This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
勿
In brief: the laws of all three ways have deviated: do not go on
Common reading
Pictographic. According to the oracle-bone form it is a banner: the handle on the right and streamers on the left. Original sense: the banner raised in a district, the banner raised by grandees and officers in antiquity, half red and half white, used to gather people. Shuowen: “勿 is the banner raised in a district, of mixed silk with halves of different colours, used to urge the people.” Duan’s note: “‘District’ should read ‘officers and grandees’.” Later its use changed to: do not, must not (“Please do not (勿) smoke”; Analects: “What you do not want done to yourself, do not (勿) do to others!”); not, as a negative.
Design reading
The middle of a left-falling stroke joins ㇆, which stands for saving people with the Fa, and inside are two more left-falling strokes: three left-falling strokes in all, showing that the laws of the three ways of heaven, earth and humanity have all deviated from the Great Law. This image warns the people of the world: do not (勿) go on like this.
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.