This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
Li Xutong
Origins
Today both critics and supporters of Chinese characters say that Chinese characters are a unique script in the world today: other scripts are phonetic, while Chinese characters are pictographic, ideographic and so on — someone online says there are more than thirty such descriptions. What kind of script Chinese characters really are seems, even now, to have no explanation that convinces everyone.
Some say Chinese characters have the longest history, five thousand years from the age of human myth to the present, which is remarkable. Others say that all other scripts have evolved from primitive pictographic writing into phonetic writing, while Chinese characters are still at the primitive pictographic stage — so what use is your long history? In the end it is still a primitive script at the first stage.
In Western society, Chinese characters are considered the hardest script in the world to learn. With a phonetic script, schoolchildren can read books fluently after a year or two of study; for Chinese people, Chinese characters are studied throughout primary and secondary school, and learning them is indeed a heavy burden.
In short, Chinese characters carry the most mysteries, the most questions and the most difficulties. Here we want to explore these questions in some depth.
Prelude: One Stroke Opens Heaven
Surely there is no one who does not know the meaning of 一 (yī, “one”): one apple, one pear; one, two, three, four, five, up the hill to hunt the tiger — this is how today’s textbooks teach it. But the sentence “In the very beginning, the Dao was established in the One; it created and divided heaven and earth, and transformed into the myriad things” — many people today may not know where it comes from. In fact, this is the explanation of 一 in the Shuowen Jiezi, the character dictionary handed down in China from more than two thousand years ago.
The figure 一 had several meanings in ancient China: some think it represents the Supreme Ultimate (Taiji), others say it is the first line of the Qian trigram, or the yang line of the Two Modes. As a basic building component of Chinese characters, it is called the stroke “horizontal” (横). On its own as a character, it is the number 一, “one.”
So in Chinese tradition 一 is not merely the number one; related sayings such as “the Dao gives birth to One,” “the Dao is established in the One,” “one stroke opens heaven” and “the first birth of yang” point to the broader meaning of 一.
Understanding 一 can begin with the idiom “one stroke opens heaven” (一画开天). This idiom comes from the poem “Reading the Yi” by Lu You of the Song. Legend has it that Fuxi’s drawing of the Eight Trigrams began with the first stroke of the Qian trigram (☰); Qian is heaven, hence “one stroke (line) opens heaven.”
In ancient Chinese mythology, Fuxi is regarded as the ancestor of all humanity. Fuxi’s drawing of the trigrams was the transmission to humanity of its first understanding of this world. The starting point of this understanding is 一.
Some now argue that Pangu, who created the universe, and Fuxi are the same god. The words “one stroke opens heaven” cannot help but call to mind Pangu splitting the primordial chaos with one stroke of his axe, the light rising to become heaven and the turbid sinking to become earth, opening heaven and earth for the first time. So this 一 represents not only the starting point of humanity’s understanding of the world, but also the beginning of the world’s formation. Thus the first stroke of the Qian trigram signifies the world beginning to change out of chaos — there is change, and the rules and principles of change; in today’s terms, it is an operator that generates being out of non-being.
Laozi said the Dao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, and Three gives birth to the myriad things — telling how all things are produced from the Dao: all things begin from One, and are born of the Dao. Read in reverse, Laozi’s saying means that people’s understanding of anything must return to the Dao. Or, to put it another way, to understand the essential meaning of a thing is to understand the Dao behind that thing.
This is also the most basic Dao of learning. Some people are very good at learning, and some are not. Those who are good at learning have mastered this Dao of learning. Whatever you study, always think about the principles behind the object of study, and you will find that after a while you can integrate and master it thoroughly, your ability to understand problems will be greatly strengthened, and you will become wise and bright. Thus you get better and better at learning, and learn better and better.
The Dao can nowadays often be understood as principle, law, regularity, rationale and so on, but in ancient times it was generally thought to mean the ultimate Dao, the Great Dao. What this ultimate Dao is, worthies and adepts through the ages have sought and pursued. Laozi’s “mystery upon mystery, the gate of all wonders”: behind every level of principle there is a further mystery, and above every level of Dao there is always a deeper level of Dao; one can never trace it to the final answer, the constant, unchanging Dao. In this it has the same meaning as Shakyamuni Buddha’s saying “the Dharma has no fixed Dharma.”
The Great Dao is utterly simple, and 一 is the simplest written symbol; so if the Great Dao is to be manifested in the human world, it is most likely to be represented by this symbol.
The first half of the Shuowen Jiezi’s explanation of 一 can be understood as: in the beginning, the Dao was manifested through the One.
How it is manifested, and what is manifested, can be seen from the requirements for writing 一, or from its shape. 一 must be written straight and level, of suitable length. Straight — not bending, not distorting the facts — that is truth. Levelness is the basic characteristic of water; the virtue of water is goodness: water benefits all things without contending, which is called “the highest good is like water.”
