This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
穴
In brief: where lives fallen into the Three Realms dwell
Common reading
Pictographic. In the small-seal form, 宀 on top stands for a covering, and the two sides below for openings. Original sense: a hole in the earth, a cave. Shuowen: “穴 is an earthen chamber.” Note: it depicts a hollow, not the character 八. Note to Book of Changes, “Xu”: “穴 is the path of yin.”
Design reading
The cover without a dot stands for a plane above, and a dot added shows that the function of this plane is to cover. The 八 below stands for yin and yang divided, for being close to death: lives that have fallen from higher realms into the Three Realms are in fact regarded as already dead and buried in the earth within the Three Realms. So 穴 is used for the place where these lives dwell.
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.