0010 外

外

GAI and soto in Japanese, mean ‘outside, outdoors.’ It’s wài in Chinese.

The part on the left

夕

is yū, meaning ‘evening,’ xī in Chinese.Think of it as a crescent moon or a moon not yet fully above the horizon.

On the right

卜

is uranau in Japanese, ‘to tell fortunes,’ bo in Chinese. Amazingly, Wiegel somehow knows that this means ‘to divine by looking at the cracks in a tortoise-shell as the heat develops them.’ The character represents two cracks, one horizontal, one vertical.

Wiegel says that dream divination by consulting a tortoise shell had to take place in the morning, after the dreams of the night before. You couldn’t do dream divination in the evening. Thus, this character, which portrays ‘evening divination,’ represents an activity which is outside the ritual limits. Talk about taking the long way around. I think Wiegel would have had a hard time with charades. “You dunderheads, couldn’t you see that I was signaling ‘evening’ by making a crescent moon with my arms and then ‘tortoise-shell crack divination’ by sticking my leg out to one side? And once you got that, the target word, OUTSIDE, would have been obvious...Right!!!???”