This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
水
In brief: the virtue of water: Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
Every world and the whole universe come from the water of the origin. Water by its nature has the characteristics of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance, so it is shown with three dots. This is also why water has the “virtue of water” of the Daodejing: “dwelling in the places people dislike and washing all things” is Truthfulness; “benefiting all things without contending” is Compassion; “being good at staying low, and so becoming king of a hundred valleys” is Forbearance. The golden-bodied Fa king, seeing the suffering of beings, gives rise to the compassionate wish to save all: this is “metal produces water”.
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.