I don't know if you have ever heard the old man tell me that every silent night, a divine beast will come out of the mountain forest, suck people's nightmares, and leave people with beautiful dreams every day. It looks like a lion, has a nose like an elephant, eyes like a rhinoceros, and tiger-like legs.
Dream-eating tapir, a sacred beast that appeared as early as the Han Dynasty in China, but in ancient China, this sacred beast did not eat dreams. Legend has it that the Tang Dynasty literary hero Bai Juyi was suffering from a serious illness and could not be cured for a long time, and his family heard that the tapir had the effect of expelling diseases, so they carved two tapirs on the screen in front of the bed, which was strange to say, Bai Juyi's illness was so good, so he wrote the "Tapir Ping Zan" in the back: "The tapir, the trunk, the rhinoceros, the oxtail, the tiger foot, born in the southern valley, 'sleep its skin to ward off the plague, and try to ward off evil in its shape'." Regardless of the background of his writing, we can see that in ancient times, the tapir only had the divine power to drive away evil spirits and cure diseases, and there was absolutely no legend of cannibal nightmares, and the version we listen to today is basically a legend about its dreams, so how did this legend come about?
As we all know, our neighbor, Japan, during our tang dynasty, as a small country, leaned on our Tang Empire every day, always learning and imitating our cultural traditions and craftsmanship, and often brought some objects to their own countries. At that time, the screen engraved with tapirs was quite popular with these people. Our ancestors told them that this divine beast was able to drive away bad luck, which they understood as eating bad luck. Of course, the teacher taught it very carefully, so the tapir was greatly respected in Japan, and has always been regarded by the Japanese as a mythical beast that eats nightmares, so the idea of the dream-eating tapir came out, which is also a belief in their country. In fact, the dream-eating tapir appeared in ancient times, similar to the Wong Tai Sin (weasel) that was popular in the northeast. In our Guizhou area, this animal is the sacred beast that appears in our books, and Xu Shen of the Eastern Han Dynasty once wrote in the "Shuowen Jiezi · Ninth Lower Tapir": "Tapir: like a bear and yellow and black, out of Shuzhong." From the jackal, Mo Sheng. ”
Tapir one or five species, now endangered species in the world, they are herbivores, with elephant-like noses, like to soak in water, good at swimming, now the world's only remaining tapir species,
(1) Asian tapir
The ancient book is called "four unlikes", like a pig is not a pig, like a horse is not a horse, like a tiger is not a tiger, like an elephant is not an elephant
(2) Chinese and American tapirs
The largest mammal seen from Mexico to South America, it can reach up to two meters in length
(3) Lowland tapir
The largest terrestrial wildlife in South America
(4) Mountain tapir
The smallest of the five surviving tapir species
(5) Capomani tapir
Mountain tapir miniature version
In fact, the ancient myths of our country are not imaginary. Our myths come from our lives, used in our lives, this is the precious legacy left to us by our ancestors, if you say that believing in the stories in myths is superstition, then you are wrong, the profundity of our culture you do not know, is it just a story? It's more about the thoughts and beliefs of our predecessors.
We do not lack any history and culture, and no country can deny how long the history of our country is and how profound its culture is. Because the facts are there, the five thousand years that the sons and daughters of China have walked through are placed there, foreigners do not understand, can we not understand?