This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
止
In brief: cultivate upward step by step; do not stop
Common reading
The original form of 趾 (zhǐ, “toe”). Pictographic. The oracle-bone form depicts toes above and the top and sole of the foot below. Original sense: foot. Shuowen: “止 is the base below; it depicts plants coming out from a base, so 止 is used for the foot.” Guangyun: “止 means to stop, to rest.” The oracle-bone and bronze forms of 止 are both single-unit pictographs depicting a human foot.
Design reading
上 with a short vertical added is 止, forming a shape that climbs step by step, showing that cultivation must go up step by step: “What is hard to endure, one can endure; what is hard to do, one can do.” One must not stop (止) and go no further, and in the end one can reach consummation. So this form, with a meaning opposite to “stop”, reminds people: all of life in the human world is cultivation; do not stop.
Two 二 in perpendicular directions cross: heaven and earth of two directions cross, with the sense of stopping each other.
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.