What 𮌓 means
A rare Han ideograph preserved in a digital Buddhist canon. 𮌓 belongs to the Han family — the writing system of Chinese origin used across East Asia. That system holds tens of thousands of characters, and this one sits among the rarest: it plays no part in everyday Chinese, Japanese or Korean, and the standard's own records give it no settled sound or meaning.
What the standard does record is where it was found and how it is drawn. Its source tag, USAT-00164, points to the SAT Daizōkyō Text Database, a University of Tokyo project that digitizes the Taishō Tripiṭaka (Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō, 大正新脩大藏經) — the edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon published in Japan in 1924–1934 and still a standard reference for Buddhist studies in East Asia.
The catalog files it under the 肉 “flesh” radical and describes its shape in shorthand: 月 on the left, and on the right a 未 crossed by a long vertical stroke. That shape, plus the passage it occurs in, is nearly all a reader has to go on.
What does it mean where I found it?
The passage around it is the only reliable guide. An early Unicode draft drew this character as 脬 — read pāo, meaning “bladder” — so the two may be the same character. A draft glyph can't prove that, and the current catalog gives no gloss. Rare canon characters are often variants of common ones or signs coined for Sanskrit sounds, so scholars read them against the sentence and the edition's notes.
The left-hand 月 points the same way: in that position it usually stands for 肉 “flesh”, not the moon — consistent with a body-word reading. To pin it down, find the passage in the SAT text, read it as classical Chinese, and check how the same scripture runs in another edition — differences between editions are where variant characters get explained.
Why does it show as a box?
Your font can't draw it — the character is fine. It sits outside the basic 16-bit range, in a stretch of Unicode few fonts cover, so many devices show a hollow box in its place. Even a font labelled “full CJK” may skip it — only one that actually includes this code point will draw it, and anyone you paste it to may still see the box.
Nothing to misread — the record gives it no everyday use or tone at all.
Don't assume a Chinese or Japanese reader can read it — it isn't in their ordinary dictionaries either.
Who writes 𮌓
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What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsA rare, undocumented graph — let the sentence and the edition's notes decide how to read it.
Don't confuse it with
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Related characters
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Worth knowing
- 𮌓 is one of some 2,800 rare characters the SAT project proposed for Unicode so its digital canon could keep the printed text's actual glyphs.
- The hollow box that replaces a missing glyph is nicknamed “tofu” — the Noto font family's name means “no tofu”.
Questions people ask
4How do you pronounce 𮌓?
It has no established reading. If the 脬 link holds it would be pāo — otherwise the safe citation is its code point, U2E313.
Is 𮌓 Chinese or Japanese?
Both, in a way — it's a Han graph from a Chinese-language Buddhist canon; the edition that preserved it was compiled and digitized in Japan.
Why isn't it in my dictionary?
Because Unicode recorded where it was found, not a definition — it entered the standard through a text corpus, not common use.
Can I use it in a name or handle?
You can paste it, but expect hollow boxes on many devices, and older software may reject characters outside the basic plane. Recognising it is another matter — it isn't an everyday character anywhere.
More like this
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How to type or find 𮌓
- Also called
- SAT-00164 · USAT-00164
- Search it as
- u+2e313 · 2e313 · cjk extension f · taisho tripitaka character · rare kanji · rare chinese character
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𮌓\2E313Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.