This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
己
In brief: cultivating oneself by the Fa, mind and body together
Common reading
己 is the ancient form of 纪, borrowed to mean “self”. Original sense: the end of a silk thread, used to bind silk. The sixth of the heavenly stems.
Design reading
Cultivation is cultivating oneself (己) according to the Fa: holding oneself to standards and righting oneself. One’s self has two aspects, xing and ming: xing is xinxing, the mind; ming is the body, one’s physical being. People live between heaven and earth; 己 has three horizontals, the top and bottom depicting heaven and earth and the middle one the person. On the right the person is joined to heaven, showing that one’s inner xinxing accords with the principles of heaven; on the left it is joined to earth, showing cultivating the outer ming according to the way of earth; the final hook shows rising after dual cultivation of mind and body. Taken together they form the complete image of 己.
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.