弘 (hóng) — Widening What You Were Handed · Giving It More Room · Carrying It Past Where It Reached

Release a bowstring and two things leave the bow. One of them is the arrow. The other gets there first, and on the standard reading of the oracle-bone forms it is what the character was drawn to record: the bow graph 弓 with a short mark set beside the string — an indicative stroke that points and says here, this part, this is where the noise comes off. 许慎 still had the noise in front of him when he wrote the entry. 弘，弓声也 — the sound of a bow — and he takes the graph apart as 从弓，厶声, a bow with 厶 supplying the reading, adding that 厶 is the old way of writing 肱, the upper arm. So the pointing mark hardened into a phonetic. Five strokes now, and nothing in them looks like a bow being fired.

The bow's report is a sound that gets further than the bow does, and the character was borrowed away from the noise to name reach of that kind. It then settled into two lives and kept both. One is flat description: 弘璧, the great jade disc laid out among the regalia in 《尚书·顾命》; 弘大; 弘量 — the word doing what any adjective for large does. The other is the one that earned it a place beside a long shelf of synonyms. Put an object after it and it stops describing anything and becomes something a person does. 弘道, to widen the way. 弘法, to carry a teaching out past the walls. 恢弘志士之气, to enlarge the spirit of men who have some. Something already existed, somebody gave it more room, and the somebody is not the thing.

Two centuries of imperial bookkeeping then tangled it with its twin. 乾隆's given name was 弘历, which put the character under 避讳 for the length of his reign and beyond: it was printed with its last stroke dropped, and the Tang academy 弘文馆 comes down through Qing editions as 宏文馆. 宏 (hóng) sounds identical, already meant grand, and made the obvious substitute, so the two words spent a long stretch standing in for one another. Modern Chinese has separated them along the line the etymology predicts rather than along their meanings, which overlap almost completely. 宏 states a scale — 宏大, 宏观 — a thing measured and found large. 弘 does something to a scale. It keeps a foothold on the other side in 恢弘 and 弘愿, but the half of it still in daily use is 弘扬, and that half needs somebody to perform it.

In 1918 a painter, songwriter and stage actor who had spent a decade putting Western oil painting and spoken drama into Chinese schools and theatres walked into 虎跑定慧寺 outside Hangzhou and gave nearly all of it up. 李叔同 took 演音 as his dharma name and 弘一 as the name he is known by, and of every art he had practised he kept exactly one: the brush. The calligraphy from before that year is worked and confident; the late work is thin, plain, and almost unpractised-looking, and it is what he is now studied for. The 弘 he chose is the verb, and it describes the twenty-four years that followed, spent recovering the 南山律 vinaya learning that had been out of use in China for centuries. A calligrapher whose chosen name is the character for giving something more room is a useful correction to reading the word as bigness.

The word's other modern life is public, and it is worth knowing before brushing it. 弘扬 is standard Chinese official language — 弘扬传统文化, 弘扬工匠精神 — printed on banners at every scale from a ministry down to a village primary school, which lends the character a faint civic accent, the way "uphold" or "foster" carries one in English. Two things keep it personal. 弘 is a standard character in men's given names — 乾隆's was 弘历 — and it is what 李叔同 reached for when he needed a monastic 号, so a reader meets it on people at least as often as on banners. And the banner usage is the classical usage unchanged: something exists, it deserves more room than it currently has, and a person is being asked to give it that room. The register went public; the grammar is the one 孔子 used.