Custom Profound Chinese & Japanese Calligraphy Wall Scroll

This Chinese word is the form of intense that describes a person who is deep, serious, and a true thinker. If you find yourself comtemplating the world and coming up with profound ideas, this might we the word for you. In some context (especially Korean), it can mean seriousness, gravity, or acuteness.

In Japanese, this can mean "serious problem", or can be a rare given name, Misa. You should not use this if your audience is Japanese.

These four characters together translate in English to a strong form of "profound" or "written with a forceful hand".

But there is much more to the story...

The deep meaning behind this phrase comes from a man named Wan Xizhi who lived in the third century.

He was a great writer and calligrapher whose writing style influenced generations of other writers and calligraphers.

He once wrote words on a piece of wood to be taken to an engraver.
When the engraver began to carve the characters into the wood, he found that Wang Xizhi's writing had penetrated the wood about 3/8 of an inch.

Thus people believed that his words were so powerful, and so profound this it caused the ink from his brush to penetrate the wood deeply.

The phrase literally means "penetrated wood three fen" (fen is an ancient Chinese measurement a little over to 1/8 of an inch or almost 4mm).

In Buddhism, this term refers to a community of monks and/or nuns (one of the "Three Jewels"). In general terms, it can simply mean "all followers of the Buddha".

Notes: Though there are not vast numbers of Chinese Hindus, in the Hindu faith, this term means "community together".
The original Sanskrit word is also Romanized as samgha.
The first character means "monk". The second character means Buddha or Shakyamuni.
This is really a transliteration of the original Sanskrit, but it uses two very profound Chinese characters related to Buddhism.

Some may pronounce this as "seng qie" or "seng jia" in Mandarin (two possible pronunciations for second character). Note that "qie" would sound a bit like "chee-ah" using typical English pronunciation. Chinese Romanization is not actually designed to match English sounds.

Note that when writing this as Kanji, Japanese will tend to write the first character in the form shown to the right. If you select our Japanese master calligrapher, please expect this special Kanji form. However, it should also be noted that this is not a common term in Japanese (except by certain sects of Buddhism or perhaps devout Buddhists in Japan).

This is an ancient Chinese idiom which means "tranquility yields transcendence".

This suggests pursuing a quiet life of profound study.

The first two characters mean tranquility. The last two characters mean "go far" which suggests achieving much in your life or expanding beyond normal limits. The direct translation would read something like, "[With] tranquility [in your life, you'll] go far".

Compare this to the English idiom: Still waters run deep.

This Japanese word means intense, serious or earnest. It describes a person who is deep, serious, and a true thinker or dreamer.

Literally, this means "true sword", as compared to a sharpened wooden practice sword blank. It's real, true, and serious.