Wen | Dai Yongxia
The "Golden Bull" is gone, the "Tiggo" comes with Wei, and the Lunar Year of the Tiger (壬寅) is about to arrive with the bright spring light of "new peach for old charm". In this welcome moment of "cattle to tigers", people naturally pay more attention to tigers.
In the minds of the ancients, the tiger was the king of the hundred beasts. It is majestic and mighty, and in the long-term struggle and coexistence with it, people realize that it has an invincible power, so they turn from reverence and fear to worship and worship it as a god. Ancient people hoped to be blessed by the "tiger god", hoped that they were as strong and powerful as tigers, invincible, and even hoped to become the descendants of tigers, which gave rise to the custom of worshiping tigers. This custom is widely present in the traditional culture and folk life of the mainland.
Tigers occupy an important position comparable to dragons in traditional Chinese culture. "Zhou Yi Qian" Gua Yue: "The cloud is from the dragon, and the wind is from the tiger." "The dragon flies in the sky, the tiger travels on the ground, and the combination of the dragon and the tiger becomes a symbol of auspicious prosperity and prosperity, and also becomes a characteristic of a national culture full of vitality and vitality." Therefore, people throughout the ages have used to use words such as "dragon leaping and tiger leaping" and "living dragon and living tiger" to express the spiritual outlook and strength of the Chinese nation.
In the political, military, artistic, medical and other fields of the mainland, it is also soaked with dragon and tiger culture. For example, in "Zhou Yi", the dragon and tiger are compared to Qiankun, heaven and earth, yin and yang, and men and women, and civilization is characterized by dragons and tigers; there are "dragon tao" and "tiger tao" in the military book "Liu Tao", and the strong people compete with each other "dragon and tiger fighting"; Chinese medicine has "dragon and tiger needle method"; calligraphy has "dragon and tiger seal"... In ancient books such as the Han Dynasty's "Taishan Jingming", the dragon and tiger became the messengers who received the introduction of the immortals; the inscription of the stone tomb of the first year portrait of YuanJia in Cangshan, Shandong Province, has the verse "There are dragons and tigers with the title of Li Lai, and the hundred birds hold together to the money", and the dragon and tiger have become the gods of wealth who recruit wealth and treasure...
It is not difficult to see that dragons and tigers are important guardian deities and mascots in ancient China. As two cultural concepts that complement each other, rigidity and softness, and reconcile yin and yang, dragon and tiger have extensively and profoundly influenced all aspects of the production and life of the Chinese nation.
The tiger is a beast, the ancients believed that the mighty tiger made all the evil people fearful, so they often regarded it as a door god, and in the lunar calendar Chinese New Year's Eve pasted its portrait on the door to guard the portal and ward off evil spirits. This custom began as early as the Zhou Dynasty, and the first ritual monograph of the Western Zhou Dynasty on the mainland, "Zhou Li", has a record of "juhumen to the left, Si Dynasty". Zheng Xuan, the great Confucian of the Eastern Han Dynasty, commented: "Humen, Lu Bedmen also." Wang Ri looked toward the road, and painted a tiger outside the door, with Ming bravery and courage, Yu Shouyiye. ”
By the Han and Wei dynasties, this custom was even more prevalent. The Eastern Jin Dynasty historian Gan Bao's "Search for God" said: "In this customary law, every time the wax ends with Chinese New Year's Eve, decorating the peach people, hanging reed ropes, painting the tiger on the door, placing two lamps on the left and right, like a tiger sleeping, to drive away ominousness." "It shows that at that time, people generally drew tigers on the door during the Spring Festival to drive away demons and ghosts." The Tang Dynasty Duan Chengshi also recorded in the "Youyang Miscellaneous Tricks" that "the custom is better than the door painting the tiger's head", which shows that this custom was still prevalent in the Tang Dynasty and has been passed down for a long time in later generations.
