戒
Symbols Spirit
discipline of spirit
ㄐㄧㄝˋ jiè
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.
Rules you keep on yourself for a religious reason - what you give up and what you hold to. Chinese calls these precepts.
Before you commit
Choose with care戒 is also the plain verb for quitting a habit - 戒菸 quit smoking, 戒酒 quit drinking - and 戒指 is a finger ring. Alone it may read simply as I gave something up.
JapaneseJapanese keeps 戒 with the same Buddhist sense of precept, so the glyph does not read as specifically Chinese.
At small sizesSeven strokes with a long diagonal across the whole character. Simple and reliable small, and the diagonal suits a curved placement.
Meaning
A precept; to abstain from, to give up.
The Buddhist precepts, and the everyday verb for quitting something.
Other characters for “discipline of spirit”
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