Sinograph ambigram for "mindfulness"
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From Ting Fen Yik on Facebook:
It's been a while since we've posted on ambigrams. David Moser is the master in Chinese and in English. See the references below.
Selected readings
- "Weird characters" (7/7/13)
- "Orientation-dependent ambiguity" (12/27/18)
- "Sinographic memory in Vietnamese writing" (4/16/14) — see esp. the last comment
- "Freemocracy" (6/13/19)
- "Happy LÓNG year!" (1/24/12)
Thomas said,
June 12, 2025 @ 5:00 am
“The character for mindfulness in Chinese and Japanese is 念”
Is it, though? This is the first time I have heard this meaning for this character, and it sounds suspicious to me.
David J Moser said,
June 12, 2025 @ 9:02 am
Thanks for the shout-out, Victor. Zev Handel's webpage (no longer updated) has a photo of one of my Chinese ambigrams, which was coopted by a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the US. I've never found out the location.
https://faculty.washington.edu/zhandel/
And a long-forgotten "cobweb site"
https://chinese-ambigrams.blogspot.com/
Fen Yik said,
June 12, 2025 @ 12:01 pm
Thanks so much for posting this, Prof. Mair.
To address Thomas' doubt, I called 念 "the character for mindfulness" as a social media-friendly simplification. It's the Chinese and Japanese translation of sati, the Buddhist concept commonly translated as "mindfulness" in English.
http://www.buddhism-dict.net/cgi-bin/xpr-ddb.pl?q=%E5%BF%B5
Chris Button said,
June 12, 2025 @ 5:21 pm
Love it! Very cool indeed!
Incidentally the phonetic component of 念 is 心. The upper 今 component originally just consisted of an inverted 口 that constitutes the top half of 今.
Jonathan Smith said,
June 16, 2025 @ 3:11 pm
No, there's no telling if "念" was coined via a "phonetic" component and if so which of the two pieces it would have been (felt to be). The upper (let's represent it "亼") is not "inverted 口" (which I guess is a mistranslation of "倒口") but "downward facing mouth" (cf. words that mean 'hold in mouth' etc.)
Chris Button said,
June 16, 2025 @ 3:47 pm
口 is a "right-way up (i.e.. not inverted) mouth". But you need to look at the inscriptional forms to see that.
The phonetic component is 心. Even if the top were an abbreviated 今 with the bottom chopped off for some reason, its onset cannot be reconciled with the onset of 念.
Chris Button said,
June 16, 2025 @ 3:51 pm
Separately, the downward/inverted/flipped mouth in 今 is not connected with holding things in the mouth. That would be really weird :)
Chris Button said,
June 16, 2025 @ 5:46 pm
Perhaps I should have specified graphically inverted mouth–irrespective of any symbolic downward value or otherwise.
Yves Rehbein said,
June 19, 2025 @ 4:48 pm
not "downward" but in profile, cf. Sux. SAG, KA zu₂ inim