) ‑ぬ signals completed action (here, signaling completed descent / alighting): the deity has indeed come down/alighted—an image resonant with Shinto myths of heavenly descent (tenson kōrin).

かがやき / 輝き（kagayaki）— noun / continuative form “radiance, shining”.

わたる / 渡る（wataru）— in classical literature can form a kind of auxiliary meaning “to extend / pervade throughout a space or duration” when attached to another verb’s 連用形; “to do X all over / continuously,” which is exactly what 輝き渡る is doing here.

かがやきわたる（kagayaki-wataru）— ‘to extend / pervade’, portraying light as filling the whole domain (not a single beam); radiance that “shines throughout”; verb wataru distributes the action across space, conveying pervasion rather than a single beam—hence “brilliance pours across”.

海の底（うみのそこ; umi no soko）— “the bottom of the sea, seabed, depths”.

にも（ni mo）— に (“to, in”) + も (“even, also”).

海の底にも（うみのそこにも; umi no soko ni mo）— “even to the bottom of the sea”; competes a vertical sweep from the High Plain of Heaven to the sea-bed; the particle mo (“even”) stresses total reach: the divine light suffuses not only the upper world but penetrates the hidden/depth realm, completing the vertical sweep from sky to sea‑bed; a cosmographic range that mirrors Shintō conceptions of Takamagahara above and the terrestrial / oceanic realm below.

Classical verb + auxiliary morphology. The perfective ぬ after a verb’s 連用形 (here tachi) is textbook bungo; it marks completed action rather than negation (which is the unrelated ず/ぬ paradigm).

Attributive modification. Treating 天かけり as either 連用形名詞 翔り (‘heaven‑soaring [flight]’) or as 連体形 翔ける(‘that which soars across heaven’) is standard prewar/classical usage; both readings license modification of 光の神. For such alternation and classical attributives, see reference grammars.

Historical kana. This poem happens not to contain yōon / wi‑we / wo features that differ under kyū‑kana, which is itself consistent with many Shōwa‑era bungotai texts; where relevant, historical kana conventions (e.g., particles は / へ / を) persist.

Semantic pivot across vertical axes. The movement heaven → descent → pervasion → sea‑bed is a classical waka move (macro‑image → action → pervasive effect), aligning with Shintō cosmography and the rhetoric of divine descent (天孫降臨).

Distribution verb ‑wataru. Using わたる to indicate “throughout” is idiomatic in literary registers and reads naturally in bungo. 

Shintō mythic frame. The poem’s “light‑kami” descending and suffusing all realms easily reads against the Kojiki/Nihon shoki mythic backdrop—especially tenson kōrin (the Heavenly Grandchild’s descent) and the vertical linkage of Takamagahara to the middle world via the Ame‑no‑ukihashi (“Floating Bridge of Heaven”).

Ueshiba’s religious milieu. Ueshiba Morihei’s writings (dōka included) are saturated with Shintō imagery and Ōmoto (大本) inflections; scholarship repeatedly documents the founder’s Omoto associations and scriptural imagination. This informs readings where “light” is both cosmological and soteriological (purification / misogi, harmonization).

Anthropology of aikidō practice. Ethnographic work on aikidō emphasizes embodied acculturation and the transmission of cosmological/ethical tropes in and through practice—insightful for reading dōka as didactic verse embedded in training.