"An Open Book Benefits Your Mind" Chinese Calligraphy Wall Scroll
You can choose from many options to create artwork with "An Open Book Benefits Your Mind" characters on a wall scroll.
Start your project by clicking on the button next to your favorite title below...
There are several ways to translate this ancient proverb. Translated literally and directly it says, "Open roll has/yields benefit".
To understand that, you must know a few things...
First, Chinese characters and language have deeper meanings that often are not spoken, but are understood - especially with ancient text like this. Example: It's understood that the "benefit" referred to in this proverb is to the mind of the reader. Just the last character expresses that whole idea.
Second, Chinese proverbs are supposed to make you think, and leave a bit of mystery to figure out.
Third, for this proverb, it should be noted that roll = book. When this proverb came about (close to two thousand years ago) books were really rolls of bamboo slips strung together. The first bound books like the ones we use today did not come about until some thousand years after this proverb when they invented paper in China.
This is a great gift for a bookworm who loves to read and increase their knowledge. Or for any friend that is or wants to be well-read.
Learning is Eternal
xué wú zhǐ jìng 학무지경
This Chinese philosophy tells of how we continue to learn throughout our lives. It can be translated in a few ways such as "Study has no end", "Knowledge is infinite", "No end to learning", "There's always something new to study", or "You live and learn".
The deeper meaning: Even when we finish school we are still students of the world gaining more knowledge from our surroundings with each passing day.
Characters shown above are read vertically, starting from the right
This is a lifelong suggestion for expanding your horizons by gaining knowledge, experience, and seeing the world.
Of course, this was written long ago when it was hard to travel 10,000 miles. With air travel and the business I'm in, I often achieve that lifetime goal on a monthly basis. However, I am a little behind in the book count.
Note: An ancient Chinese mile (lǐ) referred to in this phrase is a bit shorter than a British/American mile.
All of our calligraphy is completely done by hand in the ancient way.
When the calligrapher finishes creating your artwork, it is taken to our art mounting workshop in Beijing where a wall scroll is made by hand from a combination of silk, rice paper, and wood.
After we create your wall scroll, it takes at least two weeks for air mail delivery from Beijing to you.
Therefore, allow a few weeks for delivery from the time you place your order. Rush options are available!
When you select your calligraphy, you'll be taken to another page where you can choose various custom options.
The scroll that I am holding in this picture is a "medium size" 4-character wall scroll. As you can see, it is a great size to hang on your wall. (We also offer custom wall scrolls in larger sizes)
Professional calligraphers are getting to be hard to find these days. Instead of drawing characters by hand, the new generation in China merely type roman letters into their computer keyboards and pick the character that they want from a list that pops up.
There is some fear that true Chinese calligraphy may become a lost art in the coming years. Many art institutes in China are now promoting calligraphy programs in hopes of keeping this unique form
of art alive.
Even with the teachings of a top-ranked calligrapher in China, my calligraphy will never be good enough to sell. I will leave that to the experts.
The same calligrapher who gave me those lessons also
attracted a crowd of thousands and a TV crew as he created characters over
6-feet high. He happens to be ranked as one of the top 100 calligraphers
in all of China. He is also one of very few that would actually attempt
such a feat.
The following table is only helpful for those studying Chinese (or Japanese), and perhaps helps search engines to find this page when someone enters Romanized Chinese or Japanese
Title
Characters
Simplified Traditional
Various forms of Romanized Chinese
An Open Book Benefits Your Mind
开卷有益 開卷有益
kāi juàn yǒu yì kai juan you yi k`ai chüan yu i
kai1 juan4 you3 yi4 kaijuanyouyi kaichüanyui kai chüan yu i
If you have not set up your computer to display Chinese, the characters in this table probably look like empty boxes or random text garbage.
This is why I spent hundreds of hours making images so that you could view the characters in the "An Open Book Benefits Your Mind" listings above.
If you want your Windows computer to be able to display Chinese characters you can either head to your Regional and Language options in your Win XP control panel, select the [Languages] tab and click on [Install files for East Asian Languages]. This task will ask for your Win XP CD to complete in most cases. If you don't have your Windows XP CD, or are running Windows 98, you can also download/run the simplified Chinese font package installer from Microsoft which works independently with Win 98, ME, 2000, and XP. It's a 2.5MB download, so if you are on dial up, start the download and go make a sandwich.
