ego

我

ㄨㄛˇ wǒ

Two versions of the same picture, and both are free with no account and no watermark. The first has no background at all, which is the one to send your artist — but a phone or computer photo viewer set to dark will show black strokes on dark grey and it can look like nothing downloaded. If that happens, use the second one: identical characters on a plain white background. Either way you get the characters on their own — the square and the faint guide lines you see above are not in the file. Each character is 1000px, so a two-character download is 2000×1000, and the script and layout are the ones you picked.

Script

Characters

Layout

The self you defend. Chinese Buddhism has a precise term for clinging to it, and modern Chinese has a plain psychological one.

Before you commit

Choose with care我 on its own simply means I. It is one of the first characters anyone learns, so it reads as a pronoun and not as a concept.

JapaneseShared with Japanese, read ware or ga. The Buddhist ga sense is understood there, though 我 alone still reads as I.

At small sizesSeven strokes with a long diagonal hook on the right. Clean when reduced, and the diagonal suits a curve.

Meaning

I, me; the self. In Buddhism, the illusory self.

The character at the centre of the Buddhist argument that there is no fixed self.

Other characters for “ego”

What to do next

Pick the script and layout you want above, download the PNG, and send that file to your artist. Ask them to work from the file rather than redrawing the character freehand — that is where strokes go missing.

Related concepts