This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
禍
In brief: people unreasonable, a state without a foundation in the Dao, divided
Common reading
祸 means harm; it is the gods not blessing.
Design reading
This group of characters takes “whether people are reasonable, whether there is a foundation in the Dao” as the core of their formation, showing in concentrated form the feature of Chinese characters that “ethical teaching is the rationale of their formation”.
The opposite of 福. The Dao within the mouth is 曰, meaning that people should be reasonable when they speak; in 咼 the 一 inside the 曰 on top is broken, that is, people are no longer reasonable; below, the frame has lost its bottom 一, that is, the state has lost the Dao on which it was founded, its foundation in the Dao; and a state within a state is a state divided, lords fighting one another. Left and right together: heaven warns people that when people are unreasonable and the state, without a foundation in the Dao, divides, that is 祸, calamity. (Top and bottom use “intent gives rise to form”; left and right, because it takes the sound of 咼, use “sound gives rise to form”.)
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.