The Calligrapher — Shì Huáirén 释怀仁

Tang monk who compiled Wang Xizhi's script into the Sacred Teachings stele.

Tang calligrapher (), master of running script — known for 集王羲之行书《圣教序》. Tang dynasty

Cultural Story

想 is thought with the person in it. The 詩經 already sends the heart 想 after an absent friend, and the word kept that longing edge before it meant mere cognition. The heart with 相, to look, is the mind turning toward something absent. To think, in this character, was first to miss.

Common words & phrases

• 想法 idea · thought
• 想象 imagine
• 理想 ideal
• 思想 thought · thinking
• 想要 want
• 感想 impression · reflection

Read the story behind the character

想 is the busiest word in the head: 想法 the plan, 想象 the daydream, 理想 the life you are building. 想要 is the want, 感想 the thing you say when asked how it was. It does the work of think, want, and miss, often three times before breakfast.

Why this character belongs on skin

Under the heart, an image: 想 is to think, to imagine, and most achingly, to miss—to carry someone's picture inside your chest and press on it. 我想你, I want you / I miss you, is the sentence this character lives in, and it refuses to separate thought from feeling, because the Chinese never did: the mind lives in the heart. Buddhists would note the machinery—sensation feeding image, image feeding craving, craving feeding the whole restless theater—and they would be right and still incomplete, because the same machinery dreams cathedrals and writes love letters and builds countries out of ideas held hard enough. Everything made by humans was 想-ed first. Everything longed for is already half-real. This is the softest of these characters and maybe the most powerful: thought with a pulse, longing with a direction. Ink it for the person across the distance, or the life you are still imagining into being. The heart beneath the picture is the whole instruction: to want something, hold it in the heart. Then go get it.