0056 寂

寂

This character means ‘lonely, desolate, still, silent, elegant simplicity.’ In Japanese it’s pronounced JAKU, SEKI, sabi, or sabishii, depending on the shade of meaning. In Chinese it’s jì.

A brief digression: Japanese specifies different meanings by adding other characters or syllables (written in hiragana) to the character, and these Kanji-of-the-day features have been glossing over these details. Sabishii, ‘lonely,’ for example, is not just 寂. It’s actually 寂しい. 寂 written by itself would be sabi, elegant simplicity. We will continue glossing over these details for now in these post, though, since the main task here is to gain familiarity with the characters themselves.

Back to 寂. There’s a roof on top.

宀

All the rest below the roof is there as a phonetic clue to the pronunciation of the word. And that is not very useful for those of us trying to get a grip on the meaning whenever we run across the character. Can we get any help from breaking things down?

叔 means ‘father’s younger brother.’

尗 means ‘the younger among brothers.’

上 means ‘top, highest, go up.’

小 means ‘small, tiny, insignificant.’

又 means ‘and, also, again,’ and derived from an image of a right hand which is doing things again and again.

菽  which looks almost like 寂, but with a different upper figure indicating a connection with plants, means ‘beans, peas.’ Interesting, but is it useful?

寂

So, is this where we need a story of our own making? We could say that father’s younger brother is sitting under the roof of a shed shelling peas by hand. Which could be very lonely, or sabishii, after a while. Or, if father’s younger brother were more highly evolved in his understanding of the 道, or Dao, he might appreciate the elegant simplicity, or sabi, of the task.