preface
Wu Fei, a professor at Peking University, called for the restoration of earth burials, which treat people as garbage, which is disrespectful to the dead.
In a speech at Shantou University, Wu Fei, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Peking University, analyzed the problems of funerals and the relationship between funeral reform and traditional funerals.
He said that after the new China demanded cremation and was not allowed to be buried, many people put the ashes of their ancestors into coffins and built concrete graves.
tradition
Chinese pay attention to the five costumes, there is no need to worship the ancestors above the high ancestors, and the earthen tombs of the ancestors will slowly return to nature with time, he said, the current cremation is regarded as a matter of disposing of corpses, like disposing of garbage, it has lost its cultural significance.
Our Chinese nation has a history of more than 5,000 years, with a vast territory, many nationalities, rich cultural content, and rich and diverse national habits.
mores
And about funerals, there are many different ways, there are day burial, water burial, cremation, and earth burial, among many funeral methods, earth burial is the traditional burial method in many places. Today we are going to talk about burial and cremation separately
Burial originated in primitive society, when people used mud to bury the deceased in order to avoid the remains of their companions or relatives being eaten by wild animals, and Han burials have a history of thousands of years.
faith
In the central plains of the ancient continent, the land was fertile, and the people had been mainly based on agriculture for generations, that is, people believed that the land was the foundation of life, and believed that burying people in the loess soil after death was the best way for the soul to rest triumphantly.
The Idea that the Han people are based on the loess soil, advocating yellow, and entering the soil for safety has also been influenced to this day, at first people's burial methods were very simple, but after entering the class society, with the needs of the ruling class and ritual ideology.
etiquette
Burial methods began to become more and more complicated, and later burials emphasized thick burial as filial piety, often holding a solemn burial ceremony for the relatives after their death, and putting funerary products in the coffin and erecting their tombstones.
The ancient princes will believe that the people take the loess as the basis of life, and the yellow is in the middle of the five elements, which is the most stable and solid, and can better preserve the power and status of the deceased before death, so they pay more attention to their own mausoleums.
Heritage
To this day, many mausoleums have been excavated in the mainland conservation, and these mausoleums are of great significance to our understanding of ancient Chinese history and figures. Cremation flourished in Hinduism, and Buddhism, and is famous for the cremation of the relics left by the cremation of the Buddha Shakyamuni after sitting in the circle
Cremation in the history of the mainland, began before the Zhou Dynasty, prevailed in the Song Dynasty, when the Song Dynasty was influenced by Buddhist culture, as well as the poverty of the country, there is an estimate that the cremation rate of the Song Dynasty was as high as 10%-30%, but cremation was not prevalent in ancient mainland china.
international
Cremation was even severely forbidden by law in parts of medieval Europe, which they considered to be a form of punishment for infidels. After the founding of New China, cremation has been advocated for the protection of the land.
Although the state now stipulates cremation and does not allow burial, the progress has not been so smooth, and many remote areas still use traditional burial methods
Pros and cons
Compared with earth burial, cremation greatly reduces the use of space, as well as the environmental pollution and the spread of some diseases that may be caused by earth burial, and cremation is simpler than that of earth burial.
The original intention of the mainland to promote cremation is to reduce the share of the land by the cemetery, but now the urn is still buried after cremation, and the burial cemetery is even more expensive in some places, and more and more research also shows that cremation also has a significant impact on the pollution of the bad environment
Speech
In my opinion, whether it is burial or cremation, the important thing should be the equality of national culture, should not directly prohibit burial, traditional burial does have many shortcomings, but what we should do is how to take the essence of traditional burial, take its dross, so that the fine culture of burial can continue to continue.
Where conditions permit, it is not impossible to restore burial, and it is not impossible to introduce better burial policies, such as simplifying the complex and cumbersome funeral rites of traditional burial, infectious diseases and other deaths that are identified by the hospital as non-burial, etc. Of course, the above is only my personal one-sided view.
Changing day by day
With the rapid development of China now, the pace of people's lives is getting faster and faster, family affection, life and death seem to be getting weaker and weaker, no matter where the former strange two people meet, as long as they can find an identical name in the family tree or find that this person has the same hometown as themselves, they will feel incomparably kind.
Each of us is in the social community, and people are through the culture and the social environment in coordination and adaptation, and thus build a pattern of behavior and values, virtue from social life, in the social group can be reflected, and our traditional burial ceremony, on the one hand, conveys and strengthens the sense of collective concept.
Emotional aspect
On the other hand, it also shows people's inner emotions and moral character, the burial shows, love and respect, and the traditional funerals preside over the funeral are all people of high moral standing, respected, and the current cremation is too impersonal.
Peking University Professor Wu Fei's appeal, I think more of an appeal to family affection, inheritance, and cohesion
In the face of Professor Wu's point of view, I don't know what is better for you in front of the screen, which way is it better to look at burial and cremation?