This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
瓦
In brief: digging out the high beings fallen into the mortal world
Common reading
Pictographic. It depicts roof tiles laid face up and face down in turn; some say it depicts a fired earthenware vessel, originally meaning fired pottery; others that it depicts overlapping scales, originally meaning roof tiles. Another name for “earth” among the eight sounds of ancient music. Shuowen: “瓦 is the general name for fired earthenware.” Duan Yucai’s note: “All unfired earthenware is called 坏 (坯, greenware); all fired is called 瓦.” Zhoushu: “Shennong made earthenware (瓦) vessels.”
Design reading
The top horizontal depicts the way of heaven, the Great Law; the vertical rising stroke depicts the Fa spread in the world to save people; the horizontal-turn-bend-hook on the right depicts cultivating and rising by the principles of the Fa one has become enlightened to within the Great Law: the spreading of the Great Law and cultivators obtaining the Fa and cultivating are linked ring by ring. The cultivation world holds that all matter in the Three Realms, this material world, is earth, and the human body too is earth relative to higher spaces. When Chinese folk legend says that Nüwa made humans from earth, it means that, seen by higher beings, humans were made from the matter of this world, that is, from earth. People with such bodies cultivating in the world are like vessels fired from this earth. 瓦 (wǎ) sounds like 挖 (wā, “to dig”): making tiles is like digging out high beings who have fallen into the mortal world. This is the greatest image of 瓦; used in the human world, it is the 瓦 of the roof.
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.