This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
去
In brief: cast into the Three Realms for deviating from the Fa: as good as dead
Common reading
Compound-ideative and phono-semantic. In the oracle-bone form a person (大) is above and a mouth below (or 凵), showing a person leaving the mouth of a cave or a pit. Shuowen: “From 大, with 凵 as the sound.” Original sense: to leave. Shuowen: “去 means people parting from each other.” To go, to go to, the opposite of 来 (“go to school”, “go on an outing”). To die: Tang Xianzu (Ming), The Peony Pavilion: “Miss Du of the yamen has been gone (去) three years; we will call her soul back to the ninth heaven.”
Design reading
土 above and 厶 below. 厶: what has slanted must be righted; look within. Seen by beings beyond the Three Realms, lives cast into the Three Realms for deviating from the Fa are like lives buried in the earth (土), gone (去) in death.
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.