nothingness

無

ㄨˊ wú

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

Layout

Nothing at all - and in Chan Buddhism a famous one-word answer meant to stop the question rather than answer it.

Before you commit

Choose with care無 is a grammatical word as much as a philosophical one. Alone it reads as does not have, and a reader may look for what is missing after it.

JapaneseIdentical in Japanese, read mu, and strongly tied there to Zen. Many Western viewers will read it as Japanese.

At small sizesTwelve strokes, four short legs beneath tight horizontals. The base merges when it is inked small.

Meaning

Nothing; not to have; without.

The plain negative, and the single most famous character in Chan practice.

Other characters for “nothingness”

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.

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