Representative of creating Chinese characters
Overview
Chinese Name: 仓颉
English Name: Cangjie
Other Names: Cangjie Master仓颉先师, Cangdi仓帝, Cangsheng仓圣，ShiHuang Shi史皇氏
Born: the 28th day of the 3rd lunar month，Year unknown
Died: Unknown
Achievements: The creator of primitive hieroglyphs原始象形文字的创造者
Brief Biography of Cangjie
Cangjie was the historian of writing characters in the period of the Yellow Emperor(Huangdi黄帝)，and known as “the Sage of Word Making(造字圣人)”.
Cangjie was also the God of words in Taoism. According to historical records, Cangjie had two pupils and four eyes. He was born wise and virtuous. He observed the movement trend of stars and the footprints of birds and animals, created words according to his image and created the foundation of civilization.
Why does Cangjie have four eyes?
In ancient books, it is said that Cangjie “has four eyes and noble morality”, It can be seen that Cangjie has four eyes, and in the portraits handed down in many ancient books, Cangjie also has four eyes.
As for why Cangjie had four eyes, the myth and legend wrote this: at the beginning of writing, Cangjie caught many crustacean insects, stained them with black water and let them crawl on the grass leaves to make words with the marks left by insects. Because there were not many characters in the early stage and they were not enough to use, Cangjie was so anxious that he even had another pair of eyes – four eyes on a face.
Modern explanation: the four eyes may be the Double Pupils. The real Double Pupils is only one black eye, but there will be two pupils in the eye, usually one large and one small. From a distance, it only feels some abnormalities. It can be found from a close look. This is called pupil adhesion up and down in modern pathology, and there are not really two normal pupils. In ancient times, many people thought it was a symbol of an emperor, indicating that he could be rich and powerful.
How did Cangjie create Chinese characters
The Chinese characters we use today have a long history and are said to have been created by Cangjie. Cangjie was a very clever man. He made an in-depth study of the symbolic characters in Luoshu and absorbed some picture characters collected from the people, thus creating a unique pictographic character. Later, Cangjie also took the pictographic character as the orthodox character of his family.
Many people regret that they can’t see what the words made by Cangjie look like, but China really has a material that is recognized as Cangjie’s work, which is Cangjie’s Book(仓颉书). Cangjie’s Book has only 28 words. It was first included in the Sutra of Chunhua secret Pavilion in the third year of Chunhua of Emperor Taizong of Song Dynasty (AD 992).
In history, the debate over Cangjie’s book has never stopped. The first is its authenticity. In the Ming Dynasty, some people suspected that Cangjie’s book was actually written by Liu Xin of the Western Han Dynasty.
At the same time, some people believe that Cangjie books are actually the characters used by the ancient Yi people. There is no final conclusion about its interpretation.
Although there are many disputes about this Cangjie book, most people still choose to believe that this is the text originally created by Cangjie and regard it as the “first book in the world” as the earliest prototype of Chinese characters.
It was Cang Jie who created Chinese characters.