There is a passage in the "Mencius Teng Wen Gongshang" that says: "There are those who do not bury their relatives in the world, and those who die are held up and entrusted to the gully." He passes by, the fox eats, the fly feeds, his jaws are slurred, and he does not look at them. Fu Shu is also not a human being, the center reaches the face, the cover returns to the sycamore and hides it, and the sincerity of the cover is also.
This means that there was once a person in the world who not only did not go to the burial after the death of his relatives, but also threw the corpses of his relatives into the valley, and after a few days, when this person passed by that place, he saw wild beasts eating the corpses of his relatives, and mosquitoes and flies were also flying on the corpses and biting.
In an instant, a cold sweat appeared on the man's forehead, and he did not even dare to look at the corpse, and the fear in his heart came out like a cold sweat, and later, he went to pick up vines, shrubs and other items and seriously buried the corpse.
In fact, human beings have always had the habit of handling the aftermath for their loved ones, one is that they feel that burying the body is the greatest respect for the deceased; the other is to avoid the environmental pollution caused by the decay of the body, but how to bury it and where it is buried often changes according to the humanistic customs of various ethnic groups and regions.
In China alone, there are several funerary methods such as earth burial, cremation, water burial, tree burial, sky burial, cliff burial, etc., of which cremation is the mainstream funeral method today, and earth burial is the earliest, longest circulating and widest range of burial methods in the mainland, but the most peculiar funeral method is probably cliff burial.
However, cliff burial is also different, some are more convenient, directly using the naturally formed cave on the cliff as a burial site, parking coffins; some will chisel out the cave on the cliff and put the coffin into it.
Then there is the most famous hanging coffin - a wooden stake is inserted on the cliff face and the coffin is placed on it, but the only thing that is the same in the cliff burial is that the higher the position of the coffin, the more noble the person's status before death.
As far as the cliff burial relics found in China are concerned, the cliff burial ship coffin of Wuyi Mountain in Fujian and the hanging coffin of Longhu Mountain in Jiangxi have the longest history, dating back to the Spring and Autumn Warring States period, but how the ancients put coffins and corpses and even funerary products on the steep cliffs has not yet been examined.
However, there is a place in China that still preserves the tradition of hanging coffin cliff burials, and also has inheritors who can preside over cliff burials, and this place is the Miao Village in the Gegong River Valley in Ziyun County, Guizhou.
In the Geguan River Scenic Area in Ziyun County, there is a large cave known as the Swallow Cave, and on the cliffs on both sides of the cave, there are countless hanging coffins layer by layer, and the owners of these coffins are the ancestors of the local Miaozhai villagers.
Locals said that these coffins can be placed on the cliffs, relying on the unique "corpse bearers" in their Miao village, in the past, as long as someone died, they would find a corpse bearer, and ask the corpse bearer to transport the coffin and the body to the cliff for burial.
However, with the promotion of cremation, fewer and fewer people choose cliff burial, and the number of back-to-body people has also decreased, and now, there are only four local back-body people who can independently complete cliff burial, and there is no successor.
One of the four corpse bearers was a woman named Luo Ping, who studied under her father, Luo Kaike, and the other three were her fellow brothers.
According to Luo Ping, since she was a child, she watched her grandfather carry the deceased people around her to the cliff wall of the cave for burial, at that time, the nearby corpse people were actually not too few, but when the grandfather grew old and his father took over the inheritance of his grandfather, the number of corpse bearers began to decrease sharply, and in her generation, in this area, there were only four of them.
For her, becoming a corpse bearer is a family origin, and it is also a matter of course, because she hopes more than anyone else that the custom of burying the corpse on the back of the Miaozhai cliff can be passed on, rather than becoming a pale text recorded in books in the future.
Because in the inheritance of the corpse bearers, there are many things that need to be passed on by the mouth of the corpses from generation to generation, such as their ancient Miao ritual songs, if they lose the language pronunciation and other elements, the inheritance of their corpse bearers will be broken.
But even if each generation of corpse bearers strive to inherit, there are some things that can no longer be traced back, so if there are no young people willing to learn this skill, after the death of their generation, it is basically impossible to reproduce the process of hanging coffins in Guizhou Yanzi Cave.
Luo Ping also said that what blocks the inheritance of the corpse bearer is not only the difficulty of learning this skill, but also its great risk - the corpse bearer needs to climb without any protective measures, and one careless person may fall to the bone.
Hanging coffins in other areas are generally placed on cliffs, such as the hanging coffins of servants in Yibin, Sichuan, who preside over the cliff burial can tie a safety rope and find a suitable place to dig a hole from the top of the cliff.
