This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
力
In brief: the true power of cultivating the Fa and saving people
Common reading
Pictographic. The oracle-bone form depicts a lei, a plough with a handle and a point, used to turn the soil; using the lei shows that tilling with it takes effort. 力 is one of the radicals; its original sense is physical strength. Shuowen: “力 means sinew; it depicts a person’s sinews.”
Design reading
力: a horizontal-turn-hook with a left-falling stroke (the left-falling stroke showing manifestation) shows cultivating the Fa and saving people made manifest, that is, true power.
The left-falling stroke of 刀 pushes up through, and the horizontal and vertical cross, one substance and one function, giving rise to the sense of the method of using a knife. “Splitting Mount Hua with strength”: the method of using a knife lies in using strength (力), so this figure gives rise to the meaning 力. The left-falling stroke crosses the horizontal and pushes through; a person deviating from the Fa cannot be above the Fa, so it does not stand for a person deviating from the Fa but should mean saving people with the Great Law. In physics, force can accelerate an object: two strokes of saving people means saving people at an accelerating pace, which gives the meaning of 力.
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.