Shishi has been regarded as the guardian of home feng shui since ancient times. It is often seen that a pair of stone lions will be placed at the entrance of ancient palaces or giant growers. This kind of stone lion placement actually means. The stone lions placed at the door are usually a pair, that is, a man and a woman, all in pairs, and the position is left male and right female, which is actually the same as the philosophy of Yin and Yang in China traditional culture.
Up and down here depends on the direction of people going out from the gate, so when a person goes out from the gate, the beast will be on the left and the lioness will be on the right.
Shishi is an evil spirit in the traditional culture of China. At present, the earliest stone lion in China is the stone lion in front of Gaoyi Tomb in the Eastern Han Dynasty. In early China, the lion was not a small animal. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, the Sleeping King of the Western Regions presented the first lion to China. Since then, lions have only occurred in China's land resources, and people gradually used them as hand-carved engineering decorations to ward off evil spirits in towns and houses.
After the Ming Dynasty, when castles, mansions and temples were built, everyone liked to put stone lions at the gate to protect the house. Later, people gradually carved all kinds of stone lions on many engineering buildings, such as door pillows, stone plaques, cornices, guardrails, etc., which became an indispensable decorative design hand-carved object in ancient buildings.
Now there are still many stone lions in Beijing in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and the stone lions at this stage are kind and impressive. Lions usually placed at the gate can be distinguished in appearance. The beast on the left is generally carved with hydrangea trampled by the right front paw or placed between the two front paws, while the lioness below is generally carved with hydrangea in which the left front paw touches the cub or the cub lies between the two front paws.
If you put the stone lion at the gate, you usually need to wash your eyes every month on the fifteenth day of the lunar calendar, that is, wash the eyes of the stone lion with cold water and salt. This practice is intended to let the lion recognize the treacherous villain and distinguish between good and evil.