This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
頁
In brief: yin and yang reversed: the last page
Common reading
In the small-seal form 首 (head) is above and 人 below; it is the original form of 頭 (tóu, “head”), originally read xié. 頁 is a radical, and characters with 頁 all relate to the head and face. ① Original sense: a person’s head. ② Extended sense: a page of a book. Shuowen: “嶪 means 枼.” Duan Yucai’s note: “What children write, each 頁 is called a 葉; today one sheet of writing is called a 頁. It is also written 葉, but should properly be 枼.”
Design reading
The two dots on top of 首 are turned over to the bottom: the crossing of yin and yang above becomes the separation of yin and yang below. This symbolizes how today yin and yang are reversed, heaven and earth hang upside down, head and feet are inverted, and the human world is in danger. Human history has turned over like this, right to wrong and wrong to right, page after page, and now it has reached this last page; the character 页 reminds all beings to wake up quickly.
页 sounds like 业 (yè, “karma”). Living in this world, people create karma at every moment; reincarnating within the Three Realms, one life creates karma and another eliminates it, turning over and reincarnating page (业) after page (业).
页 and 夜 (yè, “night”) sound alike. Through the cycle of day and night, day and night, life is like pages turned one after another.
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.