This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
習
In brief: to rectify a world where yin and yang are reversed
Common reading
The simplified form of 習, meaning to study. 彗 is the sound component of 習 and 日 the semantic component; its original sense was to dry in the sun. Later the sense of drying was kept in 熭, which also has 彗 as its sound: Hanshu, “Biography of Jia Yi”: “At noon one must dry (熭) things.” Shuowen: “熭 means to dry in the sun.” 習 was borrowed for a bird practising flight again and again, for practising, habit and study. Shuowen: “習 means flying repeatedly; from 羽 and from 白.”
Design reading
Only two characters contain 习: one is 羽 (yǔ, “feather”), the other 𠁨. Kangxi Dictionary: “𠁨 means flying straight up; usually written 沖.” 羽 is made of two 习, and over a hundred characters contain 羽; by the general rules of character formation, 习 should also be a common component, yet only two characters contain it, one of them hardly used. So 习 is a very special character.
Characters with “a right-falling dot above and a left-falling dot below” are sicknesses. 厂 and 广 are both characters with positive meanings; adding this “right-falling dot above, left-falling dot below” turns them into the sickness radical: the right-falling stroke, which is yin, occupies the upper (yang) position, and the left-falling stroke occupies the lower (yin) position; the positions are not correct, which in terms of the trigrams is being out of position.
“Being in position” (当位) is an important principle of divination in the Zhouyi, reminding people to follow the demands of the times and not to move against the tide of history. Being in position symbolizes that the development of things follows the laws and is reasonable; being out of position symbolizes deviating from or betraying the right way and violating the laws. Being in position does not necessarily mean good fortune, nor being out of position misfortune, because being in position can turn into being out of position, and vice versa.
The horizontal turn shows cultivation in the Fa-rectification, and the hook the sense of spreading and rectifying the Fa. The “right-falling stroke above, left-falling stroke below” added inside has the sense of yin and yang reversed. So 习 can be understood as rectifying this world where yin and yang are reversed, or as the reversed existence that is the object of the Fa-rectification.
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.