0016 天

天

This is the character for sky, the heavens, pronounced TEN or ame in Japanese and tiān in Chinese. It’s a man with arms and legs (and no head) under the roof of the heavens (the straight line across the top).

The Chinese word for ‘weather’ is tiānqì, and is expressed with two characters:

天氣 in the traditional characters, 天气 in the simplified version used in Mainland China.

I wanted to look up this word because when Joan and I were in Makiki Park on Friday night, the night of the day that Tropical Storm Iselle passed by, we ran into a Chinese friend of ours with whom we sometimes do tai chi. She speaks essentially no English. We understood that she was hurrying to her community garden plot because she was afraid it might start to rain again as dark was setting in. She kept saying tiānqì, although it took us quite awhile to figure that out. We thought she was saying ‘rain’ or something like that, but we were lucky enough to find tiānqì when we got home and then we realized that she’d been talking about the threatening ‘weather.’

The qì character in tiānqì

氣 (steam 气 rising above rice 米)

is the same one that’s used in qigong. It means ‘gas, air, weather, qi,’ on its own, so we see it all the time on T-shirts and signage and such. However, even though it sounds like the chi in ‘tai chi’ when pronounced by English speakers, it is not the same character. The ‘chi’ in tai chi should really be spelled and pronounced jí:

極  (‘tree’ on the left, a phonetic hint from the character on the right; originally meaning ‘a cross beam rafter)

It means ‘extremely, the utmost, top.’ Tàijí literally means ‘the Supreme Ultimate:

太極.

There are plenty of words that use this kanji in combination with other kanji. Here are some Japanese words using characters that we’ve already seen:

天水  tensui, ‘rainwater’

天外   tengai, ‘beyond the heavens, farthest regions’

天気  tenki, ‘the weather’ (tiānqì in Chinese)

天真  tenshin, ‘naive’