Text: Ou Chongjing
The first day of the Lunar New Year is the Christmas of the Taoist Yuan Shi Tianzun, that is, his birthday, the Yuan Shi Tianzun is the three Qing Dao ancestors standing in the middle, if the three people stand in the middle or the three gods sit in the middle, obviously the middle is the most important.
The Shangqing faction, the Taiqing faction, and the Yuqing faction were independent, and the Yuqing faction was Yuan Shi Tianzun, so why did he stand in the middle later? In the Tang Dynasty, it was Taishang Laojun who stood in the middle, that is, Taishang Dao Ancestor, who was the Taiqing faction, in other words, he did not stand in the middle from Yuan Shi Tianzun all at once. The longevity of the Yuan Shi Tianzun is on the first day of the Lunar New Year, and the birthday of Taishang Laojun was later set for February. In other words, from the Tang Dynasty through the Song Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty, these dynasties all attached importance to Taoism, in fact, after a lot of historical development and evolution. Especially after the Jiajing Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, the three religions began to be gradually unified, and after the unification, many Taoist gods also became unified, so this gradual unity was symmetrical, and it was necessary to make a comparison with the West. Since there are three Buddhas in the West, the Chinese calendar also has to engage in a three-Qing Taoist ancestor to compete with him, so the two religions are competitive, but later because they are unified again, they are incorporated into the entire pan-Taoist system.
The Chinese New Year was not set at this time at the beginning, he went through the reform of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, and then passed through the Qin Tianjian of the Kangxi era in about 1700 AD. In fact, the time of the Chinese New Year is not static, at least until 300 years ago, and it often changed through the change of the calendar. Moreover, looking at the ancient calendar, there are more than 100 kinds of calendars in the entire calendar, and there are more than 100 kinds of calendars generated within China alone. In other words, ancient China was really a big country in the study of calendar astronomy, so there were so many derivations of calendars, and there were so many calendarists. However, the later calendar masters were strictly controlled by the official and could not be passed on casually, which was royal knowledge. This has probably been the case since 1,368 AD, as they thought that the technology might affect the emperor's throne. Therefore, since the Ming Dynasty, it has been listed as a subject that can only be understood by the official, which means that historians can only do historical technology in the end, and cannot completely enter the field of astronomy.
On the first day of the Lunar New Year, this calendar is scheduled to be the birthday of Yuan Shi Tianzun in the Ming Dynasty, after the integration of the three religions. The real boss in the sky is the Sanqing Dao Ancestor, and there is the Jade Emperor behind him, and the rank of the Sanqing Dao Ancestor is higher than the Jade Emperor. Therefore, in the entire folk religion system, there have always been various sayings, Yuan Shi Tianzun, Taishang Laojun, Lingbao Tianzun, these three Qing Dao ancestors are like a board of directors, and the general manager is like the Jade Emperor. However, at the beginning, this was not the case in the Song Dynasty, and the Jade Emperor appeared in 1004 AD, when Song Zhenzong appeared. So at the beginning, it was really that each god had its own faction to worship, in other words, the integration of the Jade Emperor and the Three Qing Dao Ancestors into a vertical system, which was indeed gradually formed after the end of the Ming Dynasty. Therefore, the compilation of relevant Taoist classics has also repeatedly made various changes in the times.
The Tang Dynasty was once, then to the Song Dynasty again, to the Ming and Qing dynasties again, and in the later modern times, there were various compilations, so the general compilation of the Taoist collection was not lost to the Buddhist Great Collection at all. Taiwan's belief in the ancestors of the Three Qing Daoists has a lot to do with Chiang Kai-shek's visit to Taiwan, because in the past, Taiwan's beliefs, after 50 years of Japanese colonization, were actually swept away, and everyone had to go home to worship their ancestors. For the traditional gods, probably the main thing left is the Wenwu Temple, that is, Confucius, and Guan Gong, and at most the Jade Emperor. But how did the other gods return to Taiwan, and that is, in 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek came to Taiwan, a large number of folk religions and Taoism flourished, and they entered a new system, which of course also included Buddhism. Therefore, I saw that many Buddhist monks in Taiwan were actually mostly from other provinces, and there were countless great monks from other provinces.
The Taoist Tianshi sect is also from other provinces, including Longhushan in Jiangxi, and the two systems have slowly formed a new integration of Taiwan's religious system, especially from 1960 to 1970, after Taiwan's economy took off, it began to worship this and that. And some of them are not worshiped in Chinese mainland, and Taiwan also worships, the most obvious being the Sixty Jiazi Xingjun. Gradually, the symbolic system of the heavenly gods was compared with each other, for example, the status of Yuan Shi Tianzun for a while was equivalent to that of Lee Teng-hui in Taiwan at that time, but of course this was just a metaphor of connection. As a matter of fact, there is a big gap between the status of the gods on earth and in the heavens, and after this period of development, all political figures in Taiwan have gradually become deified. Whether it is Lee Teng-hui, Chen Shui-bian, Tsai Ing-wen, or Lai Qingde, these people have all been invited to the altar, and they are just very ordinary mortals.
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