Each chapter opens with a mark taken from the oracle bones or the bronzes , the earliest written Chinese, incised on turtle plastron and ox scapula for divination, or cast into ritual vessels. They are between three and three and a half thousand years old. They are set here at full strength; on the chapters themselves they are pressed into the paper and easy to miss.
戶
hù · oracle bone script
A single-leaf door, drawn side on: the upright post and the panel hung from it. The doubled form, 門, gives the two-leaf gate. 戶 is the smaller opening , the door of a dwelling rather than the gate of a city.
One leaf, not two. The way into a house, standing open.
Home人
rén · oracle bone script
A person seen from the side, arm forward, back slightly bent. The oldest form leans; the upright modern character came much later.
Not the artist. A person, standing at an angle, looking at something.
A Way of Seeing水
shuǐ · oracle bone script
A current running down the centre with droplets or eddies to either side. The same element survives inside every modern character concerning water, rivers and tides.
One line, and everything scattered around it moving in the same direction.
Ways of Working舟
zhōu · oracle bone script
A boat seen from above: the hull, and the thwarts braced across it. A vessel drawn as a thing made of joined parts rather than as a silhouette on water.
The oldest picture of a crossing anyone has. Somebody drew it because somebody had left.
The Gamble of the Sea目
mù · oracle bone script
An eye, lid and pupil, lying on its side as an eye does in a face. It was stood upright later, when writing turned to columns.
Cinema begins with agreeing to look at something for longer than is comfortable.
Film樂
yuè · oracle bone script
Silk strings stretched over a wooden frame , an instrument seen from the front. The same character, read lè, means joy, which is a claim about music that nobody has since had to argue.
Strings and wood. Sound as the oldest thing a family carries.
Music文
wén · oracle bone script
A standing figure with a mark across the chest , a tattoo, or a painted design. From pattern the meaning widened to writing, to learning, to culture itself.
Before it meant literature it meant a mark deliberately made on a body. Research is the search for marks somebody meant.
Research冊
cè · oracle bone script
Bamboo slips laid side by side and bound with two cords through the middle. The oldest book. The character is a picture of the binding, not of the writing.
A notebook is loose thoughts held by a strong thread. The character shows the thread.
Notebook天
tiān · bronze script, Shang
A standing person, arms out, with the head made large and solid. Not a picture of the sky but of what is above a human being , the character for great, 大, with its crown weighted. Sky, and then heaven, came from looking up from a body.
天下一家. All under heaven, one family. Not one people , one sky, and everyone differently placed beneath it.
Culture del Mondo林
lín · oracle bone script & bronze script
Two trees, standing beside one another. Not a single tree and not a whole forest , the smallest number that makes a wood.
The clan name. 林登丽. Everything on this site descends from those two trees.
The name itselfOracle bone script (甲骨文) was incised on turtle plastron and ox scapula in the late Shang, roughly 1250–1050 BCE, and lay unread until 1899. Bronze script (金文) was cast into ritual vessels over much the same span and continued into the Zhou. Glyph forms reproduced here follow standard published transcriptions.