This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
金
In brief: the golden Buddha body cultivated in the fire of karma
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
Among the Five Phases, metal stands in the relations “earth produces metal, metal produces water, fire overcomes metal, metal overcomes wood”. From the standpoint of cultivation, 金 is composed of 人, 王, half of 火 and 土: a king of the Fa in heaven is reborn as a human to save people (wearing a human body as an outer garment), cultivates in the human fire (火) of karma, and in the earth (土, the matter of the Three Realms) cultivates anew a golden (金) Buddha body. “Earth produces metal”: with the Fa (一) in the heart, falling into the red dust (土), tempered in the fire of karma, one becomes the golden body of a Fa king, the most precious thing. “Fire overcomes metal” means that after a high-level being is reborn as a human, in the fire of karma it may become a Buddha, or it may sink.
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.