This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
卜
In brief: losing one's way: divination to understand the Fa
Common reading
Pictographic. The oracle-bone form depicts the cracks that appear on a tortoise shell after scorching; one of the radicals, and characters with 卜 mostly relate to divination. Original sense: to divine. Note to Rites of Zhou, “Grand Diviner”: “Asking the tortoise is called 卜.” Book of Rites, “Quli”: “The tortoise is 卜, the milfoil is 筮.”
Design reading
Without the top horizontal, it becomes 卜. That horizontal is the Fa, the Dao, which can show people the way; without it, a person who has come down from heaven to the human world has entered delusion. To know the future one must divine; this character also shows that all divination is about knowing and understanding the principles of the Fa.
外 (wài, “outside”): divining at night, to ask whether going out (外) the next day will be auspicious.
訃 (fù, “obituary”): where a person will be reincarnated after death had to be shown by divination; later it became the notice of a death.
赴 (fù, “to go to”): divination shows the direction of travel, the place one must hurry to (赴).
Also explained here: 外, 讣, 赴
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.