This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
尸
In brief: the body, through which a person shows outwardly
Common reading
Pictographic. The small-seal form 屍 depicts a person lying down; original sense: the person who, at a sacrifice, represented the dead and received the offerings. Shuowen: “尸 is the image of a spirit; it depicts lying.” Note: leaning on a table is called lying. Book of Songs, “Xiaoya, Chuci”: “The spirits are all drunk; the august Impersonator (尸) rises. Drums and bells send off the Impersonator; the guardian spirits return.” Note to Yili, “Shi Yu Li”: “尸 means the host. At a filial son’s sacrifice he does not see his parent’s form; since his heart has nothing to attach to, he sets up the Impersonator and directs his thoughts to him.”
Design reading
尸 and 屍 were originally two characters. The simplification scheme of mainland China treated the two as one character and replaced 屍 entirely with 尸, so the original sense of 尸 was discarded. As a component, the original sense of 尸 must be considered.
口: a mouth, standing for a person; a left-falling stroke joined below on the left of 口 shows the person showing outwardly, able to be seen and felt by others: that is 尸. So as a component, 尸 often refers to the human body: the body lets a person show outwardly.
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.