This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
山
In brief: where cultivators live, and from which they ascend out of the Three Realms
Common reading
Shuowen: “山: earth with rock, rising high.” Guoyu, “Zhouyu”: “A mountain is a gathering of earth.” The raised parts of the land.
Design reading
A person of the mountain is an immortal (仙): cultivators have long cultivated in the mountains. They cultivate according to the ways of heaven, earth and humanity, or, one may say, the manifestations of the Great Law of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance at each level; so 山 has three verticals joined to the Dao (一).
It is 三 stood upright, joined below to 一, and its sound is close to that of 三. The three horizontals of 三 can mean the three great barriers of the Three Realms in which people live, and also the three basic characteristics of the universe. 山 with the person radical on the left is 仙: a cultivator who lives by the Dao and the Fa (in ancient times cultivators mostly lived in the mountains, and a person of the mountain is an immortal); so 山 also stands for a place with layer upon layer of barriers. 三 with its horizontals stood upright shows the three great barriers opened, and the bottom horizontal stands for the Dao and the Fa: the place where those live who can enter the Dao and obtain the Fa, live by the Dao and the Fa, and ascend out (出) of the Three Realms when the barriers open, is 山.
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.