From "Dream of the Red Chamber" to see the ancient "right to name"

Author: Zhang Jingwei Chongqing No. 3 Intermediate People's Court

Source: People's Court Daily

In ancient China's patriarchal society of strict hierarchy, dignity and inferiority, people's words and deeds were strictly regulated, and their names naturally could not escape.

Compared with today, the names of the ancients are not only personal code names, but also given more connotations, hiding rich legal rules.

The characters in "Dream of the Red Chamber" have hundreds of names and surnames, and the names of the characters in the book also contain many ancient name laws.

The legal function of the surname

Name, surname corresponds to family, and first name corresponds to individual. Under the patriarchal system, the role of surname is much greater than that of name, and even many people, such as women and subordinates, only have surnames and no names. According to statutory law, surnames have two major functions:

One is "don't get married." "Do not marry with the same surname" was entered into ceremony in the Western Zhou Dynasty and into the law in the Tang Dynasty. By the Time of the Dream of the Red Chamber in the Qing Dynasty, the Great Qing Laws and Regulations "Marriage with the Same Surname" stipulated: "Whoever marries with the same surname shall have sixty rods (the main marriage and the male and female) and divorce (the woman returns to the sect, and the financial gift enters the official). ”

The second is to "divide the noble and the lowly." The ruling class, especially the emperor, in order to highlight its nobility, distinguished the surname of a country into several classes through political reforms or decrees. For example, Emperor Xiaowen of northern Wei, who established the sequence of door valves, divided the surnames of the world into three, six, and nine, emphasizing that "to inherit the noble with the noble, to inherit the lowly", which was used by later emperors.

Surnames are also governed by civil customs. Folk customary law believes that even if they have the same surname, if they are not "of the same genealogy" and "the same sect", there is still a distinction between nobles and lowly. Therefore, the ancients often improved the status of family names through methods such as "recognizing ancestors and returning to the sect", "general genealogy", "lianzong" and so on, and even achieved the purpose of climbing the power and attaching the nobility. In the second episode of "Dream of the Red Chamber", Jia Yucun told Leng Zixing that he and the Jia family "since the Eastern Han Dynasty Jia Fu, the tribes have flourished, and all provinces have ... If we talk about the rongguo, it is the same spectrum." And eventually climbed the Jia Province, "Yuanyuan" reinstated the old post, and then rose step by step. The 6th time also writes that The wang dog family of Liu Grandma's son-in-law and Lady Wang's mother's family were "connected to the sect", and used this to go to Jia Province to "fight the autumn wind" (that is, to use various connections to ask people for money and goods).

Taboo

Avoidance is a manifestation of the inequality between people in ancient times in names. The Spring and Autumn Ram Biography records that naming, writing, and even talking should be "kept secret for His Holiness, for those who are relatives, and for the sages." Secrecy, both public and family, first existed as a courtesy. Public taboo is generally to avoid the use of the name of the emperor and Confucius, and family secret refers to avoiding the use of the name of the head of the family. The Tang Law Shuyi (Tang Lu Shuyi) enshrines the ritual of avoidance, and protects the ceremony according to law through the article "Shangshu Playing the Crime" (public secret) and the article "The official of the government called the offender of the father's ancestral name" (family secret). Among them, "the official of the prefectural number claims to have violated the father's ancestral name" stipulates: "The number of the prefectural government and the official are called the offender's father's ancestral name, and the risk of honoring the residence ... One year in vain. "That is, the official name and the place name of the official appointed by the official shall not be the same as the name of the father and ancestor, otherwise it shall be a crime." Song followed Tang Xiao to Cao. However, this system caused a conflict between imperial power and patriarchy, which was unwilling by those in power, so it was abandoned by the laws of the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Despite the lack of a proper rule, the people of the state of etiquette still enshrined the avoidance of family. "Dream of the Red Chamber" embodies the feudal rule of avoidance in many places. The 2nd time, Dai Yu (whose mother's name is Jia Min) would "subtract one or two strokes" when writing Min characters, and read the Min character as "secret"; the 54th time the storyteller quickly atone for his sins after Wang Xifeng said "Wang Xifeng" in "Feng Qiu luan"; the 62nd time, Bao Yu and his sisters played the game of "shooting over", Bao Chao "covered" a "bao" character, Bao Yu thought of the "jade" of the psychic jade through "bao", so he thought of the ancient poem containing both "jade" and "钗" words "knocking off the red candle cold", and laughed: "Sister took me as a yakuza, I shot instead. Say it sister don't be annoyed, it is the sister's secret, the word '钗' is it. "These are all family secrets.

Unlike the article "The official of the prefectural number is called a criminal of the father's ancestral name", the article of "Shangshu Playing a Crime" continued until the Qing Dynasty, and the Great Qing Laws stipulate: "Whoever commits a mistake in committing a royal name and a temple if he commits a crime in the upper book shall have a staff of eighty." Those who misrefute the remaining documents are flogged forty. If it is a name offender, a hundred rods. Those who commit a royal name and a temple curse, whose voice is similar, and whose words are different, and who have two words to stop committing a crime, are not guilty. It can be seen that the feudal law punishes those who violate the public secret very severely. During Cao Xueqin's Yongqian years, there were many cases of literal prison for violating the evasion ban. In fact, "Dream of the Red Chamber" also involves public secrets, and many of its early manuscripts have deliberately written the words "Xuan", "Yun", and "Hong" by deliberately reducing their pens to avoid the secrets of Emperor Kang, Yong, and Qian.

name

Since the Zhou Dynasty, the naming of names must follow the rules of "five rules" and "six avoidances", and "five rules" refers to the sources of the five aspects of the name, that is, "faith", "righteousness", "phase", "false", "class"; "six avoidance" requires avoiding the name of the country, avoiding the name of the mountain and river, avoiding the name of the official, avoiding the name of the disease, avoiding the name of the sacrifice (animal) and avoiding the name of the sacrificial instrument.

