Claim. SMM reads the Chinese characters for heaven (天), father (父), and mother (母) as graphic encodings of the principle that heaven, parenthood, and personhood require the binding of two — vertical and horizontal — through love.
Elaboration. The character 天 (cheon, heaven) decomposes into 二 (two) and 人 (person): heaven ‘does not exist alone’ but comes into being when two people are joined. The character 父 (bu, father) similarly contains two 人 strokes bound together — a man becomes a father not by himself but by binding the heavenly person and the earthly person to act as one. The character 母 (mo, mother) is read as two 女 (woman) figures joined upside-down, signifying that a mother must hold within herself a heart connected to heaven and a heart representing the women of earth. The character 夫 (bu, husband) adds a ‘hat’ that rises above heaven, signifying that lovers ascend together to the top of heaven (Section 1. The Meaning of the Characters for Cheon ( 天) and Bu-mo ( 父母) If we analyze the Chinese character for cheon ( 天), meaning heaven, it con- sists of the character for two ( 二) and the character for person ( 人). The character for in ( 仁), meaning virtue, also includes the characters for two ( 二) and for per- son ( 人). Two people. But what kind of people are they? They are people in whom heaven and earth can become completely one, both vertically and hor-).
The argument is not philological in a Sinological sense but theological: SMM treats Chinese ideographs as iconographic confirmations of the principle that perfect love binds heaven and earth, and that the gendered ordering (heaven before earth, father before mother, husband before wife) reflects an ontological priority — though SMM is careful to add that this ‘does not mean that women are disregarded.’ The mother carries two hearts (heaven’s and earth’s), which assigns her a mediating role even as the father takes lexical precedence.
This is a recurrent SMM rhetorical move: using script etymology to ground dual-characteristics and the vertical/horizontal cosmology already taught in DP. Critics will note that 母 historically derives from a pictograph of breasts, not from two 女 — but the homiletic point stands or falls with the cosmology, not the philology.