This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
迷
In brief: a life that falls into the material world enters delusion
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
米 is a 十 with four dots in the middle, that is, the four and eight directions: a person at a crossroads leading in every direction gets lost (迷路). 十 also stands for the world of the ten directions, our material world; once a life falls into it, it enters a state of delusion. The original form of 迷 is 米: a life enters this deluding material world, eats the grain and millet of the world, grows into a mortal body of flesh that does not know the truth, and becomes lost. Later 米 was borrowed for grain, so 迷 was made by the transfer method, adding the walking radical, to express the original sense.
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.