Then it is fixed by nailing a wooden stake from the top of the cliff into the stone wall, and then the coffin containing the body is lowered from the top of the cliff, placed on the stake and fixed, and the whole process can be completed under the protection of the safety rope.
Chongqing Longhe hanging coffin can also be operated in this way, but they simply chiseled out a coffin-sized grid on the cliff wall, and then placed the coffin in it, so as to complete the cliff burial, and even in some places, the hanging coffin can also be installed on the cliff wall in advance, and then the boardwalk will be demolished after the cliff burial ceremony is completed.
However, only the cliff burial of their Gegong River MiaoZhai could not be carried out under the premise of ensuring safety, because the cliff of their cliff burial was inside the mountain, and there was no condition for hanging the coffin from the top of the mountain.
Therefore, although it is difficult for the Sichuan servant hanging coffin and the Chongqing Longhe hanging coffin to nail piles and drill holes in the cliff wall, the risk and difficulty of the coffin cannot be compared with the climbing of the corpse with the bare hands of the corpse on the back.
It is also because of this danger and difficulty that every apprentice who carries the corpse must go through more than ten years of training if he wants to become a teacher, and only with the approval of the master can they independently complete the task of carrying the coffin, corpse, etc. to the cliff for burial.
According to Luo Ping, because of the danger of work, insurance companies are not even willing to accept their insurance, and now that everyone is more and more open-minded, fewer and fewer people are willing to follow the old system and be buried in coffins.
Therefore, the corpse bearer has become a "obscure" job that may have no income, the degree of danger and difficulty is extremely high, and it is also accompanied by the corpse, and it is natural to the brink of being eliminated by society.
Huang Xiaobao is also one of the local backsavers, when he was a teenager, he came to Luo Kaike to learn art, but because he suffered from polio, when he first visited the teacher, Luo Kaike rejected him, because becoming a corpse bearer requires great physical strength and perseverance, Huang Xiaobao's legs are disabled, and it is difficult to be competent for the work of climbing with corpses.
But Luo Kaike's refusal was ultimately defeated by Huang Xiaobao's persistence and reality - to Luo Kaike's generation of corpse bearers has been very few, before Huang Xiaobao came to visit the teacher, no one came to worship the teacher, in order to let the back of the corpse industry continue, Luo Kaike was fierce, or Huang Xiaobao was included in the door wall.
Because Huang Xiaobao had a leg disability, Luo Kaike's requirements for him were far stricter than those of his later brothers and sisters. Fortunately, Huang Xiaobao, who was born with insufficient conditions, finally persevered, and also took over the master's mantle inheritance and became another generation of backscarves.
According to Huang Xiaobao, people who generally choose to be buried in hanging coffins will come to them on the night of their family's death to discuss matters related to cliff burial, and they will come to the deceased's home in the early morning of the day of burial, carry the old man's body on their backs, and let people bring more than ten special wooden planks to the river bank at the bottom of the cliff.
On the shore, the bearer would take a wooden plank and lay it on a flat ground, then remove the old man's body from his body, respectfully place it on the paved plank, and then carry the planks he brought to the cliff one by one.
They would tie the planks to themselves, find the right position and start climbing, the cave itself was formed in the erosion and sedimentation of the flowing water, and Huang Xiaobao and the swallow cave cliffs that the corpses wanted to climb were still rushing with river water, and the rock surface on the cliff wall was covered with thick moss, and its wetness and slipperiness were evident.
But even such a slippery rock wall, they can also climb tens of meters in a very short period of time with their bare hands, even if they carry heavy wooden boards, they can still flexibly flash on the cliff wall, it seems that in the process of climbing, they can easily borrow power to unload, and regard the wooden board as nothing.
But in fact, they are only familiar with every point on the cliff wall in the decades of climbing, and they have also trained their muscle memory in the climbing day after day, so that they can climb upward without any hesitation.
The planks were so thick that they could only carry one plank at a time to climb, so just to transport the planks, the corpse-carrying people needed to make a dozen trips back and forth on the cliff.
The planks that were carried back to the cliff were the local simple coffins, and after carrying the planks into the caves of the cliffs, they also had to assemble the planks into a real coffin, and then, back to the bottom of the cliff, respectfully tied the body behind them.
They carry and bind the body like a child with a harness, with the head of the body resting on their shoulders and climbing again after making sure the body is tied up.
In the process of carrying the body on their backs, the bearers will be more careful and the speed of the climb will be increased, because they must ensure their safety with the body, until they carry the body to the cave on the cliff, they will untie the rope, and then place the body in the spliced coffin.
It was also at this time that the work of carrying the corpse was completed, but this was only the completion of the body, and then they had to hold a special cliff burial ceremony for the deceased.
