About
筌 refers to a bamboo trap used for catching fish. It is a phono-semantic compound: the upper radical 竹 (bamboo) indicates the material, and the lower component 全 (quán) provides the pronunciation. Most famously, the character appears in the Daoist text Zhuangzi as a metaphor: once the fish is caught, the trap (筌) is forgotten, teaching that words or tools are discarded when the meaning or goal is grasped. This philosophical context is the primary way modern readers encounter 筌, elevating it from a physical object to a symbol of conceptual abstraction.
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