This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
木
In brief: the Jianmu tree: the world made of the Buddhist and Daoist schools
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
To save falling beings, the Buddha created a material world shaped like a great tree (the Jianmu, “Building Tree”). The character 木 comes from the Jianmu and stands for this world: 十 (the swastika symbol, standing for the Buddhist school and the world of the ten directions) plus 八 (yin and yang, standing for the Daoist school; yin and yang parting also means “extinction”). That is, the Buddhist and Daoist schools make up a complete material world (the Jianmu); the Jianmu joined with the Dao (一) is the root (本) of the universe. Characters for woody plants and wooden things mostly use the wood radical.
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.