This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
且
In brief: the downward change stops here
Common reading
This; now. Book of Songs, “Zhou Song, Zaishan”: “Not only here (且) is it so; not only now is it now.” Mao’s commentary: “且 means this.” At the end of a sentence it is like “ah”: “Zheng Feng, Qianshang”: “How wild the wild boy is (且)!” Nearly, almost: Liezi, “Tangwen”: “Nearly (且) ninety years old.”
Design reading
In our world, morals decline by the day, virtue is lost, and every kind of corruption is growing worse; the Last Judgment spoken of in Christianity and the Dharma-ending period and its final catastrophe spoken of in Buddhism are drawing near. The changes of yin and yang in our material space-time, with the horizontal that symbolizes earth lengthened, show that the downward change stops here: halt, fall no further. Placed at the end of a sentence, it carries the sense that every sentence can admonish the world.
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.