示

Today we move to a new ideogram or pictogram Chinese character 示. You might be wondering why 示 can be an ideogram and pictogram character at the same time? It will be explained with its ancient scripts together with their evolution history.

evolution history of 示

As we can see from above that there are two origins of 示.  Oracle scripts, and  are now considered as pictograms of altar or altar with a god‘s tablet, as demonstrated by below image: (borrowed from http://m.guoxuedashi.com/xiangxingzi/970mx/)

worship to god

Another origin  is more ideogram. recall what we have learnt about the philosophy of Chinese ancestors while study our Chinese character 二, 三, 王 and 士.  一 on top represents heaven or sky, vertical  has the meaning of communicating with heaven (which means god).

 further emphasize the idea by using , which we know to be the Oracle script of 上,  andto represent the processing of communicating with god above (上).


Regarding  and , some indicative dots were added into  and . Like what Israelis do during their worship to God, Chinese ancestor also provide sacrifice with blood on altars. These dots are believed to represent blood of the sacrifice sprinkled around altars.

With the explanation above, we see that both origins actually have the same representation and meaning:  communicate with god above to receive the signs revealed.

Starting from Bronze Script and Seal Script, all different writings of 示 is aggregated to  and , and eventually finalized as current 示.


So 示 means show or reveal something (signs, results, information) to someone. for example 示意.

And obviously 示 is related to the process of worshiping god, any character created with 示 as its radical shows a clear indicator that such character is also related to the process of worshiping god. for example 祝.

That is all for today, let us enjoy a Chinese calligraphy with 示 inside:

训俭示康