苦
Symbols Spirit
ascetic
行
ㄎㄨˇ ㄒㄧㄥˊ kǔ xíng
Two versions of the same picture, and both are free with no account and no watermark. The first has no background at all, which is the one to send your artist — but a phone or computer photo viewer set to dark will show black strokes on dark grey and it can look like nothing downloaded. If that happens, use the second one: identical characters on a plain white background. Either way you get the characters on their own — the square and the faint guide lines you see above are not in the file. Each character is 1000px, so a two-character download is 2000×1000, and the script and layout are the ones you picked.
Script
Characters
Same in both
Layout
Rubbing mode: white on black, as a stone rubbing. The download is unaffected.
Someone who takes on hardship on purpose as practice. Chinese names the practice rather than the person, and the word is literally bitter.
Before you commit
Choose with careNo single character means ascetic. 苦 alone reads as bitter or as suffering, which is not the same as choosing it - 苦行 is the pair that makes it a practice.
At small sizesNine strokes then six, both open. An easy pair small; the grass radical on top of 苦 is the only part that thickens.
Cultural noteThe Buddha is recorded as trying 苦行 and rejecting it for the middle way, so in Buddhist writing the word carries a note of excess rather than pure praise.
Meaning
Ascetic practice; deliberately hard living undertaken as training.
The standard Buddhist term, and it says plainly that this is bitter work.
Other characters for “ascetic”
What to do next
Pick the script and layout you want above, download the PNG, and send that file to your artist. Ask them to work from the file rather than redrawing the character freehand — that is where strokes go missing.
Related concepts