The Dao gives birth to One, and the Dao is established in the One; so the existence of 一 is to show that there is a Dao behind this tangible world. If the world has a Dao, then the system of Chinese characters that expresses this world must also have a Dao. And the original meanings of the character 一 — “one, consistent, the same” — show that the Dao by which Chinese characters are constructed should be one and the same as the Dao of the world.
“It created and divided heaven and earth, and transformed into the myriad things” means that the Dao gives birth to One, One divides into heaven and earth, and between heaven and earth the myriad things are born — showing that the myriad things need a great many Chinese characters. All things are born of the Dao, and Chinese characters are born of 一; so the principle expressed by 一 is the Dao behind Chinese characters.
The Dao established in the One means that the tangible 一 can represent the intangible Dao. Extending this principle, it shows that what was created here is a writing system that uses tangible figures to represent intangible meanings.
The “horizontal” (一) is the first basic stroke of Chinese characters, and also the most common building component in Chinese characters. In the structure of Chinese characters, its basic meaning is the Dao. A long horizontal generally represents a more fundamental Dao, and a short horizontal represents specific rules and principles. Characters with this stroke are always related to the Dao, while characters without it represent things that depart from the Dao. For example, the principle of being a person is to be 正直 (zhèngzhí, “upright”), and these two characters contain a great many 一. Being reasonable, the principle of doing things — the shortest distance between two points is a straight line — means being direct, concise and so on.
This 一 is also a character in its own right. What was the first character Cangjie created? From the standpoint of writing, the Dao gives birth to One; following the Dao of all things in the world, 一 was created. So the first character created should be 一, which is also why the first character listed in the Shuowen Jiezi is 一.
一 is pronounced the same as 易 (yì, “change”), so the character 一 is linked with 易, the character that specifically denotes the rules of change, giving 一 the meanings of “change, simplicity and constancy.” Change: the formless becomes form; simplicity: the Great Dao is utterly simple and easy, and all things can be reduced from the complex to the utterly simple 一; constancy: however things change, they never depart from their source — the world changes in a thousand ways, but in the end there is an unchanging principle behind it.
The character 一 is the starting point of the formal expression of this world. In this tangible world, human cognition starts by identifying individuals — things, events, objects, thoughts, emotions and so on — such as a universe, a table, a person, a thought, an accident, a relationship and so forth. The most abstract expression of these individuals is the number 一; it is also the most formalized of the Dao’s many meanings, and the starting point of human abstract thinking.
This abstract number 一 has two meanings: one is the 一 of the unique, the one and only; the other is the 一 of one, two, three, four. As for the original meaning of the number, the former is overlooked in today’s mainstream understanding, while the latter is the meaning we generally recognize, namely the unit of measurement of countable things and the first place in an order. But in the use of the character 一, both meanings appear.
When there is more than one identical or similar individual among those that people identify, there arises a need to count and measure, and so 一 acquires its meaning as a unit of measurement. With measurement comes ordering, and then the first in an ordered sequence; for example, the first individual of various basic things, categories, elements and semantic units all carry this ordinal sense of “first” (第一).
If a thing is unique, like the mass of primordial chaotic qi before the universe came into being, there can be no need for counting or measuring; yet one still needs to express this “one” mass of chaotic qi, and so there is the meaning of the unique 一.
In fact, these two understandings of 一 correspond to two basic principles of the world. Of these two understandings of the number 一, the latter developed into the traditional Chinese “shushu” (numerology), corresponding to non-extensional things, and the former developed into “suanshu” (arithmetic), that is, the general understanding of number today, corresponding to measurable, extensional things. This will be explained in detail in later articles.
The greatest difference between Chinese characters and phonetic scripts is that the graphic symbols of Chinese characters themselves carry meaning. The letters of phonetic scripts are now basically abstract phonetic symbols with no semantic content. Chinese character figures are very different. Starting from the simplest character figures, which express the most basic human knowledge, progressively more complex characters represent progressively more complex concepts, principles and things.
When this most basic graphic symbol of Chinese characters, 一, is used in the system of Chinese characters, the most basic understanding it expresses is embodied in the characters in which it appears.
When 一 appears as a single character, the Dao it can express is limited. In fact, this is the limitation of human cognition based on perception. Humans’ use of perception to distinguish individual things itself forms a scope of understanding. Many people today do not acknowledge understanding beyond this scope, and this is something we need to emphasize particularly when studying the character 一.
At this point, you may have a question:
The ancients were indeed very primitive — were they really so clever and wise that they could think of these principles when creating characters? And if the ancients really understood these principles, how did they do it?
