This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
才
In brief: using the wisdom born of cultivation to serve others
Common reading
Pictographic. In the oracle-bone form the top horizontal stands for the ground, and below it a plant’s stem (a young shoot) has just come out of the earth before its branches and leaves have. Original sense: the first growth of plants. Shuowen: “才 is the beginning of plants.” Innate ability, endowment: employing people’s talents (Huainanzi). Strength, wisdom: Book of Songs, “Lu Song, Jiong”: “His thoughts without limit, his horses so able (才).” Just now: Hanshu: “Only (才) a few months.” Only: Tao Yuanming (Jin), “Peach Blossom Spring”: “At first very narrow, barely (才) letting a person through.”
Design reading
The horizontal is substance, the Fa; the vertical is application, cultivation. The horizontal and vertical crossing show doing things and cultivating according to the Fa as one understands it. The left-falling stroke has the sense of showing, of being expressed outwardly, and the vertical hook shows helping others. Cultivating the Great Law, one can become enlightened to one’s own Fa and give rise to wisdom; using this wisdom to do things for everyone is 才, talent.
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.