This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
來
In brief: people come from the universe
Common reading
Originally wheat. Wheat was called 麥 and barley 麰 (or 牟). Shuowen: “來: the auspicious wheat and barley received by Zhou.” Erya: “來 means to arrive.” Zhu Junsheng: “The proper character for coming and going is 麥, and the proper character for the grain is 來. Since the Three Dynasties they have been used the other way round… Master Xu did not correct it, so the error has continued to this day.” Book of Changes, “Xian”: “Restlessly coming and going.” Book of Songs, “Xiaoya, Caiwei”: “My journey does not return (來).” The future, coming: Liang Qichao (Qing): “The days to come are long.”
Design reading
Two people under a tree (木). The Jianmu is the image of the universe and stands for it; people walk down level by level from the heights of the universe and enter this world, that is, people come from the universe: this is the original meaning of 来, “to come”.
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.