Today is the second day of the second month of the second month of the lunar calendar, commonly known as the day of "the dragon's head". The "dragon" of the dragon's head refers to the oriental dragon seven stars in the twenty-eight houses, and at the beginning of mid-spring every year, the "dragon horn star" rises from the eastern horizon, so it is called "dragon head". On this day, there are many folk customs: shaving the dragon head: changing the hairstyle, good luck is the head; eating dragon food: the diet of this day is mostly named after the "dragon"; the green festival: spring flowers are full of flowers, which is a good time to enjoy spring outings.
Therefore, since ancient times, the dragon head up is regarded as a prayer for the wind and rain to be smooth, exorcism, na xiang transfer day, and "dragon" has always been a symbol of auspicious Rui, "Zhou Yi" has "see the dragon in the field", "flying dragon in the sky" and other words, "dragon" or the god of rain, in ancient times encountered drought, the folk will pray to the dragon king for rain, the ancient emperor also took the word "dragon" as a special use, "dragon seat", "dragon species", etc., in short, the word "dragon" has been given a lot of beautiful meanings, mysterious, wisdom, auspicious and so on.
In the history books, there are "(Taihao) has Jinglong Zhirui, so it is a dragon jiguan", as well as "Nüwa clan killed the black dragon to Jiji Prefecture" and "The Yellow Emperor got Tude, the Yellow Dragon Land Borer Saw", "Xia Demude, the Green Dragon Stopped in the Suburbs", etc., from the dragon's movement and movement, the Ji Ji Ji was a major event in the state affairs of the big book, or the face of the Son of Heaven was compared to the dragon face, the name ten was called Wolong, Han Gaozu and Emperor Wen and Emperor Xuanwu of Northern Wei and other legends are the emperors born of the mother's feeling of the dragon's qi.
dragon
Dragons are what animals are
What kind of animal is a dragon that is so revered in China? The compendium of Materia Medica is very to the point, and is quoted here as follows: "The length of the dragon scales." Wang Fu said that its shape has nine resemblances: the head is like a camel, the horns are like a deer, the eyes are like rabbits, the ears are like cattle, the neck is like a snake, the abdomen is like a mirage, the scales are like carp, the claws are like eagles, and the palms are like tigers. The back has eighty-one scales and nine nine yang numbers. The sound is like a copper plate, the mouth has whiskers, the chin has pearls, the throat has reverse scales, and the head has Boshan. Also known as ruler water, the dragon has no ruler water, can not ascend to heaven, he breathes into a cloud, can change both water and fire. When the dragon fire is wet, it burns, and when it gets water, it burns, and the human fire is extinguished. The fire of the deceased is similar, the dragon egg is born and hugged, the male sings upwind, the female sings downwind, because of the wind, the dragon intercourse becomes two small snakes. In addition, the dragon is rough and fierce and loves beautiful jade and empty green, loves swallow meat, fears iron and miscanthus, centipede, dongye, and five-colored silk, so swallow eaters avoid crossing the water, those who pray for rain use swallows, and those who calm water use iron. There is a saying in the "Sayings" that the dragon "ascends to the sky at the spring equinox and dives into the abyss at the autumn equinox".
The origin and development of dragons
In China and India, people worship the Dragon King in order to pray for rain, believing that various natural phenomena are the work of dragons, such as the "Wujiang Chronology" recorded that "on April 25, 1737, the second year of Yuan Wen (1737), a dragon flew from the outer mountain area, circling from the horse farm to Waseda, and the houses were damaged by people and animals", which was obviously a whirlwind. The eighteenth volume of the New Writings and Anecdotes deals with the destruction of houses by the Great Dragon In the Kochi region, and the thirty-fourth volume of the Koshi Night Tale, which records witnessing dragons in the storms of Edo.
tornado
In the eleventh volume of "Koshi Night Talk", Jin jin sees the dragon's bright eyes in the storm of the night. It's actually lightning in the storm that's glowing. The Diary of Kumano's Present Treasure Hall records that the dragon flew into the newly built palace and destroyed it in a torch, which should be the aforementioned meteorite landing. The story of the golden dragon's claws seen in the lightning and thunder of the twenty-fourth volume of The Tale of The Past and Present is actually an illusion created by the author's timidity as a rat and the blindness of the lightning. In the "On Balance", it is said that thunder splits trees, and the folk customs of the Han Dynasty call it the Heavenly Dragon. In the "Fa Xian", it is said that the poisonous dragon snows; In Master Cijue's "Entering the Tang Dynasty and Seeking the Dharma", the dragon will drop hail when fighting; The "Chronicle of the Emperors of The Dynasties" records that when the missionary land entered the Tang Dynasty, a storm suddenly fell, and the people were sad, so they gave the Buddha relics they carried with them to the dragons, thus calming the storm. The Mengos believe that dragons are horned serpents, and after fighting with earth dragons and sea dragons, they fled to the sky and became fire and became rainbows. The Cam Lan people of northern Vietnam believe that lunar eclipses are the work of dragons.
Thinking that dragons are celestial phenomena or naming dragons seems to stem from reverence for snakes, so why compare clouds and storms to snakes? The reason is that not only are snakes closer to the shape of clouds and rain than earthworms and eels, but no matter what people have believed that snakes are extremely mysterious since ancient times, it is generally believed that storms and tornadoes and even some stars are dragons and snakes. Stanley Arthur Cook discusses the custom of snake worship in the twenty-fourth volume of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica; "This question, like the study of the origin and development of trees, is as complex as it relates to various aspects of the history of human thought." As for the dragon, the head of the long horn spits fire, the form is various, to fully explain clearly more complex than the snake, even Confucius can not do anything, not to mention the author is so ignorant of the shallow, here can only borrow the information in hand to do their best.
In recent years, with the development of archaeology, scientists have continuously discovered a large number of dinosaur fossils that survived on land in ancient times, among which there are many prototypes of dragon legends. However, there are many animals like dragons depicted in the paintings in the world, in addition to scaly snakes, fish, and flying dragons.
Dinosaurs from ancient times
(A) Sri Lanka (B) South Africa (C) North America produces some of the existing lizards that resemble dragons
Therefore, the author believes that the dragon is not the dinosaur that the distant ancestors of human beings have seen that once dominated the world, as the old friend Kirby and others said, and they believe that the image and legend of the dragon have become very blurred after thousands of years, and exist in human memory like a shadow, which seems to be as difficult to grasp as the Buddhist fatalism. The author believes that the exaggeration of the dragon is an animal such as a crocodile that still lives on the earth today, coupled with the worship of snakes and the fear of the land god caused by natural phenomena such as tornadoes and landslides, or the misinterpretation of dinosaur fossils, etc., these phenomena combine to produce the imaginary animal of the dragon.