This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
黑
In brief: karma: fire burning above and below
Common reading
Indicative. The oracle-bone form circles the face of 大, like the punishment of tattooing, cutting characters into the face with ink. Western Zhou bronze forms add two dots on the face to stress the ink marks; Spring and Autumn bronze forms add dots to 大; Qin script reorganized it with 火 placed below. In clerical script 大 became 土 and the 火 below became 灬. The small-seal form in the Shuowen corrupts the bottom into 炎. Original sense: black. Shuowen: “黑 is the colour of what fire has smoked.” Xiao Erya: “The pure black bird that feeds its parents in return is called 烏, the crow.”
Design reading
Black and white are yin and yang to each other: white is yang, and black is yin.
The Great Consummation Way, “1. Characteristics of the Practice”: “Xinxing includes the transformation between de (virtue, a white substance) and karma (a black substance).” Zhuan Falun, Lecture Four: “Doing good deeds one gains a white substance, virtue; doing bad deeds one gains a black substance, karma.”
When people have gained the black substance, karma, they must eliminate it; eliminating karma is like burning oneself in the fire of karma. The four dots at the bottom of 黑 come from 火 (fire); above them is 土: a person who has fallen into the Three Realms has fallen into the earth; above 土 is a 口 with fire inside. With the black substance, fire burns above and below: this is the image of 黑.
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.