The people of Miaozhai in Ziyun County also believe that there is a soul after death, and if they want the soul of the deceased to be reborn, they need "Donglang" to guide the direction of the undead, and "Donglang" is another identity of the corpse bearer, they will sing a sacrifice song to the body, implying to appease the undead and guide them to life.
When the body is carried on the cliff wall, the first thing Dong lang has to do is to offer the sacrifice wine to the deceased, that is, the wine brought from the bottom of the cliff is spilled on the ground, and then use the knife to circle himself three times, in this process, the tip of the knife must be pointed to the ground at any time.
According to Huang Xiaobao, there are two meanings of sacrificing wine and circling himself three times with a knife, one of which is to use a knife to cut off the entanglement of anger and death on the corpse, because in the legend, it is unlucky for the living person to be contaminated with death qi, and the deceased cannot be reborn if it is contaminated with anger.
The second is to protect the undead, the sharp qi on the knife has a threatening effect on the evil spirits, and using the knife to draw three circles on the ground can effectively prevent the evil spirits from harassing the newly dead souls.
After being cut off, they will take a knife and carve a word on the coffin that represents the lineage of the corpse bearer (different factions have different words for identification).
Finally, they will start chanting, for Huang Xiaobao, more than ten weight-bearing climbs have not been a hard step of chanting sacrifice songs for the dead.
Because according to their tradition, Dong Lang would not stop chanting for the undead for three days and three nights, and for these three days and three nights, they could not rest, they could not eat, and the only thing they could enter was the pot of wine that carried them with them on the cliff.
The ancient Miao songs they want to sing also have a long history, it is said that in ancient times, the ancient Miao people used the language of sacrifice, the pronunciation of this language is very obscure, to this day, even a few local Miao people can master this pronunciation.
Because of three days and three nights of sleeplessness and no food, a cliff burial ceremony was completed, and the people carrying the corpses would basically be physically exhausted, but even so, they could not get much.
This is actually an important reason why the inheritance of the corpse bearer is about to be broken, because to become a qualified corpse bearer, in addition to learning to climb the corpse and extradite the undead in the ancient Miao language, it is more important to respect and believe in traditional funeral customs.
In fact, in the process of Donglang singing the sacrificial song, singing elegy and weeping spirits are similar, because they can also sing the life experience of this person, the only difference is that Donglang sings the ancient Miao ritual song.
Because the local Miao people believe that only the sacrifice songs sung in the ancient Miao language can invite their ancestors, and the ancestors will bring the souls that have just passed away back to their homeland.
According to legend, their ancestors were defeated in the war with other tribes and were driven away from their homeland, and in the process of migration, the enemy tribes also hunted them down, but the ancestors were attached to the land of their hometown and did not want their bodies to be buried in a foreign land.
Therefore, the surviving tribesmen buried them on a high cliff, so that they could look at their homeland from afar.
At the same time, they also have expectations that one day, future generations will be able to revive the drums of the clan and organize a strong enough team to return to their homeland and reclaim the lost homeland of the locals!
Later, the ancestors came to settle in the Gezhu River, but Guizhou is the land of Baiyue, wild beasts are everywhere, once buried tribesmen were dug up and eaten by beasts with a keen sense of smell, in order to protect the remains of the tribesmen, they retained the habit of cliff burial.
Of course, the reason why they continue to carry out cliff burial may also be that they still want to follow the descendants who took the home garden back to their hometown, and the cliff burial allows the descendants to excavate their coffins without having to work hard to excavate their coffins after retaking the homeland.
To this day, no one cares why their ancestors chose to be buried on a cliff, because even Luo Kaike, the master of Huang Xiaobao's people, could not say why.
But in Luo Kaike's view, the corpse bearer has been passed down for thousands of years, and the cliff burial has long become the custom of the Miao people, since it is a custom, it is necessary to maintain, as long as someone has a need, as long as the corpse bearer still exists, this custom can continue.
The only pity for Rokaiko is that as the times continue to evolve, the legends about the homeland and the ancient Hmong ritual songs that have been painstakingly handed down among the people who carry the corpses are also on the verge of being lost.
In the eyes of Huang Xiaobao's four brothers and sisters, they were buried on their backs, and they were not buried on their backs, and they were not for the sake of making money, after all, there were fewer and fewer people who chose to bury them on the cliffs, and if they lived on their backs, they couldn't even live a life.
What they support in their hometown now is their persistence as corpse bearers, their willingness to guard the traditional customs of the nation, and their willingness to fulfill the faith of the deceased people so that their undead can rest in peace.
Therefore, even if they had to risk their lives to go back and forth on the edge of the cliff more than ten times, chanting for three days and three nights without eating, drinking, or sleeping, and even if they did not receive enough fees, they were willing to fulfill their obligations as corpse bearers.
