This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
禾
In brief: a product of the universe's deviation: food that dulls the spirit
Common reading
Pictographic. The bronze form depicts a grain plant with a drooping ear. One of the radicals; characters with 禾 mostly relate to crops. Original sense: a general term for cereal crops, in ancient times millet, today’s 小米. Shuowen: “禾 is the fine grain; it begins to grow in the second month and ripens in the eighth, gaining the middle of the seasons, so it is called 禾.” Guangya, “Shicao”: “Grain before heading is called 苗, after heading 禾.”
Design reading
In the first chapter of the Chinese classic Journey to the West, the stone monkey born of the immortal stone on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit “shot two beams of golden light from his eyes that pierced the Palace of the Polestar”: born of heaven and nourished by earth, the stone monkey could at birth “shoot two beams of golden light that pierced the Palace of the Polestar”, but after he took food and water the golden light faded. This says that Sun Wukong was born of the truth of heaven and the beauty of earth, of the essence of sun and moon, and could send golden light from his eyes and had remarkable spiritual powers, but after eating human food his spiritual power gradually waned.
In fact the West also has legends that when angels came down to the human world they could fly at first, but after eating human food their bodies gradually grew heavy and they could fly no more.
木 with a left-falling stroke on top is 禾. 木, the Jianmu, can mean the universe; the left-falling stroke shows deviation; so 禾 is a product of the universe’s deviation. It is used for human food, which is to say that all of it is food that has deviated. Eating it can meet the needs of the physical body, but it makes people lose their spiritual nature.
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.