This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
毛
In brief: deviation suppressing the righteous law: the image of a beast
Common reading
Pictographic; bronze form. 毛 is a radical, and characters with 毛 mostly relate to fur. Original sense: eyebrows, hair, animal hair. Shuowen: “毛 is the hair of eyebrows and head and of animals.” Book of Rites, “Record of Music”: “The feathered brood their young; the furred (毛) bear and nurse them.” By extension, beasts.
Design reading
A long left-falling stroke on top of two horizontals. The left-falling stroke is the image of deviating from the Fa: an existence that has deviated from the Fa presses from outside on the Dao and the Fa represented by the two horizontals below, and binds the righteous Dao and Fa with the inner constraint shown by the vertical-bend-hook: this is the behaviour of a beast. Such a character is used for an animal’s fur (毛).
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.