修
Symbols Spirit
spiritual practice
ㄒㄧㄡ xiū
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.
The daily work of a religious life - sitting, chanting, keeping precepts. Chinese calls it cultivating and walking, not believing.
Before you commit
Choose with care修 on its own means to repair or to trim - 修車 fix a car, 修剪 prune a hedge. The spiritual sense lives entirely in compounds like 修行 and 修心.
Pairs well with修行 for practice as a whole life, 修心 for work on your own mind. Either removes the handyman reading 修 alone invites.
At small sizesTen strokes with three parallel sweeps on the right. Keep those separated - when they merge the character stops reading.
Meaning
To cultivate, to practise, to train oneself. Also to repair.
The character in every word for religious practice, Buddhist or Daoist.
Other characters for “spiritual practice”
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