The ancients had a peculiar emotion for bones: on the one hand, because when born as a human being, this object can form a shape and support actions, so they regard it as the "motive" of life and even dominate fate; On the other hand, I feel that after death, the flesh and blood gradually erode under the soil, and this thing can survive forever, so it must still play a role in another world, so it is an "activated" ghost... This mixture of understanding makes the bone an object with mysterious power, and for the living, the fate can be changed by "setting bones"; For the dead, ghosts can be removed through "bone placement" - the word "bone setting" here refers to both bone augmentation and bone reduction, as well as bone replacement.
However, few people have noticed that there are records in ancient notes of "setting bones" to cover up crimes.
Stills from the movie "New Washing of Injustices"
First, a piece of bone gain can pass through the immortals
Mingren Zhu Guozhen wrote such a thing in "Yong Building Sketch":
When Hou Yue, a native of Shandong, went to an ancient temple to play when he was a teenager, "saw a man walking in, calling himself a man from Jiuhua Mountain", he took Hou Yue's hand and said: "You will definitely be rich and noble in the future, as long as you add another bone, you can pass through the immortals." So he uncovered his underwear, as if putting something into his body, Hou Yue only felt "slight pain, long time is peaceful." Who knew that since then he has a peculiar ability - drawing a humanoid god, that is, he can see his appearance when he sees a person, "those who taste the face, go for decades, can be silent". When Hou Yue was later admitted to the enterprising degree, he had only met the three hundred people on the same list, and when he returned home, he drew their faces and put them in a small box.
One year, when Hou Yue took leave to go home, while walking in the mountains, he encountered a gang of robbers and took him hostage, so Hou Yue sent his entourage back to the city, "borrowed money to redeem himself", and sat on the stone with the robbers to talk and laugh. The robbers got acquainted with him, so they asked, "If you were to be an official, what would you do if you met someone like us?" "Hou Yue said that if it is a good year, people like you will be severely punished, but this year to catch up with the famine, everyone is hungry and cold, and the government does not provide relief in time, everyone is really helpless, so they find a way to mix and eat, how can they blame you? After hearing this, the robbers sighed and felt that Hou Yue was a reasonable person, so they released him. Hou Yue "roared back across the horse", and when he returned to the city, he drew the clothes and faces of each bandit and sent it to the local officials, took people according to the map, and finally arrested the bandits one by one.
"Yong Building Sketch"
This is a typical example of "setting bones" to change destiny. As for the effect of dispelling ghosts, the author casually flipped through the notes "Dongling Xiaozhi" written by Guo Zeqi of the Republic of China, and he found something: "The waterway of the former Jingshi Shui Dao, from Xiangfang Bridge to Xizhimen, are all Daming River Ditch" - it should be noted here that the Daming River Ditch is a sewer main canal built after Zhu Di, the ancestor of the Ming Dynasty, moved to Beijing, and the walls of this underground drainage channel are covered with huge bricks, covered with cypress squares soaked with tung oil, and the ground is connected by brick seepage wells. After the Qing Dynasty, a ditch was set up for the year, and after the river thawed in February every year, the official ditch was hollowed out once a year to allow the water to flow smoothly. "Dongling Xiaozhi" said that "the dungeon from the south to the north, dug up a lot of white bones", and the source of these white bones is sad, all of them are palace maids and eunuchs who threw themselves into the river and died when Li Zicheng led his army to attack the Forbidden City at the end of the Ming Dynasty. "The Western people collect bones and refine animal charcoal, willing to use money for easy, three cents per catty." The Chinese people were very dissatisfied with this situation, and the famous scholar and philanthropist Ma Jun really set up a Buddhist disaster revitalization association at the Guanyin Temple on the side of the Xiangfang Bridge. Among them, there are two relatively complete skeletons, and one is particularly tall, "completely undamaged", there is really no place to put it, so it is suspended in the Guanyin Temple with a rope. The abbot was meditating behind closed doors, did not know about this matter, and one day suddenly "dreamed of a man with a bad word" and begged him to help relieve it. The abbot was not impressed at first, but then he had the same strange dream for three consecutive days, and the armored man cried bitterly in the dream: "Three days in the balance, misery." The abbot felt that something was wrong, so he told the other monks about it, and when Ma Junshi heard about it, he immediately asked people to untie the tall skeleton and put it into a coffin, bury it with the other collected human bones, and erect a stone tablet with the words "Ancient Tomb". That night the abbot dreamed that the armoured man had come to pay his respects, and never appeared in his dream again.
