In the departure: village burial

Relatives on Earth Series (20)

Village burial

In Longnanshan Village, where there are many mountains and ditches, the most solemn ceremony is a person's funeral.

When I was a child, I experienced many funerals in Xia Jiayuan, some of whom were old and dying, some of whom were young people who threw up their legs halfway, some of whom cried sadly, and whether there were a few cries and were buried without a banquet. But there is one thing, from a young age, I have subtly educated my soul and cultivated the goodness in my bones. That is, no matter what the surname of the deceased person in the village is, no matter whether the person has a good temper or a good temper, as long as three cannons are heard and someone shouts "grab the soup", people will take the mill out of the house and rush to help bury the grave.

In the summer of 2004, I went to Luqu in Gannan, passed monasteries and hemp piles along the way, and climbed to the top of an uninhabited mountain, with colorful prayer flags flying high. A Fellow Tibetan friend solemnly said that this was a heavenly burial platform. He told us that when a person dies and is devoured by vultures, he asks for the immortality of the soul and the reincarnation of ascension, and in their view death is nothing more than the separation of the immortal soul from the old body. They believe in feeding the vultures in the "flesh", which is the most honorable sacrifice, reincarnation and generosity.

When people die, they are buried in the ground. The custom that houcun has inherited to this day is burial. When the days are not smooth or the moon is broken, there are also coffins in the field. The common burial time is mostly chosen at dawn. The whole village woke up to the sound of the cannon, hurriedly got up, dressed, walked all the way, knocked on the door and knocked on the window, first in groups of three or five, and then half of the villagers collectively went out and ran upside down the mountain path. Before dawn, the women went to the yard to pull the yellow wheat grass in the core of the haystack, and the men rushed to the funeral one by one. The white light of the flashlight swayed all over the village, shining from the mountain to the bottom of the ditch, from the fork of the ditch to the mountain beam, crossing, colliding, and transmitting messages.

When he finally resigned from the world, he encountered the honorable courtesy that he had not enjoyed in this life, and the old and young people in a village successively squeezed into their family's courtyard, which was even more lively than when they built a new house to build a purlin for their son and daughter-in-law, which was a funeral that the whole village was not absent.

In the noisy and noisy crying, the funeral relatives want to compete to drink a bowl of funeral soup and rice, usually the oil and vinegar braised noodles cooked in a large iron pot, which is actually the last "reunion meal" that the whole village eats before a person completely leaves home and returns to the mountain for burial, which is also a "broken meal". The elders told me when I was young that I had to eat this soup and rice when I went to the cemetery, and I thought that this procedure was nonsensical, and some of the mysteries were too mysterious, but I did not dare to ask in detail, and I also scooped a bowl and devoured it, which was really delicious.

When it came to the funeral, I could feel the sadness of the world's determination, solemn and solemn, and after the filial piety performed the incense burning ceremony, he had to use the filial piety stick to smash the spiritual hall, smash the brazier that burned paper, and roll away the quilt. Immediately afterward, the tightly fastened coffins were lifted out of the threshold, erected on a bench that had long been set up on the edge of the courtyard, and then tied with hemp rope to carry the coffin's mourning burden.

When the hour came, the villagers scrambled, propped up their shoulders, lifted the coffin, and brushed the ground towards the cemetery. Along the guiding paper scattered on the road by the female filial piety, in the fire light lit by the courtyard everywhere, the black coffin was lifted on the shoulders of the crowd, the heaviness of the coffin itself was shared by more than ten people, and the people who carried the spirit rushed to take the steps, and the strength of the nu round body. The whole village looked at the deceased who was walking in front of them and was silent. Those who follow the mourners, those who light fires along the road, those who carry the car, those who carry the bench, those who carry the lanterns, those who set off cannons, those who carry milling, those who blow whistles, those who smoke, those who step on the grass and dew along the way. The coffin rested on the uncovered soil next to the tomb, waiting for the burial. In the cemetery that Zhuang's relatives and brothers laid out the day before, there was a long lamp to guard the tomb, and a wall kiln was dug on the left and right of the tomb, and a golden child and jade girl were placed.

I remember the year of my grandmother's death, it was a cold day in the first month, and I postponed the funeral in time for the moon. On the day of the funeral, suddenly heavy snow flew, but the neighbors on the far road came, and those fathers wiped their tears and chanted "Aunt Niu". My young nephews and nephews, who, as great-grandchildren, wear red filial hats. The whole village followed the procession, facing the wind and snow, and walked to the new tomb at the foot of the mountain.

