Author Xu Jiangwei authorized the release
The famous boot-footed Liren clay pot was excavated from the site of Huoyaogou in Qingquan Township, Yumen, Gansu Province, and the pottery pot dates back about 3800 years and can be attributed to the Siba culture. This object is 20 centimeters tall, with a monkey face and a dog's mouth, and the most peculiar thing is that the foot boots are so large that they are not proportional to the body, which is the long-standing physical witness of the custom of "foot worship" that the author calls.
The Bigfoot Standing Man clay pot on display at the Gansu Museum
Siba culture is recognized as the ancient Qiang culture, the age is equivalent to the end of the Xia Dynasty in the Central Plains, pottery is red pottery, painted black color, thick painted, raised on the surface, so it is easy to fall off. The above figure liren in the shape of a dog's mouth, not an isolated phenomenon, here also unearthed the "three dogs square Tao Ding", is a national first-class cultural relics.
The head of the pottery boots in the picture above is rolled up, which is the leather boot style maintained by the Tibetans and the northern steppe peoples to this day, mainly because the large quilt of the pottery boots is extremely exaggerated, the length of the sole of the boots exceeds the entire leg, so that "big feet" and "giant boots" have meaning, which represents conquest and represents the great cause of opening up the territory, and this expression is only continued in the ancient Qiang tibetan nomads.
Similar boot-foot clay pots have been excavated on the edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, throughout Central Asia and West Asia, because there is also a passage for the migration and spread of ancient Qiang to the west, but the author has not found anything more typical and intuitive than this Liren clay pot.
What image or deity are these boot-footed clay pots expressing? The author thinks that it is the Bon god of war translated as "pe har".
The old Tibetan word (pe) means "to come and go" (honorific), and (har) means "shoe" or "boot man", which means "shoe god", because it is synonymous with "conquering the enemy and trampling the enemy". Therefore, this "Baihar" can be directly translated as "the shoes that run rampant in the world".
Left, Qinghai Majiayao culture boot foot clay pot. Right, Gansu Yumen Fire Burning Ditch unearthed boot foot clay pot.
Baihar is known as the lord god of the Bon protector god, also known as the "White Brahma King", or "White Lord". According to the Bon texts, this god originally lived in the thirty-three heavens and was the king of all the gods, but after the middle robbery, it descended to a place in northern Tibet and became the god of war in Badahor and the main god enshrined in the temple, also known as the "Yang God Nantuo Caibo" ("The Bo"), referred to as "The White King", and its queen was called "Mu Le Heng".
However, it is also said that the worship of Baihar first appeared among the Muya people in northern Tibet, and there are also legends that Baihar was hatched from the thirteen eggs born to the dragon girl in the Ma Pang Yong. But in the end, he was invited to Samye Monastery and became the protector of Tibetan Buddhism. It is generally believed that it was surrendered to Badahor by Master Lotus and brought back to Samye Monastery, and based on the lofty status of Samye Monastery, it has in fact become the protector of the whole of Tibet.
As the great god of the "King of All", Baihar always resides in the center of the mandala, surrounded by flames, and is usually presented as a "ngry face": a large mouth of blood basin, fangs exposed, waist skin and tiger skin, one hand holding a sharp blade, the other holding a lasso, with a crow as a precursor, attacking the enemy with hail lightning. The ancient altar text of Naiqiong Monastery has this praise for Baihar: "You, the five-body king, with your concubines and companion gods, come to share wine, blood and flesh, and the blood dorma offered to you..."
The Feast of the Sages says: "When Zampusong praised Gampo, he established the Rajabhakhar to promote the Dharma. "But this god was obviously not introduced from India with Buddhism, but an inherent concept of Bon, which has appeared for a long time, and has long since become a way of thinking unique to Tibet, a language expression habit that is different from other cultures.
Tibetan calls "shoe" "haa" or "ham" and is also written (hang pronounced "hang" or "狠"), and strangely enough, both the Wuyue dialect and Mongolian call shoes "haa". It's just that in Chinese dialects, shoes are never associated with kings.
But the Tibetan language is different, for example, in the Dunhuang Tibetan document "Biography of Zampu in the Past Dynasties", it is said that Zampu was a victorious general who never lost his hand, saying that "the boots under his feet have never been crooked" (qas ham xi ju nyi snang). And the ancient Tibetan language often refers to the gods and kings by "sang pu sta ham", which means "mysterious tiger shoes" in Tibetan. In addition, the Tibetan word for "son of heaven" (haa) is also called "ha", which is pronounced the same as "shoe".
The Tibetan word for "bullying and domineering" is called "ham ba," which is derived from "shoes, trampling," which means "stomping on the soles of your boots." The Tibetan word for "shoe" also means "particularly fierce and powerful", such as the name of a particularly fierce dog or fierce god "hal qi".
The Khitan language calls the royal family and the direct subordinate tribes of the emperor "horizontal tent", and the original meaning of "horizontal" is also "shoe", which means "the boots of the emperor", and there are imperial honor guards holding boots in the Liao tomb murals. In the Central Plains, the two generals of "Heng and Ha" are often seen in the temple mountain front hall, which actually comes from the two pronunciations of the Tibetan word "shoe", and the cultural source is also one.
But in Han culture, this kind of "foot worship" has long disappeared, or it has long been said that traces are difficult to find, today people can not imagine that the representative of the noble sacrifice vessel, but will be made into the shape of boots, serving food to enjoy the ancestor gods, because in Chinese, feet, socks, shoes and the like have been associated with "smelly, unclean", of course, it is difficult to read what the faience boots are expressing, as for what gods represented by bigfoot people, it is even more impossible to verify.
However, to this day, the murals or statues of Tibetan protectors are mostly presented in postures on one or two little people who have fallen to the ground (representing the devil), which is the inheritance and continuation of this ancient culture, and it is also a clue to the origin of this culture.
In fact, the last emperor of the Xia Dynasty, the martial arts outstanding "Xia Jie", the real name is called "Shoes", this "Shoes" is the shoe, "癸" may be the serial number, that is, the tenth rank among the princes who have been sealed (numerical suffix), or it may be the original character of "Kuí", meaning "dispatch, command", then together it is the meaning of "military commander" or "commander of the march under the heavens" (inverted word order). If the Xia people did not have the Baihar worship from the primitive Bon religion, and did not express the language habit of conquest with shoes and boots, this seemingly "inferior" name would not have appeared.
Left, Sumerian civilization boot foot red clay pot. Right, black pottery cup with boot feet exhibited at the National Museum of Azerbaijan.
Looking west, the second pharaoh of the First Dynasty of ancient Egypt, who ruled upper and lower Egypt for 32 years, was named "Hor-Aha", which is the "Hor" of "Badahor", and "Aha" is the honorific pronunciation of the Tibetan word for "shoe". There is also the famous ancient Babylonian king "Hammurabi", who is also the pronunciation of the Tibetan word "boots", and "rabbi" is the ancient Qiang and Naxi language honorific titles for shamans, all of which will not be accidental coincidences, but clues to the origin of culture.