This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
艹
In brief: yin and yang meet; each blade of grass a world
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
The grass radical, the same as 艸, also written 艹 in regular script. Characters for herbaceous plants usually take this component on top. Herbaceous plants grow thickly in the soil and take in sunlight directly; yin and yang meet and give rise to the energy of life. 十 stands for the meeting of yin and yang, and two 十 for luxuriance. One flower is one world: 十 also stands for the world of the ten directions; grass, however frail, is also a world.
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.