This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
Li Xutong
Learning Chinese characters inevitably involves their origin. Today let us talk specifically about Cangjie’s creation of the characters.
Where did Chinese characters come from? Volume 1 of the Outer Records of the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (Zizhi Tongjian Waiji) says: “The Yellow Emperor appointed Cangjie as Historian of the Left to create characters, so that all the principles of righteousness under heaven would be gathered into writing.” That is, the Yellow Emperor appointed Cangjie as the official who recorded history and asked him to create a script with which to record the morality and principles of the world. The earliest surviving record of Cangjie creating characters comes from Xunzi of the Warring States period, who wrote in “Dispelling Obsession” in the Xunzi: “Many were those who loved writing, yet Cangjie alone has been handed down, because he was single-minded.” That is, at the time many people created scripts; the reason Cangjie’s script was handed down is that Cangjie devoted himself wholeheartedly to the task. This passage reveals something very important: the characters Cangjie created were not the only writing system of the time. Many people created many writing systems, just as today a single phenomenon may have many theoretical explanations, and in the end the system created by Cangjie was the one that survived.
So how did Cangjie create the characters? The apocryphal text Chunqiu Yuanming Bao records that Cangjie “had a dragon’s face, broad and full, and four eyes shining with spiritual light. He truly had wise virtue and could write from birth. Thereupon he exhausted the changes of heaven and earth; looking up he observed the round, curving form of the Kui constellation, looking down he examined the patterns on tortoise shells, the feathers of birds, and the mountains and rivers; pointing with his palm, he created writing. Heaven rained down millet, ghosts wailed at night, and dragons went into hiding.” That is, Cangjie had two pairs of eyes, one pair looking at heaven and one pair observing the earth. In Chinese tradition, heaven often refers to the heavenly realm, the Way of Heaven, and its rules. So Cangjie’s four eyes actually mean that one pair could observe the heavenly realm, view the writing of the higher realms and observe the workings of the Way of Heaven, while the other pair looked at the human realm, observing the distribution of the constellations, the shape of the mountain ranges and rivers on earth, the traces of birds, beasts, insects and fish, and the forms of plants and implements. According to the principles of the Way of Heaven, and following the mountains, rivers, plants, fish and insects of the human realm, he created all kinds of different symbols and fixed the meaning that each symbol represents.
Cangjie created the characters according to the forms and laws of change of the sun, moon and stars and of all things in heaven and earth, so these characters must also accord with the laws of development and change of all things in heaven and earth. As mentioned above, when Pangu separated heaven and earth, “Chaos first opened, and Qian and Kun were first established. The light and clear qi floated upward and became heaven; the heavy and turbid qi sank downward and congealed into earth. The sun, the moon and the five planets are called the Seven Governors; heaven, earth and humanity are called the Three Powers.” That is, before heaven and earth were formed, all was chaos; when the chaos separated, heaven and earth were formed. The light, clear qi rose and formed heaven, and the heavy, turbid qi sank and solidified into earth. The sun, the moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars and Saturn are called the Seven Governors; heaven, earth and humanity together are called the Three Powers. So Chinese characters can also be approached starting from these basic things: heaven and earth, the sun, moon and stars, the myriad things between heaven and earth, and human beings.
In the surviving classical texts, some have long conjectured that Chinese characters originated from the Book of Changes (Yijing). It is said that the Yijing originated in prehistory. After the great flood of high antiquity, China inherited certain things from prehistory, and the Yijing was the most important part of them. So in the time of the Yellow Emperor and Cangjie, the Yijing must still have governed people’s thinking, and it was entirely natural for Cangjie to create characters according to the principles of the Changes.
These principles of the Changes inherited from prehistory passed through the Lianshan of the Xia, the Guicang of the Shang and the Zhouyi of the Zhou. After the Warring States period, with the feudal lords dividing the land and the Hundred Schools of Thought vying with one another, the principles of the Changes gradually declined, and how Cangjie created characters according to them gradually became a lost learning. By the time of Xu Shen’s Six Scripts of character formation in the Han dynasty, the link between Chinese characters and the Yijing had been essentially completely severed. In modern times there even arose a movement to Latinize Chinese characters, seeking to replace them entirely with an alphabetic script.
In keeping with the law that things turn into their opposites when they reach an extreme, and that good fortune follows the depths of adversity, some contemporary scholars have gradually begun again to study the relationship between Chinese characters and the Yijing; Mr. Xiao Qihong’s theory that Chinese characters arose from the Changes is a representative example. Using 20 characters for astronomical phenomena, 14 for geography, 27 for plants and 31 for animals, 92 characters in all, Mr. Xiao Qihong deduced the entire system of Chinese characters according to the yin–yang principles of the Changes, striving to restore the original form of Cangjie’s character creation. It is a useful attempt at exploring the relationship between Chinese characters and the Yijing.
