introduction
Li Shangyin once made a poem "Jia Sheng", which included: "Poor night half empty front seat, do not ask Cangsheng to ask the ghosts and gods", showing the late Tang Emperor did not care about the government and politics, indulged in superstition. In the era of underdeveloped science and technology, most people will believe in some superstitions, and it is a very small number of people who are really not afraid of ghosts and gods. With the development of science and technology, most of the theories of ghosts and gods have been denounced as "feudal superstitions", but there are also some ancient theories that coincide with modern science.
01
China has always paid attention to "the dead are great" and "the burial is safe", and it is often necessary to properly handle the funerals of the deceased to show their honor. In the Paleolithic age, primitive people had the concept of the soul, believing that the dead could still affect the blessings and blessings of the living, and funeral customs were born from this. Funeral regulations, ranks, etc. are influenced by regions, ethnicities, religions, etc., and are more affected by class identity. Emperors and generals often built very large-scale mausoleums before they died, some of which can be called "underground palaces", and it is already very good for civilians to have a place to live, and some even have to bury or even expose corpses in the wilderness.
▲ The large-scale Qing Dongling Tombs
In the funeral regulations, the funerals of kings and religious leaders are often the most solemn, and in slave society and feudal society, there are a large number of gold and silver jewelry and living people as funerary items, such as some of the Shang Dynasty tombs that have been excavated in China. In the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the "Mozi Festival Burial" once said: "The Son of Heaven killed martyrs, hundreds of many, and dozens of widows." During the Tang and Song dynasties, "martyrdom" was changed to "accompanying burial", and the Ming Dynasty began to popularize palace martyrdom, especially palace concubine burial, which stopped since the Ming Yingzong period; in the early Qing Dynasty, there was also a palace concubine burial system, but the latest record was only until the Kangxi period.
▲ Burial graves
China is a vast country, the population is large, the culture between various ethnic groups and regions is also different, and there are many different kinds of traditional Chinese funerals. The main practices include burial, funeral, and mourning, but the forms include earth burial, cremation, water burial, and sky burial. Among them, earth burial is one of the most widely circulated burial methods, which has been circulated for thousands of years in the Han nationality alone; mongolians and other nomadic peoples practice heavenly burial, feeding the bodies of the deceased to vultures as their smooth ascension to heaven; there is also a special kind of tank burial in Yangshao culture, which is to seal the corpses into a pottery urn, which is related to the ancient human reproductive worship, which derives from buddhism and Taoism After the death of some mages "bone-wrapped true figures" and so on.
▲ Funeral
The main processes of traditional funerals in China are: small funerals, purification and appearance and wearing birthday clothes; then family members report funerals, relatives and friends run to mourn; followed by stopping the spirit and guarding the spirit, accepting condolences from the bereaved; generally stopping the spirit for three to seven days after the funeral, moving the deceased into a coffin covered with mattresses, covering the quilt and sealing the coffin, and then carrying out the funeral and burial; after burial, there are activities such as burning seven, five seven, keeping filial piety, and sweeping the grave to sacrifice the deceased. In this set of processes, perhaps the strangest thing everyone thinks is why stop for three to seven days? Why not bury people in time after they die?
02
The original saying was that on the seventh day after death, the soul of the deceased would come back to see the human world, so it was necessary to stop the spirit for seven days, and later because of the hot flashes in the summer, the body of the seven days of the death may have already decayed, so some areas shortened the time to three days. But Chinese has always adhered to the behavior of the dead, why don't people bury them immediately after death, but also have to stay at home for three days? For this reason, experts said: without stopping the corpse for three days, those who buried early regretted it. In fact, these three days are not only feudal superstitions, but also have a certain scientific basis, because there is a state in medicine called "suspended animation".
▲Simulation of the scene of rescuing patients in the operating room
Earlier, it was believed that if the breathing and heartbeat stopped, it meant that a person died. This statement is usually no problem, but with the development of medicine, doctors have found the existence of shock phenomenon, people suffer from severe pathogenic factors after metabolic dysfunction, blood circulation is greatly reduced, there may be respiratory and cardiac arrest, but this is not the real sense of death, after effective rescue can be "revived", and sometimes even sometimes do not need to rescue people themselves can recover. The Briton Boute once spent 30 years collecting evidence of premature burials and found that there were 219 premature burials, 149 burials, 10 vivisections and 2 "corpses" waking up during embalming operations.
▲Flat Magpie bronze statue
In fact, as early as the Spring and Autumn Period, China's divine doctor Bian Que once created a miracle of "reviving the dead". It is said that Bian Que once traveled to the kingdom of Yu, and heard that the prince of the kingdom of Yu suddenly died of illness half a day ago, so he asked himself to treat the "body" of the prince, and was considered crazy by the people guarding the palace gate. However, after testing according to the method said by Bian Que, it was found that the prince was indeed saved. Bian Que called this situation "corpse", which was explained in Chinese medicine as a disorder of yin and yang and so that there was no face, and he did not actually die.
Funeral mourning
Therefore, the three-day suspension is to prevent the tragedy of misjudging death. In modern times, "brain death" has become the standard for more and more countries to determine death, but the custom of three days of suspension has continued, which is to give relatives and friends enough time to remember the deceased and allow him to be buried in the scenery. Modern technology is also enough to preserve the body for three days without decay, so the custom of stopping the spirit for three days has continued and has become an important part of China's funeral rite system.
epilogue
The ancient funeral ritual system was mostly to show status, but after a thousand years of inheritance, these processes became a habit, and it became a way to maintain blood and family affection and send mourning. In the case of the large-scale anti-feudal movement of the new cultural movement, the vigorous "breaking of the four olds" at the beginning of the new China, and the gradual reduction of the illiteracy rate, most people have long since distrusted the theory of ghosts and gods, but many people still adhere to customs such as tomb sweeping, not because they are afraid of "bad luck", but because they really pin their thoughts on the deceased.
Resources:
"Jia Sheng"
"Mozi Festival Burial"