This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
母
In brief: a life entering the lower realm from a higher one, through a life on earth
Common reading
What one calls one’s mother. A respectful term for female elders. That which can give rise to and multiply things: the source, the root. Pictographic. The oracle-bone form depicts a mother with breasts. Original sense: mother. Shuowen: “母 means to nurture; from 女; it depicts carrying a child; some say it depicts suckling a child.” Cangjie Pian: “母 has two dots in it, depicting human breasts.” Book of Changes, “Shuogua”: “Kun is the mother.” Laozi: “It may be taken as the mother of all under heaven.” Note: “The root.”
Design reading
口 stands for the world. This world is layered, with higher and lower spaces, and the spaces of different levels have different laws. When higher beings no longer meet the laws of a higher level, they fall into the spaces below. The horizontal in the middle shows the boundary between the upper and lower spaces (the upper and lower realms), or the laws that distinguish different spaces. One dot above and one below show a life entering the lower realm from the upper. At the lower right is a 十 with a vertical hook, showing a small inner world within a lower space, that is, a life that can nurture a life; the vertical hook shows that this small world is on earth. Together: through a life on earth, a life enters the lower realm from the upper: that is the meaning of 母, mother.
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.