This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
田
In brief: the four and eight directions, the world of the ten directions
Common reading
Shuowen: “Land where grain is planted is called 田.” Shiming, “Shidi”: “Land already ploughed is called 田.” Kangxi Dictionary: “Land where grain is planted is 田; it depicts four 口; the 十 is the system of field paths.” Yupian: “Soil; land.” Shiming: “To fill: the five crops fill it.” Book of Changes, hexagram Qian: “The dragon appears in the field.” Tongdian: “In ancient times there were well-fields, drawn as nine plots like the character 井; eight families tilled them, and the middle was the public field, worked for the state. Gui fields were fields beyond the salary, for the sacrifices; added fields were granted again as a reward.” The basic sense of 田 extends to things related to farming (farming households, fields and gardens); in ancient times it was the same as 畋 (hunting) and 佃 (tilling), and it is also a surname. 田 is the same in different writing systems, so it is a very basic ancient character.
Design reading
A 十 inside the frame. The square frame depicts the four directions east, south, west and north; the eight points where its lines meet depict the eight directions; the 十 in the middle is the world of the ten directions. Together they make the four and eight directions and the world of the ten directions.
The four and eight directions can also depict the four images and the eight trigrams, which belong to the Daoist school. The 十 in the middle is the centre of the Buddhist swastika symbol 卐; or one may say a 卐 is hidden in 田; in the Kangxi Dictionary 十 is the radical of 卐. So 田 expresses a world made up of the Buddhist and Daoist schools.
The cultivation world says that there is a dantian (丹田, “elixir field”) in the lower abdomen. 口 often stands for the material world we are in, and 十 for the world of the ten directions, a great world. People can cultivate in this material world, and every person is a small universe; those who succeed in cultivation have each cultivated a true universe, each a great world of the ten directions. That is, great worlds can be born one after another within our material world.
So 田 can refer broadly to an enclosed place that can nurture higher existences, such as our material world, the dantian, or the place where crops are grown. When Cangjie created the characters, he used 田, which stands for the world where life arises and grows, for the land where grain and trees are planted; but when 田 serves as a component in many characters, it still carries the sense of the world of the ten directions.
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.