This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
廿
In brief: the relationship between two universes
Common reading
Shuowen: “廿 is two tens together; an abbreviated ancient form.” 廿 is read as the fusion of 二十; a Song inscription at Kaiye Temple has “念五日”, and Gu Tinglin held that “using 念 for 廿 first appears here.” In Cantonese and Mandarin today 廿 still has the alternative reading 念 (niàn). Warring States bamboo slips also use it for twenty: Guodian slips, “Tang Yu zhi Dao”, slip 25: “Of old, the sages were capped at twenty (廿)”, meaning the sages of antiquity received the capping ceremony at twenty, marking adulthood.
Design reading
Two worlds of the ten directions joined at the ground. Every person is a small universe: from the organs of the body to cells, molecules, atoms, electrons, protons and so on, down without end; seen from a fine enough scale, each is a vast universe, a world of the ten directions. Two people in this world will meet and form relationships, which may be good or bad. 廿 tells people too that relations between people are no small matter: they are relations between two universes; take special care not to form bad relationships.
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.