空
Symbols Spirit
void
ㄎㄨㄥ kōng
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.
Emptiness as a positive idea rather than a lack. In Buddhist Chinese it is the claim that nothing has a fixed self of its own.
Before you commit
Choose with care空 also means sky, and in speech it means vacant or free - 有空 is to have time. The Buddhist meaning is only one of several.
JapaneseThe same glyph in Japanese, read kuu or sora. There it very often reads as sky before anything else.
At small sizesEight strokes under the cave radical. Balanced and open, and one of the safer small choices in this group.
Meaning
Empty; the void; sky. In Buddhism, emptiness of inherent nature.
The technical term for sunyata, and also the plain everyday word for sky.
Other characters for “void”
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