In addition to painting tigers at the gate, there was also the custom of posting or hanging tiger pictures in the New Year. For example, in some areas of North China, the "Picture of the Divine Tiger in the Town House" is often hung in the main hall of the home on the Chinese New Year's Eve of the lunar calendar, and there is often an inscription on the map: "The divine tiger descends the mountain and descends to the human world." The good family bought it, and the four seasons kept it safe. "The tiger is the king of the beasts, and the evil spirits are removed from below." Your house invited to go, all things are auspicious. These all express people's good wishes for the blessing of the tiger god.
In the Zhangzhou area of Fujian Province, the "Five Blessings Map" is often hung during the Spring Festival. The painting shows five fierce tigers ("tiger" and "fu") sitting at the cornucopia, indicating the five blessings (the first blessing is longevity, the second blessing is wealth, the third blessing is Corning, the fourth blessing is good virtue, and the fifth blessing is good death) is at the door and the auspiciousness.
Many places also celebrate children's efforts to make tiger-related antidotes.
In the past, the folk regarded May as a poisonous month and an evil moon, believing that May was the season when poisonous insects were everywhere and evil gathered, and the plague was easy to spread, and the tiger, as the king of the hundred beasts, the poisonous insects and ghosts had to avoid it. Therefore, every May, women will make tiger belly pockets, tiger hats, tiger head shoes and other tiger-related evil things for their children and wear them on their children. The belly pocket is embroidered with five poisonous patterns, and a tiger with angry eyes is embroidered in the middle, which is quite powerful. The toe of the tiger's head is embroidered with a tiger's head, highlighting the word "king" on the tiger's head.
The shape of the tiger head hat is similar to that of the tiger head shoe. Folk believe that children wear tiger head shoes and tiger head hats, and the whole body tiger tiger is full of vitality, so that they can be bold and ward off evil spirits and grow up healthily, which also means that children will live a long life and be rich for a lifetime.
There are also some places where there is a custom of pinching tiger face flowers for the Spring Festival and making "tiger cypress flowers". In the old days, whenever there was Chinese New Year's Eve, in Shanxi, Shaanxi and other places, people often used tigers, rabbits, fish, birds and other shapes to pinch the noodles and flowers to pay homage to the ancestors or give to each other, in order to seek more blessings and more wealth, more than every year.
Folk in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and other places often make "tiger cypress flowers" during the New Year's Festival, that is, with cypress leaves dotting patina, cutting velvet for tiger shape, tied into small flowers, named "tiger cypress flowers". Some are also adorned with small tigers, called "descendants of tigers", so as to give each other gifts, in order to seek more children and blessings, peace and auspiciousness.
The custom of chonghu is not only long-standing in Han culture, but also more prevalent among some ethnic minorities. For example, the Yi people living in the southwest region of the mainland call themselves the Tiger People and regard themselves as the descendants of the Tigers. They used the tiger as a place name, gave their children names related to the tiger, and their twelve-beast calendar also began with the tiger.
Some Yi areas also celebrate the "Tiger Festival", which begins at sunset on the eighth day of the first lunar month and ends at sunrise on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, during which celebrations such as inviting tiger gods and dancing tigers are held. The fifteenth day of the first month is the "Day of Sending the Tiger East home", which begins when the time of unitary, the people who play the tiger god recite auspicious words and go to each house to pay their respects. The Yi people believe that only after the Tiger Festival, the population will prosper, the six animals will flourish, and the crops will be harvested.
The Bai people of Yunnan are also a tiger-worshipping people. They worship the tiger as their ancestor and call themselves the tiger children and tiger daughters.
The Naxi people regard the tiger as a symbol of merit and revere it. They went out to choose the tiger day, thinking that the tiger day was auspicious, and that they could get the blessing of the tiger god when they traveled on this day. They believe that children born on Tiger Day are extraordinary, rich or expensive, and will receive special attention. The Naxi god of the naxi tribe is a yak and a tiger, one left and one right, to pray for peace.
In addition, the Pumi, Nu, Lahu, Lisu in Yunnan, the Qiang in Sichuan and Gansu, the Luoba in Tibet, and the Tujia in Hunan and Hubei also worship the tiger, and their worship of tiger customs has its own characteristics.
Nowadays, many tiger worship customs have been annihilated in life, but some still exist in the folk to varying degrees, affecting people's lives.