This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
了
In brief: without the Great Law, life ends in the red dust
Common reading
Pictographic: from 子, without arms. The small-seal form depicts an infant with both arms bound; newborn infants were often wrapped with their arms bound. Original sense: binding an infant’s arms. Shuowen: “了 means 尥, bound; from 子 without arms, pictographic.” Duan Yucai’s note: “Anything of two strands or one that is tangled, twisted or tied and not stretched straight is called 了戾.” Borrowed for 憭 and 悟: to understand, to grasp the meaning.
Design reading
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.