This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
闐
In brief: the true gate is heaven
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
Take 闐 (tián): it sounds like 天 (tiān, “heaven”) and means “full, great”; inside the gate (门) is the character 真 (zhēn, “true”). By the rule that same sound means same sense, “the true gate is heaven”: the true gate through which people return is in heaven, and the whole sky is full of gates of return.
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.