通 (tōng) — Open · Connected · The Way Through

Turn a Zhou-dynasty bronze bell over and the surprise is that its handle is hollow. 《周礼·考工记》 names the parts from the mouth upward — 舞上谓之甬，甬上谓之衡, above the top plate is the 甬, above the 甬 is the 衡 — and that tube standing on the bell's crown is 甬 (yǒng), open into the chamber below it. 《说文解字》 (Shuowen Jiezi, c. 100 CE) defines 通 in two characters, 達也 — to reach through — and parses it 从辵，甬聲: the road-and-foot radical 辵 carrying the meaning, 甬 supplying only the sound. But 甬 did not stay a bell part. On its own it came to name a walled passage, and when 《史记》 describes Han armies building protected corridors so that grain convoys could reach the front, the word for those corridors is 甬道. A character about getting through ended up built from two things that are open at both ends.

What the verb does in Chinese is remove obstacles rather than add anything. A new subway line 通车 — opens to traffic. A phone call 打通了 — got through. A drain that 不通 needs clearing, and a person who 想不通 is stuck on a thought the way a pipe is stuck on a blockage; Chinese does not switch metaphors between the two. From there the word climbs into the mind without ever changing its logic. 精通 is thorough command of a subject, 通晓 is knowing something all the way through, and 融会贯通 is the state in which separately learned things have joined up and run as one system. Even the blunt sense of "throughout" — 通宵 all night, 通篇 the whole text, 通用 usable everywhere — is the same idea applied to extent instead of passage.

The character's opposite is the more revealing half. 塞, 阻, 堵: blocked, obstructed, jammed. Chinese medicine compresses its most quoted account of pain into that opposition — 不通则痛, where nothing gets through, there is pain — and the character for pain, 痛, is 甬 again, this time under the sickness radical 疒. 通 is also an odd thing to wish on a person. 勇 and 坚 name something held alone, in an empty room; 通 always needs a second point. Sometimes that point is another person — 沟通 fails if either end is shut. Sometimes it is a body of knowledge: 融会贯通 is two subjects that finally explain each other, 精通 is a mind that has got all the way into one. Either way the character never describes a thing on its own. It describes what runs between two.

• 穷则变，变则通，通则久。

  《周易·系辞下》(Book of Changes, Great Appendix II, c. 300 BCE)
  At the limit, change; change, and you get through; get through, and it lasts. — Three clauses that chain into China's oldest theory of how anything survives. Note the order: 通 is not the starting condition but the reward for having been willing to alter course when the old road ran out.

• 九年知类通达，强立而不反，谓之大成。

  《礼记·学记》(Book of Rites: Record on Education, c. 300 BCE)
  In the ninth year he sorts things by kind and gets through, stands firm and does not turn back — this is called the great completion. — The classical curriculum's final milestone, and it is not a quantity of knowledge. It is the point at which what was learned separately starts working as one thing.

• 初极狭，才通人。复行数十步，豁然开朗。

  陶渊明《桃花源记》(Tao Yuanming, "Peach Blossom Spring," c. 421 CE)
  At first it was very narrow, barely wide enough to let a person through. After another few dozen paces it opened out wide and bright. — The most quoted passage in Chinese about a gap you have to squeeze into before you can see anything. The word doing the work at the tightest point is 通.

One of the most durable things wished on a Chinese business at New Year is 万事亨通 — may every affair pass through. 亨 carries there the sense it has in 元亨利贞, the four words that open the first hexagram of 《周易》: passage without obstruction. The pairing 亨通 took that sense into ordinary speech and never left it — 财路亨通, 官运亨通, 事事亨通. Walk past enough shopfronts around Lunar New Year and you will find the couplet that states the ambition at full stretch: 生意兴隆通四海，财源茂盛达三江 — may the trade flourish and reach the four seas, may the revenue swell and arrive at the three rivers. Both halves are verbs of getting somewhere rather than of piling anything up.

There is a counterweight, and it is worth knowing before the character is given. 通 holds no opinion about who is waiting at the far end: 通敌 is to collude with the enemy, 私通 is an illicit connection. (通融, bending a rule for someone who asked nicely, is neither praise nor accusation — which is rather the point.) That neutrality is also why the compliment it does carry is so exact. 通情达理 — understanding of feeling, arriving at reason — is what Chinese families say about the relative who can actually be talked to, and it credits something 聪明 and 能干 do not. Being reachable is treated as the harder achievement.