This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
百
In brief: we come and go with nothing: all is empty
Common reading
“百 is ten tens.” (Shuowen) “A thousand blessings and a hundred (百) fortunes.” (Book of Songs, “Daya, Jiale”), an approximate number meaning many. From 一 and from 白; 白 is borrowed for 百.
Design reading
白 has the sense of “having nothing at all”. People always want more of the things of the world, yet we come naked and go naked, take nothing with us, and it is all an empty loss. So this 百, borrowed from 白, is used to remind people.
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.