Young people now love to say one word: a sense of ceremony. Is there a sense of ceremony during the Spring Festival? This is something I've been thinking about lately.
Some people think that our Spring Festival has no sense of ceremony, not as good as Western Christmas, Westerners have to set up Christmas trees, sing Christmas songs, spend Christmas Eve, and our Spring Festival has been understood as a happy play, Chinese New Year's Eve set up a reunion feast in the evening, eat a dumpling, and then set off firecrackers. This is a big misconception. Our Spring Festival originally had a strong sense of ceremony, but now the traditional sense of ceremony has been forgotten by us. This is indeed a big problem of cultural loss.
Chinese the traditional Ritual Sense of new year is very different from the ritual sense of Christmas in the West: there is no religion behind our new year. Christmas is supported by strict religious regulations, and some ceremonies are actually religious ceremonies. And our traditional new year is a kind of life festival, and it is supported by traditional folklore. But our traditional new year customs are not optional, but also have very strict procedures. For example, there is a set of requirements in the preparation of the year. For another example, before eating Chinese New Year's Eve meal, you must worship your ancestors, worship the "Heaven and Earth King's Master", and express gratitude and awe to nature, ancestors, teachers, and the transmission of life in the form of burning incense and prostrating your head. I once wrote an article recalling the respect and seriousness of my childhood ancestor worship, and the ancestor worship should follow the sequence of grandfather, father and then me to express the orderly inheritance from generation to generation, and the reverence for the "Heaven and Earth Emperor and Master" naturally formed in my heart since I was a child. After the Xinhai Revolution, Chinese overthrow the monarchy and the "jun" was removed, but our reverence for "heaven and earth", "pro" and "teacher" should be passed on. Once interrupted, the spirit of tradition appears blurred.
Ancestor worship is followed by a family reunion, and today we see it as a reunion meal, which is actually not so simple. Once a year, a family condenses the popularity of the family and helps each other harmoniously, which is also the most important thing we Chinese. And this family-based cohesion is actually the foundation of our national cohesion. At this time, the whole family will say some auspicious words autonomously to help each other, especially to make the elderly happy. During the Spring Festival, the old man must be placed in the "top" position, and the best dishes on the table must be sandwiched into the old man's bowl first, and this awareness has long penetrated into my bones year after year.
Folklore is an affinity and beautiful life culture and life emotion. It is a simple "ritual", it is not as strict and standardized as religious rituals, but it comes from the heart. Its most important thing is not the form, but the spiritual connotation and multi-emotional connotation.
Now there is often a saying in the media: we want to pursue the modern expression of traditional festivals, which I think is misleading. Traditional festivals are a rare time for our contemporaries to really get close to tradition, review tradition, and respect tradition, so do we have to turn traditional things into anime in order to celebrate the New Year? Today's Westerners celebrate Christmas with a so-called "sense of ceremony" that shows that they are celebrating the festival in full accordance with Western traditions, why can they feel that tradition is lovely, even sacred? Because tradition is not exactly a form, there are generations of emotions in the form, which is the most precious part of our culture and life.
The modern expression of the so-called traditional festivals is nothing more than to turn the traditional eating, drinking and playing into modern eating, drinking and having fun, and looking at the traditional festivals with a good or not fun mentality, rather than treating it as an annual sacrifice to life. If the year is losing its own unique sense of ritual, our traditions will become more and more superficial, so that we lose not only the charm of the year, but also the deep and beautiful emotional and spiritual traditions of life of our festivals, which is the problem that worries me the most.
(The author is a member of the 6th-12th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the dean of the Feng Jicai Institute of Literature and Art of Tianjin University)
Source: Global Daily
EDIT: Mo Shuo
Review: Jiajia Zhou