A Roadmap for Unveiling the Secrets of the Chinese Language and Chinese Characters

This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.

A thousand sails pass by the sunken boat; ten thousand trees bloom in spring beyond the withered one. Through the rise and fall of so many civilizations, traditional Chinese civilization has come through great perils and has at last preserved the genes of divinely imparted culture down to the present day. Traditional Chinese civilization is also called the He-Luo civilization. “The Yellow River brought forth the Chart, the Luo River brought forth the Writing, and the sages modeled themselves on them” — this paints, in very simple and clear strokes, a picture of divinely imparted culture. As the core of such a civilization, Chinese characters — imparted by the divine and called a “semi-divine script” — are, among all the scripts used by humanity today, the only one that has been passed down continuously from the age of myth and that comes from divine transmission. This determines that Chinese characters have features entirely different from every other script in use today. Chinese characters have been able to record the entire five-thousand-year history of the civilization without interruption, not only through what is written in Chinese texts; the characters themselves also seal within them the wisdom that the divine most wished to leave to humankind. The surviving classical texts in Chinese characters date back only about three thousand years, yet the characters themselves, already fully mature at that time, can be traced back five thousand years. The rich information contained in the very structure of Chinese characters has preserved the cultural genes of this civilization and kept the core content of divinely imparted culture. Let us now go back to the source of divinely imparted culture, break the seal on Chinese characters, and truly grasp the mysteries they contain.