This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
爪
In brief: demon claws over the human world
Common reading
Pictographic. In the oracle-bone and small-seal forms 又 is the hand and the two dots depict the nails. Original sense: human fingernails and toenails. Liushu Gu: “爪: a person’s finger-fork, or also written 爪.” Shuowen Jiezi Zhu: “丮, to hold. The hand facing up is 掌, the hand facing down is 爪.” Book of Rites, “Sang Da Ji”: “The junior officer trims (爪) the feet.”
Design reading
Today 爪 basically means the ends of an animal’s limbs, mostly in words with negative meanings, such as demon’s claw (魔爪) and ghost’s claw (鬼爪). On top is a horizontal-left-falling stroke, similar to a horizontal but running the opposite way, standing for demonic law; below it join a left-falling stroke, a vertical and a right-falling stroke, symbolizing demon claws covering the human world. In the Dharma-ending period the human world is ruled by demons, and 爪 expresses such an image.
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.