"dake" does not just mean "only"

The Japanese language is full of useful little words like dake, hazu, and wake. It’s often hard for Japanese learners to get their heads around these words. For example, hazu represents a situation where something should be or ought to be or should have been the case, and so the speaker of Japanese as a second language has to make a mental transformation from the structure used to express that in English—a verb auxiliary like should—to a noun-like structure using hazu.

But dake is one of the simpler ones, right? Doesn’t it just means “only” or “just”—indicating a restriction or limitation? In terms of word order it follows the thing being restricted, instead of coming before like in English, but other than that means exactly the same thing as “only”, right?

Not really. That would not explain the common phrase 好きなだけ/suki na dake, which means “anything you’d like”, or “as much as you’d like”. Here dake is not restricting or limiting, it’s expanding to the limits of your desires. Another example is the frequently seen できるだけ/dekiru dake, which doesn’t mean “just what you can do”, but “as much as you can do”!

We can get some insight into this seemingly contradictory behavior of dake by examining its origins in the word take, which is written in kanji as 丈.

You may be most familiar with this character from its appearance in the word 大丈夫/daijōbu/OK.

丈 is first and foremost a unit of measure, read as jō. It is ten shaku, or almost exactly ten feet (since a shaku is a foot, 0.99 feet to be precise). The character 十 for “ten” is right there in the character—see it?

The Japanese adopted this character as the way to write the native word take, which simply means “height”. You guessed it; this word is related to 高い/takai for high, and to 岳/take meaning a cliff, since a cliff is, you know, high. It’s related to a word you might not have encountered, takeru, written in kanji as 長ける, and meaning “be(come) high”. And this take is also related to 竹/take/bamboo, since the measuring stick to measure length would have been made out of bamboo, and/or because bamboo plants grow to such heights. As we have seen over and over again in these articles, native Japanese words form surprisingly dense phonetic clusters.

From its meaning as a unit of length, this character came to refer to length in general, height, stature, extent, or measure. And then by extension, morphing into the today’s dake, it came to mean “equal to, no more and no less than some measure”. So there’s the restrictive meaning “no more than”, but there’s also the expansive meaning “no less than”. That is why 好きなだけ/suki na dake means “as much as you want”; it actually means “the (full) measure of your desire”. できるだけ/dekiru dake means “the measure of what is possible”.

We’re not even close to being finished with Dōgen, so next time we will revisit moon-in-water and related topics.