2. Replace the neck bone to escape responsibility
The above two notes can be called a matter of things, the solution is not correct, Hou Yue is strong and good at painting, it must have nothing to do with being placed in a fairy bone in his youth; Ma Junshi's good deed of collecting the bones and reburying them did not need the abbot's strange dream to add to the icing on the cake. The "De Qingqi case" included in the "Book of Trial Without Punishment" for Wei Xiyuan of the Qing Dynasty is a classic case in which criminals almost achieved the goal of getting away with their crimes by "setting bones".
Selected Stories of the Book of Trial Without Criminal Punishment
Deqing County is located in Zhejiang Province, and there is a woman who "mistakenly fits and is a woman", that is, accidentally marries a husband who is frivolous and misbehaved, who not only fornicates with his mother-in-law, that is, his father's little wife, but also requires her daughter-in-law to serve her like a mother-in-law. One day, the mother-in-law asked her daughter-in-law to make shoes, and when the shoes were ready, the mother-in-law picked and said that it seemed to be a little incorrect, and the daughter-in-law said in her words: "It doesn't matter if the shoes are not right, as long as you do it right." When the mother heard this, she "said that the woman was hiding herself," and she was ashamed and angry, and that night she consulted with the adultererer, drunk her wife and killed her, "obeying her mother clan with violent illness." The mother clan is poor and cowardly, and does not dare to compare."
As the year passed, there was more and more discussion in the township, saying that the woman had died unjustly, so they gathered at the county to file a complaint. The county order sent people to dig up the grave, open the coffin for an autopsy, and report that there was no injury after the examination, and the lawsuit was closed, but the local people became more and more angry. Later, the county changed a county order, and everyone went to voice their grievances, but they still could not change the original verdict, and the same result was the result of the appeal that crossed the level.
A few years later, the murdered woman had a distant brother who was named Hanlin because of his success in the imperial examination, and the case was brought to the Criminal Department, and the minister of the Criminal Department did not dare to neglect and reported it to the emperor, just as the Xuezheng in Zhejiang was changed and the new Xuezheng resigned, the emperor told him to seriously investigate and handle the case. After Xuezheng arrived in Zhejiang, he raised the case and asked about it, but he had no clue, and the bone test was still unharmed. Through careful investigation, Xuezheng learned that the deceased's husband was having an affair with his mother-in-law, so he felt that "this woman will be wronged", and if he could not make a deal for her, he would not be sorry for the deceased, let alone restore his life to the emperor, so he went to a neighboring province to find an experienced old servant, hired him to assist in the investigation of the case with a lot of money, and from the day he was taken back to Zhejiang, "eat and eat together, sleep and sleep together, and not let anyone see anyone", in case someone used money to buy the old servant, and at the same time posted a notice to reopen the coffin and reopen the autopsy one day. On that day, the plaintiff and defendant were brought into the hall, and the spectators from all sides were blocked. After the old servant finished his autopsy, he said: "There is indeed no injury on the bone, but a bone under the head and neck has been replaced, and the age of the deceased is about twenty years old, and the weight of this bone is obviously wrong, it belongs to a person about forty years old." Xuezheng immediately sent all the previous works involved in the opening of the coffin to interrogate, and finally the first autopsy admitted that he had accepted a bribe from the deceased's husband and replaced the neck bone, and the replaced neck bone was still there, and when you took it, there were obvious indentations caused by bamboo and wood on it. The deceased's husband had to plead guilty, admitting that he was "crushed and killed by adding to the fence".
Ancient Chinese forensic science led the world, and attached great importance to the examination of bones in terms of autopsy, for example, the third volume of the Southern Song Dynasty's "Collection of Washing Injustices" has a "bone examination" chapter. The Qing man Lu Yitang wrote in his book "Cold Lu Miscellaneous" about a story of Zhu Yuan, who had been the commander of Jiyang and Changqing County during the Qianlong period. The local servants arrested a citizen because of a case, who knew that the people died suddenly, and after the family buried him, they accused him of being killed by the servants, and the case remained unresolved for 30 years. Shangguan was really helpless and asked Zhu Yuan to be in charge of bone examination. The bones of the deceased were buried in a willow wood coffin, Zhu Yuan let the wooden shelf be erected in place, put the coffin on it, slowly unloaded the coffin board, and removed the soil that seeped into the coffin, revealing the body wrapped in a mat, while baking with fire, pouring vinegar, beards, and bones were clearer. After examining it, he said, "There is a purple blood wound on the skull of the corpse. When the deceased's family heard of the great joy and believed that they had confirmed the evidence of death caused by the abuse of the servants, Zhu Yuan stepped forward to examine it and said: "This is not an injury, it is contaminated with rotten blood, and it can be washed away." Everyone laughed and said how could thirty years of blood be washed away? Zhu Yuan let it be washed with water, who knew that as soon as it was washed, the bones would turn white, and the plaintiff had to withdraw the lawsuit. People asked Zhu Yuan how he knew it wasn't bleeding from the wound? Zhu Yuan said: "The wound is bleeding, the middle color is heavy and gradually lightens outward, while the blood marks on the skull of the deceased are heavy around and shallow in the middle, so it is formed by rotten blood pollution, not wound bleeding." ”
"Cold Lu Miscellaneous"
Third, late night bone examination to wash grievances
The "Bone Examination" chapter of the "Collection of Washing Injustices" records the number and characteristics of bones in various parts of the body in detail, showing the superb level of ancient anatomy on the mainland. Before Zhu Yuan examined the injuries on the bones, the fire baking method and vinegar washing method used on the corpse were also derived from the "Collection of Washing Injustices": "When digging a pit, which is wider than the corpse and three feet deep, take charcoal and firewood and spread it all over the pit, and burn it with fire to make it red... Where the bone is damaged, no traces are seen, and the corpse is splashed with bad vinegar: in the open air, cover the place with a new oil silk or open oil umbrella, and look at the sun through the umbrella, and the marks will be seen. If it rains, use hot charcoal to illuminate it, this good law is also good. ”
The case of identifying the real murderer through bone examination is also found in Pan Lunen's notebook "Hearsay".
