This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
屯
In brief: hard cultivation in the mountains: the difficulty of beginnings, and accumulation
Common reading
To gather, to store; to pile up, to block; to station troops; a village; difficulty, danger. Compound-ideative: 屮 through 一. 屮 (chè) is grass and 一 is the ground, depicting the difficulty of plants first sprouting. ① (zhūn) Original sense: difficulty. ② Extended sense: to gather. Guangya, “Shigu III”: “屯 means to gather.” Shuowen: “屯 means difficulty; it depicts plants first sprouting, struggling and difficult; from 屮 passing through 一 with its tail bent. 一 is the earth.” Book of Changes, “Xugua”: “屯 is the beginning of the birth of things.”
Design reading
屯 is a 十 on top joined to a 山, with the middle vertical of 山 joined to a vertical-bend-hook. Together: a person cultivating in the mountains according to the Fa he has become enlightened to. Such cultivation in the mountains in the past was ascetic practice, very hard for ordinary people, so 屯 has the sense of “difficulty, hardship”. The time when a person practises hard in the mountains is the time when a new higher life is first born: kings and lords of some universes and worlds came down to the world, practising hard among humans and accumulating mighty virtue so as to be able to save the beings of their own worlds; this is the greatest accumulation and storing. Such a 屯 is used to mean “the difficulty of beginnings, and storing” in the human world.
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.