聖
Symbols Spirit
sage
ㄕㄥˋ shèng
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 whose understanding and whose conduct are both complete. In Chinese this is the highest thing a person can be called, and rarely said of the living.
Before you commit
Choose with careChristianity has thoroughly claimed 聖 in modern Chinese - 聖經 the Bible, 聖誕 Christmas, 聖母 the Virgin. Many readers will see holy before they see sage.
At small sizesThirteen strokes, an ear and a mouth over a stable base. It carries small reasonably well as long as that base stays wide.
Cultural noteConfucius is 至聖, the supreme sage. The phrase 人非聖賢 - nobody is a sage - is the standard way of excusing a mistake.
Meaning
Sage; holy, sacred; the highest moral and intellectual attainment.
Reserved in classical use for figures like Confucius, and now also Christian.
Other characters for “sage”
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