This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
手
In brief: using the hands came after people deviated from the Fa
Common reading
Pictographic. The small-seal form depicts five outstretched fingers. Original sense: the whole upper limb, generally the part below the wrist. Shuowen: “手 means fist.” Duan’s note: “Today people open it as a hand and close it as a fist; in fact they are one.” Book of Changes, “Shuogua”: “Gen is the hand.”
Design reading
The form is like 毛, except that the vertical-bend-hook turning right has become a vertical hook turning left.
As in 毛, a long left-falling stroke sits on top of two horizontals. The left-falling stroke is the image of deviating from the Fa: an existence that has deviated from the Fa presses from outside on the Dao and the Fa represented by the two horizontals below; the vertical hook shows doing things in a way that deviates from the Fa. “I say there are tens of thousands of genuine supernormal abilities. A person sits there, without moving hand or foot, and can do what others cannot do even with hands and feet.” In high antiquity, when these abilities existed, they could do whatever people wanted; after the human heart became selfish and bad, these abilities were gradually sealed off and could no longer be used, and now they have basically all disappeared. So people today must do things with their hands: doing things with the hands appeared after people deviated from the Fa and became bad, and so this form of doing things not in accord with the Fa is used for 手.
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.