This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
寸
In brief: a world of worlds within an inch
Common reading
Indicative. The small-seal form is from 又 and from 一: 又 depicts a hand, and 一 marks the point one inch below the wrist. 寸 is one of the radicals, and characters with 寸 often relate to the hand. Original sense: in Chinese medicine, taking the pulse, the place one inch from the wrist is called 寸口, “inch opening”, or 寸 for short. Shuowen: “寸 is ten fen. One inch back from the hand, the pulse is called 寸口.”
Design reading
A 十, a vertical with a hook, and a dot at the lower left make 寸. 十 is the world of the ten directions; Shakyamuni said that a grain of sand contains three thousand great chiliocosms, so within a square inch there is a great chiliocosm. The dot means that the world of the ten directions can exist even in a grain of dust. In the past 寸 was mostly used to describe something short or small (an inch of time is an inch of gold; every inch of land is gold; inch-power; an inch has its strengths and a foot its shortcomings). But the structure of this character reminds people: do not belittle what lies within a square inch. Do not do evil because it is small, and do not fail to do good because it is small; life is cultivation, and only by cultivating every thought does one reach the righteous attainment.
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.