This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
天
In brief: life fallen from heaven into the mortal world
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
Life falls from heaven to the mortal world and is buried in the red dust, turning through the six paths of reincarnation, on the earth and under it: this, relative to humans, is the image of 天.
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.