This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
七
In brief: the Dao begins to tilt
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
Its ancient sense includes “cutting”: a horizontal and a vertical cross and cut the whole apart. The tilted horizontal shows the Dao (一) in the world of the ten directions beginning to tilt; the laws of every level have decayed, and the world enters the Dharma-ending period.
When the left-falling stroke of 匕 (bǐ, “dagger”) pushes through, substance and function cross, and that is 七. 七 sounds like 奇 (qí, “unusual”): the dagger is used to strike by surprise and win by the unexpected. This gives the sound qi (七, 奇, 气) the sense of an odd number, of something rare or unseen.
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.