体
This character means ‘body, group, object, reality.’ In Japanese it’s pronounced TAI or karada, and in Chinese it’s tǐ.
亻
is just a compressed way to write
人,
a man on two legs, meaning ‘man, people.’
本
means ‘root, origin’ in Chinese, but in Japanese it means ‘origin, real, true,’ but also ‘book.’ In today’s character it gives a sound clue, which is no help to us in remembering the character’s meaning. We could, however, think of a person’s ‘reality’ as their body. Or, if we saw ‘person’ and ‘book’ in the character, we could think, rather poetically, that the person’s ‘book’ is the person’s body, as in, ‘You could read her like a book.’
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