After the Qin and Han Dynasties, the door valve system made society pay attention to the concept of the door and the family origin, which gave birth to the Qi character (Xingsheng Zi School), which was mostly drawn up by the ancestors in advance according to the generations, included in the family tree, fixed in the form of family rituals or family laws, and formed a regular "Fan", all future generations of the family Ding ding to take the name of the "Fan" character, and those who do not respect the family rules are not allowed to be recounted into the family lineage. The naming rules of the "Fan" character, in the process of family continuation, make the same lineage of people clearly deduce the lineage and generations through the "on the word ranking generations", which has become the best way to distinguish between respect and inferiority.

The Jia family in "Dream of the Red Chamber", as a family of poets and poets, takes the names of their descendants in strict accordance with the rules of the Xingsheng Character School: Ning Rong Ergong Jia Yan and Jia Yuan, "Water" characters, and all of them are three points of "water"; the second Generation Jia Daihua, Jia Daishan, Jia Dairu, etc. are "Generation" characters, and the "Generation" character is in the center; the third Generation Jia Shu, Jia Jing, Jia Zheng, Jia Min, etc. are "Wen" characters, and the "Wen" character is on the right; the fourth Generation Jia Zhen, Jia Zhu, Jia Lian, Jia Huan, etc. are "Jade" characters, and "Jade" is next to the left, Jia Baoyu belongs to this generation, and should be from "Fan", However, it took two words, but there was still the word "jade", which is a special case, in order to take care of the "stone record" and highlight its protagonist status; the fifth generation of Jia Rong, Jia Lan (Lan), Jia Yun, etc. are "grass" characters, and "grass" is on the head. The name of the "Fan" character can be the word "Fan" of the same generation of men and women, such as Jia Min and Jia Zheng, etc., or the word "Fan" can also be used by women alone, such as Yuan Chun, Yingchun, Tanchun, Xi Chun, the "Jade" character of the same generation that is not "Fan", and the "Fan" and "Chun" characters are also in line with the "Fan" character naming rules.

rechristen

In feudal society, in addition to changing names themselves, most of them are honorable people such as emperors, and parents change the names of lowly people such as subjects, descendants, and slaves. Emperors can show their praise by giving their surnames and names, such as Ming Chengzu who gave Ma Sanbao, who was famous in the West, as Zheng He. If given the national surname by the emperor, it is the highest honor for the recipient, such as Liu Bang, in addition to rewarding Xiang Bo as a marquis, also gave the surname Liu and so on. Of course, the emperor could also reduce the surnames of his subjects to evil surnames as punishment, such as Wu Zetian's title of empress dowager, and the surnames of Li and sun who had opposed his dictatorship were demoted to Yu.

In aristocratic families, the parents, like the emperor, enjoyed the right to decide the names and change the names of their children and slaves. The people who were renamed in "Dream of the Red Chamber" were mainly slaves, which fully reflected their low legal status. The second time, the raider's real name is Pearl, also surnamed Hua, because of the poem "Flowers Attack People Know the Warmth of the Day", Baoyu renamed it Raider. On the 21st, Bao Yu asked who gave Hui Xiang's name, and Hui Xiang replied, "My original name was Yun Xiang, and it was Sister Hua who changed Hui Xiang." Because Baoyu was angry, he said, "The serious should be called 'obscure', what kind of incense!" So because he was the fourth in the family, he changed his name to "Four Children". In the 63rd time, Baoyu renamed Fangguan "Xiongnu" and "Yelü Xiongnu", resulting in Fangguan often being called "Wild Donkey". Subsequently, Baoyu changed the name of Fangguan to "Wendulina" and so on. In addition to Baoyu, almost all the masters in the book have changed their names: Lin Daiyu renamed the parrot brother given by Jia Mu to Purple Crane; after Yinglian was sold into the Xue family, she was renamed Xiangling by Baochao, later as Xue Pan's side room, and then renamed Qiuling by Xia Jingui, the main room; Xiangyun renamed Kui Guan "Wei Daying", and so on.

According to modern civil law, the content of the right to a name includes at least three aspects: the right to decide on the name, the right to use, and the right to change the name. However, in ancient times, as subordinates, slaves obviously did not have the right to decide on names and change names, and the use of names was difficult to call "right". Therefore, the right to a name in feudal society was only the exclusive right of the powerful. In addition to being renamed, the names of many slaves themselves do not have the meaning of name rights protection, such as Lai Da, Lai Er, Second Sister, Third Sister, Fourth Child, Fifth Child, Dog Er, Wang Er, etc. This is especially true for people like Youling. The twelve small plays purchased for Yuan Chun Province only have stage names with the word "official", such as civil officials, lingguans, etc., who sell art for a living, and I myself have been sold to sell them, without personal freedom, let alone the right to name. And the stage name is the shackle of the social status of these excellent people, and it is also an insult to their personality.

It can be seen from this that the ancient society was an identity society, marking the identity of each ethnic group and individual through the name, and preaching the difference between dignity and inferiority, the order of the elderly and the young, and the division of master and slave through the word. Ancient law is an ethical law, name is a symbol of status, only the emperor enjoys the absolute right to name, the right to the name of the parents and his holiness relies on family law and family etiquette to provide relative maintenance, while the names of the untouchables are only code names, not the "right to name".

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