This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
長
In brief: after falling, obtaining the Fa and cultivating inward
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
Vertical hook (亅) and vertical rising stroke: the vertical hook stands for the right face of a cube (the closing side, the exit) and is often used in the knife radical, with the sense of cutting off. Take 長: the vertical hook saves others outwardly and the vertical rising stroke saves oneself inwardly. After a life has strayed far from Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance (the three horizontals above) and fallen into the Three Realms, it obtains the Fa again (the long middle horizontal) and cultivates inward (the vertical rising stroke): this makes 長.
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.