This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
回
In brief: return to one's origin
Common reading
The Shuowen explains 回 as “to turn”.
Design reading
Its ancient form closely resembles the spiral and cloud-and-thunder patterns of antiquity, so we may infer that these designs, taken for “ornament”, were in fact the ancient character 回. Why do ancient vessels, especially the great ritual cauldrons (鼎) of the state, carry so many 回? In the light of the principles of the Great Law, it can be understood like this: human life originally arose in the high levels of the universe, assimilated to the universe’s characteristic of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance; because selfishness arose, it fell level by level until it reached the human world. Out of compassion, enlightened beings gave people one more chance in the most bitter of environments, so that amid delusion they could cultivate through enlightenment and return to their origin and true selves. A spiral open at the top, containing the swastika symbol and the yin-yang figure, can help people return to heaven, and so it was given the meaning 回, “return”. That such patterns abound on vessels, especially cauldrons, shows the gods constantly reminding people to remember to return to their origin. In the early days of civilization “heaven and earth communicated, and humans and gods mingled”, so the early 回 was written as an open shape; after Zhuanxu “cut off the communication between heaven and earth”, the human world became an enclosed region, and 回 developed into “a small enclosed mouth inside a large enclosed mouth”: the large frame 囗 stands for an enclosed region (the Three Realms, the universe, a country), and the small frame 口 for the enclosed small universe of the human body (“the Daoists regard the human body as a small universe”). This development accords exactly with the principles of the Fa.
The 口 of a person (a small universe) living within the 口 of the frame (the great universe) is 回: the small universe of a person has entered the Three Realms. When a being from a high level falls into the material world of this universe, the most important thing is to leave the Three Realms and return (回) to where it came from; hence the meaning “return”. That this pattern abounds on vessels of the past is the gods reminding people at every moment to return to their origin.
Related characters
About this entry
This entry is taken from the edited manuscript of LI Xutong’s Exploring the Design Mysteries of Chinese Characters. The common reading follows traditional philology, the Shuowen Jiezi and other classics, and modern dictionaries; the design reading recovers the rationale of the character’s formation from the meanings of its strokes, the pairing of yin and yang, and the nine-palace layout, following the New Six Scripts. The premise of the design reading, that the generative mechanism of Chinese characters was designed, is an axiom of this system and differs from the evolutionary account usual in philology; the two readings are kept apart, as surface and depth.