In those days, I was very sad in my heart, and when I couldn't help but be sad, I often hid in the corner and cried, and I had a kind of fear that the person who loved me the most in the world was gone. But watching my uncle and father not close their eyes for several days and nights because of the funeral, I felt that I should have grown up this time, should no longer cry and cry, and should stand in front of this stormy home to block things. I knew that my grandmother would pass away forever and ever. Uncles and fathers did not cry, they could not cry, and their tears flowed directly into their hearts.

When the auspicious time for burial arrived, people lifted the coffin and went down into the tomb, mr. burned paper to chant, and finally put a bowl of five-colored grain, and began to bury, a dozen iron millers surrounded the tomb, while shoveling thick and soft soil into the tomb, the soil slapped the coffin lid made a steaming sound, and after a while it covered the grandmother's final destination, and piled up a nose-like mound.

The five-colored grain buried in the tomb has two layers of blessings: one is to pray for the heavens, the deceased can have food to eat, reproduce future generations, and prosper; the other is to plant five grains to bless future generations with thousands of hairs and abundant grains.

At the funeral banquet, after the luncheon officially began, The voice changed the tune, and in front of the relatives of each room, the filial piety lined up in a long line, knelt in the courtyard, and entered the hall three times in a row to pay homage to the incense, and the mother's uncle or the elder of the family judged the filial piety of the filial piety and commanded the message. During the funeral, the chef is invited to serve the deceased at the time of each meal, before the guests are cooked, or at dawn. No matter how ordinary this person is, and no matter how important this person is, the death of any person is like a village mountain, which has collapsed into a corner, and no matter how busy people are, they must stop what they are doing to cure the funeral, to pay tribute, to comfort.

After the opening of the table, the filial family should set up a table for the musician and the ceremonial book and accounting room, and the visitors should return the "gift" for the gunner and musician who picked them up. More importantly, the filial piety must bring wine and vegetable steamed buns, bring hot tea cigarettes, go to the cemetery to deliver food to the soil workers who beat the grave, and "eat" for the people who sit on the night watch at night, they are mostly honest and strong laborers in the village, setting up accounts, moving furniture, carrying water, chopping firewood, grinding noodles, killing pigs, making tofu, and they are most grateful to the main family.

At that time, the information was not clear, and some people would encounter a sending team coming from behind the mountain in the middle of the funeral. The senders hurriedly turned around the hillside field, and the funeral procession went up the mountain. In the countryside, there is a kind of respect in the blood of the people, that is, the dead are great, and the land is like running gold. Everyone has a day of death, but a relative dies, people have to burn seven periods of paper, burn a hundred days of paper, burn one year of paper, two years of paper, three years of paper, when the three years are not enough, they must sit on paper for the deceased relatives in the first month, relatives come to lay paper, send winter clothes before dawn in early October, and go to Taishan Temple on March 28 to burn the wrapped paper, write the address, stamp it, and send out paper money. This may be the world's earliest invention of express delivery, it does not use mail trucks, no one to send, but kneeling in a place, a fire, it arrives, it signs, it sees the paper as it is, at least it is the wish of people's hearts, because of telepathy and through time and space, implemented. It's like the father has been on the first and fifteenth day of the first month of the month, giving incense to the ancestral tablets in the upper room, offering rice before eating on the first day of the first month, burning a few incense candles on the day of death, and preparing a pair of bowls and chopsticks for the New Year's Day, everyone knows that the ancestors will definitely not receive it, but there is no doubt that the father's insistence is pinned on his thoughts about his mother and relatives, the incense is rising, the spirit of the living and the dead crosses the years and intersects, meeting on both sides of the long river of time and space, giving people some comfort and peace of mind.

After living in the city, I often went to say goodbye to the elders of my friends and colleagues, to my colleagues who had worked together for many years, and to some well-wishers who had helped me support me. People with a bit of status will generally hold a memorial service very formally, someone will specially hold a microphone to introduce their lives, generally it is also an ordinary and meritorious cliché, from the farewell ceremony of the body in a neat line, I did not see the dignity and weight that a life should have when it dies. No matter how high a person's wealth is, no matter how brilliant and prominent he was before he was born, how powerful he was, but if it is useless in the world, no one remembers it, at best it is just a dead leaf floating alone.

