This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
日
In brief: the Dao within this space-time
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
日 has the same structure as 曰, one tall and one flat. Sunlight is the energy that sustains life in this enclosed world, and life obtains the Dao and rises within this space-time, so 日 equals the Dao in this space-time, shown as a horizontal inside the frame. The frame has become tall because in the Dharma-ending period people are far from the Dao and heaven and earth are apart.
The sun and moon are the best representatives of yin and yang (the sun yang, the moon yin). 日 mainly means “the sun” and the daytime, and also a whole day and night. The early form of 日 was mainly a circle with a dot in the middle: the sun is round, and the circle is an extreme expression of yang; at the extreme of yang, yin is born, and the dot in the middle stands for the yin so born. By extension, the time when the sun is out is a day, and the repeated interval of a day can also be shown by 日.
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.