Fortunately, with the improvement of people's living standards, the tourism industry along the scenic Gecqu River has also developed, and the Swallow Cave, as the largest cave in the Gecqu River Basin, has become one of the famous attractions, and even many tourists come to see the hanging coffin.
When more people see the hanging coffin, there will be tourists who want to understand how the local hanging coffin burial is placed on the steep cliff, at this time, the tour guide will mention the local corpse bearer and tell them how the corpse bearer works.
Human curiosity is endless, when it is learned that there are still corpse bearers, there will be tourists who want to see the process of the corpses and coffins brought to the cliff by the corpse bearers, so now, in the swallow cave of the Gegong River Scenic Area, there is a Spider-Man performance.
Huang Xiaobao's four brothers and sisters naturally will not really perform the back of the corpse, whether tourists can accept a funeral when traveling or secondary, the most important thing is that letting others visit the funeral of the Miaozhai people can be said to be a kind of disrespect for the deceased.
Therefore, the four brothers and sisters of Huang Xiaobao cut the corpse bearer and the spider man very well - if there is a funeral, they are silent backsmal people; if there is no funeral only tourists, then they are performing the spider man who climbs the rock with his bare hands in the Swallow Cave.
During the performance, they will not climb into the cave where the coffins of the clan are placed, so as not to disturb the rest of the ancestors, as a spectator, tourists can generally only watch his performance on the cruise ship or on the shore, the cave is full of water vapor, and when Huang Xiaobao climbs to a height of tens of meters, the tourists below can not see his figure clearly.
Therefore, generally at a certain height, Huang Xiaobao and others will stop climbing, and then quickly "slide" down from the cliff with their hands and feet, and their performance will often win the exclamation of tourists.
But spider-man performances are not always there, under normal circumstances, they will only perform in the tourist season and holidays, and every day is to climb up the cliff several times back and forth, people who miss the performance, can only wait for the next one, or say goodbye with regret.
Nowadays, Huang Xiaobao's brothers and sisters have entered middle age, and their physical condition no longer allows them to move around on the cliff wall for a long time, but as long as someone wants to carry a cliff burial for the deceased elderly, they will still carry the corpse for them, and then sing the sacrifice song for them for three days and three nights.
Some people have also said to them: Since they have climbing skills, why not go outside to participate in certain sports, show their skills to the eyes of the world, perhaps, will get a lot of climbing or parkour sports fans favored, but also get more income?
In this regard, The answer of Huang Xiaobao and others is: they can't leave, now there are only four of them left in the village, if they leave, the cliff burial that they have inherited for a thousand years in Miaozhai will really be cut off in their generation!
They still want to struggle, and they are still looking forward to it, maybe one day in the future, there will be a Miao family teenager who is as determined as Huang Xiaobao in the past, who will come to them to worship them, and then, without hesitation, pass on the skills of the Miao family's hanging coffin.
In fact, whether the Miao family's corpse bearers still have the need to pass on is a question worth discussing, we respect all ethnic beliefs and customs, but in addition to respect, we will also consider more about the cost of passing on this custom.
Take Huang Xiaobao's four brothers and sisters, they began to learn rock climbing from the age of ten, and the most youthful ten years were spent in countless climbs.
Nowadays, there are fewer and fewer people in Miaozhai who need them to carry corpses, and their efforts in those years are not directly proportional to the returns they receive today, so if they simply carry corpses for the main purpose of inheritance, it may not be necessary.
However, in terms of traditional culture, the ancient Miao songs they sang as Donglang are very worthy of inheritance, which is a symbol of ancient Chinese civilization, and its value can be seen from the study of ancient Chinese ethnic minority culture alone.
In addition, the descendants of the Miaozhai village in Guizhou have forgotten their origins, and through the study of this part of the ancient Miao language, they may be able to find the starting point and route of their migration, which also has a huge effect on the study of the changes in the culture of Ethnic Minorities in China.
Finally, from the perspective of sports, their bare-handed rock climbing technology is also worth inheriting, in the Chinese civilization of thousands of years, we have also found too many unsolved mysteries, and this "mystery" is precisely because there is no inheritance or recorded.
Therefore, the hanging coffin burial in Guizhou should not become a disappearing civilization, but should be preserved in the form of words or images, and then the process of carrying the corpse of the person carrying the corpse is changed to the extreme sport of freehand weight climbing, so that more people can understand this special culture.
It is supported by the inheritance of the corpse bearers who may be severed in the future, so as not to let the Guizhou Gegong River hanging coffin become an unsolved mystery for future generations to study history like the hanging coffin of Longhu Mountain in Jiangxi.