禪
Symbols Spirit
zen
ㄔㄢˊ chán
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 meditation school - Chan in Chinese, Zen in Japanese. One character, one tradition, two pronunciations.
Before you commit
Choose with careIn Chinese this is chan, not zen. Zen is the Japanese reading of the same character, so the word you say and the word a Chinese reader says will differ.
JapaneseJapanese writes 禅, with a simplified right side. If you want it read as Japanese Zen, that is the form to use.
At small sizesAround seventeen strokes, with the crowded 單 element on the right. It needs size or it becomes a dark block.
Meaning
Chan or Zen; meditative absorption, and the school built on it.
One character carrying a whole tradition, and read instantly.
Other characters for “zen”
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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