This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
五
In brief: matter, the Five Phases, and nothingness
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
五 sounds like 物 (wù, “matter”). It sits at the centre of the nine palaces, showing the material world as the centre of the universe and the mutual generation and restraint of the Five Phases. It also sounds like 无 (wú, “nothing”): after a cycle of formation, abiding, decay and extinction comes a state of nothingness.
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.