This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
大
In brief: one who has the Dao and is reasonable is a great person
Common reading
Pictographic. The oracle-bone form depicts a person seen from the front, with hands and feet. 大 is one of the radicals, and characters with 大 often relate to humans or human affairs. Original sense: big, as opposed to small. Shuowen: “Heaven is great, earth is great, and humans too are great, so 大 depicts a person. The ancient form of 大; the zhou form is 介, which changes the ancient form but also depicts a person. All of 大人, 大夫, 太子, 太君 are honorifics.” Book of Songs, “Zhengfeng, Zun Dalu”: “Along the great road.” Explanation of Book of Changes, “Dayou”: “Great Possession: the image of embracing abundance.”
Design reading
A person crossed by a horizontal: one who has obtained the Dao, understands principle and is reasonable is a great person (大人).
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.