This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
吾
In brief: leaping out of the Five Phases, returning to the true self
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
五 above and 口 below. 五 stands for the Five Phases, and 口 for a bounded space enclosed on four sides, the space-time we live in; together they stand for the material world formed of the Five Phases. 吾 (wú) sounds like 无 (wú, “nothing”): by same sound, same sense, this material world of the Five Phases is illusory for people, and their origin is not here. People must “leap out of the Three Realms and be outside the Five Phases”, leap out of the illusory world and return to their true selves: this is the meaning, from the standpoint of cultivation, of calling “I” 吾.
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.