This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
子
In brief: coming down with a vow to save people, and obtaining the Great Law
Common reading
Pictographic. The oracle-bone form depicts a small child in swaddling clothes, with head, body and arms, and the two feet bound together. 子 is a radical; its original sense is an infant. Shuowen: “子: in the eleventh month yang qi stirs and the myriad things flourish; people use it as a name. Pictographic.” Note: it depicts a child in swaddling clothes with the feet together. Guangyun: “子 means offspring.” Book of Songs, “Daya, Shengmin”: “And so she bore a son.” Chunqiu Fanlu, “Jiyi”: “The son is the counterpart of the father.”
Design reading
A short horizontal joined to a short left-falling stroke: coming down to the world with one’s own vow (the short horizontal) to save people (the short left-falling stroke), obtaining the Great Law (the long middle horizontal), and saving the people of the world so that they rise (the vertical hook). Without obtaining the Great Law (without the long horizontal), one is finished (了) in this red dust: once ended, all is ended, and there is no going back at all.
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.