Whole of us grow from the land! : Unveiling the Journey of Chinese Characters

As one of the oldest characters, “生” has lots of meanings, and the original one is “growth”.

The common meaning of this character “生” you might have encountered in daily life include: to be born, to give birth, life, to grow, to happen, uncooked and student (usually combined with the other character into a two-characters word in modern time, just like “學生student”).

In Classical Chinese, it has more meanings, for example, descendants (Human reproduction and growth), characters (human, not the text, a life), personalities (Grass can grow into different shapes, just as the same person can have different personalities)…etc.

What do you think after reading the examples I wrote in the last paragraph?

A vivid character? — If you agree, you’ve already got the point of this character!

You are right!

Let’s take a look at the following picture. Can you understand what ancient people wanted to express through this character?

The bottom horizontal line represents the land, and the graphic “屮” above it represents grass.

Imagine it!

The seeds germinate in the soil and eventually break through.

We can’t see the seeds in the mud, but we can see the green life growing on the land.

Then, the character “生” is created.

Just like in modern times, we may use certain words to mean different things. For example, we should all have heard of “Where’s the beef?”, but the word “beef” no longer means beef.

When an ancient character passes through a long period of time, the character “生” also derives many meanings from the original meaning “growth”.

Seeds grow into trees (生長, to grow), pregnant women give birth to children (生產, to give birth), and lives (生命, life/lives).

If you are interested in derivation of literal meaning, I suggest you draw a big tree with many branches, with the character “生 to grow/growth” written on the trunk, and write synonyms on the branches.

This is very similar to the Mandala Chart (Mandala Thinking), as long as you follow the simple with logic and imagination, you can also understand why one Chinese character can derive so many meanings.

Have you begun to explore the meaning of this character?

Welcome to share with me if you do it!

In my next article, we will explore the character “草 grass” carefully!