This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
夕
In brief: the image of the Dharma-ending period
Common reading
From 月 half visible. Original sense: dusk, evening. Note to Book of Documents, “Hongfan, Five Phases”: “The beginning of dusk is 夕.” Shuowen: “夕 means evening.” Kangxi Dictionary: “The opposite of morning: evening.” Shangshu Dazhuan: “The evening of the year, of the month, of the day: the La month is the evening of the year, the last day the evening of the month, sunset the evening of the day.”
Design reading
The short horizontal is a low-level law; a left-falling stroke joined above it on the left shows deviating from the Fa rather than the Fa saving people; on the right another long left-falling stroke joins it: left and right, inner and outer, all have deviated from the Fa; there is no hook, so one cannot return by oneself. The dot in the middle shows the inner meaning of this scene, which depicts the Dharma-ending period. So it can stand for the end of the year, the end of the month and dusk.
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.