"Hearsay"
Anhui Wuwei has a Gongsheng surnamed Li, "a rich family", with a son and a daughter, the son is called Li Da, and the daughter is called Li Degu. After Li Gongsheng died, he left behind a concubine who was twenty years old, and this concubine was born beautiful, and the whole family called her "sister-in-law". My aunt had an affair with Li Da, proclaimed adultery at home, and didn't care about people's comments at all. Li Degu and her sister-in-law are about the same age, have not yet come out of the court, and despise her aunt's behavior in her heart, but she feels that her ugly affairs with her brother are not in the hands of a big girl in a boudoir, so she is silent, only making some female celebrities every day, even if her sister-in-law comes to visit her, she likes to ignore it. The sister-in-law knew that Aunt Li Degu despised her and was very angry. On this day, the neighbor's children held full moon wine, "extending the crown shoes and collecting skirts". During the banquet, the host arranged for Aunt Li Degu and Aunt Li to sit side by side. During the banquet, talking about rural customs, talking about the cheating of men and women, Li Degu interjected a few words, and the aunt next to her felt that she was deliberately sarcastic about herself, threw away the wine glass and chopsticks, and walked away.
"Because the grudge is deep, the suspicion is growing." Xiao Aunt and Li Da plotted, believing that if they did not cut the kudzu vine, they would hurt the thorns, and from then on began to look for trouble with Li Degu every day, hoping to find an opportunity to get rid of her. At night, Li Degu lay on the bamboo bed and slept, and at the second hour, the aunt suddenly knocked on the door and said that there was something to discuss. After opening the door, seeing that her brother was also following her sister-in-law, she was feeling strange, and her sister-in-law went around behind her, unexpectedly hugged her, and covered her mouth, in a hurry, Li Degu not only did not struggle, but even shouted, she was stabbed in the chest by Li Da and died.
Early the next morning, Li Da reported to the official and bribed him with a large amount of silver and two bribes, so that during the inspection, he concluded that Li Degu was "not married for a long time, and resented and killed herself." So he prepared a coffin and collected the funeral and buried the matter.
"He is a wronged underground, and he has been in existence for three years." And Aunt Xiao and Li Da have no obstructive people, they are even more unscrupulous and notorious. Li Degu has a subordinate brother, known as Li Sanye, who is proficient in the law and has been working as a famous criminal master in a different place. However, he was also worried that the accusation was false, so he ran to the cemetery late at night, opened Li Degu's coffin, and "privately examined his bones", only to see that the muscles were not rotten, the cheeks were complete, and the knife marks were there. Only then did he relax his heart, seal the coffin as before, bury it again, and then redress the grievances. At this time, Wuwei had already changed to a new official, "seeing that his love words were sincere, his heart was moved", ordered the coffin to be opened for re-examination, and carefully examined the scars, judging from the shape of the wound and the scars on the bones, "its sharp edge entered and spun out, and it was obvious that it was not a self-inflicted person"! At this time, Li Da panicked, sold the farmland, and dotted up and down, but Li Sanye was an old curtain official, and he had a lot of experience in the matter of criminal name, and saw the tricks and tricks, and smashed Li Da's conspiracy one by one. In the end, "(Li) and Aunt Li decided according to the law."
Shi Congjin, a high-ranking monk of the Song Dynasty, has a poem: "Eyeless immortals pick up bones, secretly groping to recognize the prince", in fact, princes or commoners, what are the differences between bones? As long as they abide by the law and are innocent and frank, then the common people are enough to be proud of the prince, otherwise, if they are motivated by lust and commit adultery, they are likely to end up being "Yamen servants who test their bones and confess their guilt and confess."