超
Symbols Spirit
transcendence
ㄔㄠ chāo
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.
Rising past a limit - past desire, past the ordinary world, past who you were. Chinese has good verbs for this and no tidy noun.
Before you commit
Choose with careIn modern Chinese 超 works mostly as a prefix meaning super or ultra - 超市 supermarket, 超人 superman, 超好吃 delicious. Alone it reads as an intensifier, not a spiritual state.
Pairs well with超脫 for detachment, 超越 for surpassing a limit. Both are unmistakable where 超 by itself is not.
At small sizesTwelve strokes with a long sweeping foot on the left. That sweep needs room - crowd it and the character loses its balance.
Meaning
To exceed, to pass beyond, to surpass.
The single character behind every word for going past a limit.
Other characters for “transcendence”
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