This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
凶
In brief: not cultivating goodness, becoming a demon, struck down by heaven
Common reading
Indicative. In the small-seal form 凵 depicts a pit, read kǎn; 乂 shows that people can fall in here. 兇 is compound-ideative: from 儿 (person) under 凶. Original sense: inauspicious. Shuowen: “凶 means evil; it depicts the ground opening with something trapped in it.” Erya: “凶 means calamity.” Book of Changes, “Xici”: “Good fortune and misfortune (吉凶) speak of gain and loss.”
Design reading
The way of heaven is gone and earth overrides heaven: an omen of great misfortune. The middle vertical of 山 has become 乂. 山 stands for cultivating Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance in the mountains; without the middle vertical that stands for cultivating goodness, one who does not cultivate goodness becomes a demon, and a demon is struck down by heaven: that is 凶.
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.