In the city, a person's death is often undertaken by the funeral team, the memorial is presided over by the host with a praise-like draft, paradoxically presided over, and the ceremony is the same as every deceased city person, especially the filial piety is arranged in the program, pointing up and down to run east and west. But in the countryside, funerals from a person's throat to burial, people are around the deceased, filial piety kneels in the grass bunk, mourners must be incense when they come, into the coffin, paper, paper, far and close relatives must come to send farewell, on the day of the funeral, the whole village must watch the dead person, carried up the mountain by everyone, buried in the loess. Many of my deceased villagers, who were born in the mountains namelessly, and then died in the mountains with the same fate, were surrounded by villagers who bent down and bent their knees for chai rice, oil and salt, and after death, they were still brothers who shaved the stars and wore the moon in the soil.

They were born plain and quiet, and when they died, they were quiet, and when grass grew on the grave one day, many people forgot about him. Because he is too ordinary, and because the village is too small, the sparsely populated people who guard the village are still busy earning money to support their families and raising children. People who live in the hereafter, in order to live well, they must gradually get rid of the past, stop being sad, break free from the shadow of gratitude and pain as soon as possible, and go to the outside world. She still has to be sent to the town to study, the rental house is about to expire, the day is getting colder, and she has not yet prepared cotton clothes.

I have witnessed more than once that in the cemetery of Qingming, whose daughter-in-law is on the grave with her children, her husband must be working desperately in a foreign land. I have heard many times that when some people rushed back to their hometowns over long distances, their relatives had been dead for many days. There are no zhuang relatives who help with things, there is no gentleman who understands etiquette, and there is no clan guy who borrows a stool to boil water and watch the table.

Over the years, I often wandered the mountain roads and fields outside the village, and often went to the graves of my ancestors to worship and wander. In the old home, there are thousands of good and a thousand bad. In this worldly good, there is a good, straight to life and death, if someone dies, the husband will find a piece of the best feng shui soil to dig up, the whole village will be in front of the house behind the intersection, light a pile of wheat grass fire to send off. After a lifetime of hard work, he can rest in the land he likes for a lifetime. I think this is the most luxurious treatment of a suffering rural person in the world, but unfortunately, he was not blessed to catch up with him before he died, and he did not know it after he died.

In front of my grandmother's grave, I would think of the chicken and dog life of my childhood, and she used a plate to buckle the rice left for me, and when I opened the lid of the pot, it was always steaming. Kneeling in front of the grave, I always had the illusion that my grandmother had not gone far, but had just changed places because of her old age and slept in the field closest to home. This field is her vegetable garden where she grows green onions and beans, and it is her own land with her uncle, father, and we who have dug up and hoes and planted crops and vegetables.

On countless stormy and frosty days, this square field spent morning and dusk with her, producing oil and water, vegetable heads and rice from our family's pot. As an outsider relocated from Huaya, she entered the cold door of our house from Guanghua Dam with her little feet. Her life was cramped in the fields and pot alleys, and the one sentence she remembered most clearly to me was: "Baby, it is difficult for a woman to cook without rice, just eat it, just read the book."

In my dreams, in my heart, I'd rather think she's still alive like she was 94, she just can't walk and talk anymore. Every snowy day, after heavy rain, the idle father will snuggle up next to her, and when the sun sinks in the western mountains, the father is still digging the ground alone, and a person is worried about the children and grandchildren in the world, blaming himself for doing what he has not done well.

My father was nearly old, and every morning and evening, he would go to this field for a walk, not picking a few vegetables or hoeing a few times, but he would go on time. I know that he is doing filial piety in a way of remembrance, and this company of the past is a lesson for his son, allowing him to plant carefully all year round, and to visit again and again every day in the dark.

The north mountain floats with the clouds of the south mountain, the sky is wild at the foot of the big green mountain, the rolling wilderness is the back village that gave birth to me and raised me, once we said that we could not leave the stone, and now we are invisible, as if suddenly lost the sense of love and pain in the village, and after saying goodbye, numb.

When a woman is gone, there will be less cooking smoke from the roof of the village; when a man is gone, there will be one less figure on the dirt road of the valley carrying water.

——Written on April 3, 2019 in Xia Jiayuan

(Text/Photography: On Departure)

END