This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
悟
In brief: the understanding gained by a heart without attachment
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
The upright heart radical with 吾. 吾 is oneself; 吾 sounds like 无 (“nothing”) and implies nothingness; nothingness in the heart is having no attachments. The understanding a person gains when his own heart has no attachments is 悟, enlightenment.
A well-known example is the group built on 霧 (wù, “mist”): 霧 (the Three Realms are like a mist that keeps people from seeing the truth), 物 (wù, “things”: people’s attached desire for things becomes an obstacle to rising, so everything the eye sees is called 物 and classed with 霧), 悟 (wù, “enlightenment”: cultivators must right themselves amid delusion through enlightenment). These three characters of the same sound vividly display the principle that “the Three Realms are delusion, and cultivation requires enlightenment”.
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.