Birth, aging, illness and death are the themes of life. Everyone wants to live with dignity, die without regret, and show elegance in the old illness. Death is something that everyone fears and wants to avoid, but it often comes unexpectedly.
There is such a mysterious cave in Guizhou Province, which always shows the dead in people's sight and makes people forget it. This cave is regarded as the supreme place by the surrounding villagers. There are 560 coffins of different shapes in it, and even many people come thousands of miles just to get some good luck. Death is endowed with deeper cultural significance here.
1. A coffin that will never be buried in a mysterious cave Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau belongs to a typical karst landform. There are many mountains and rivers in the territory, and dozens of ethnic minorities such as Miao, Yao and Dong live in mountain canyons and riverside plains. They have a long history and inherit different cultures, and the identity of * * * has become a mysterious and fascinating legend.
There is an ancient Woong San in Pingba County, Anshun City, Guizhou Province. In the eyes of the Miao people named Liu who have lived there for generations, this is their sacred mountain, because there is a deep hole on an old steep cliff, surrounded by trees and grass, and their ancestors are buried here.
560 blood relatives of their family are buried in this cave. These deceased people did not "bury coffins flat" according to the custom of the Central Plains, but put them in caves. This is one of the many funerals in China since ancient times-cave burial. The cave on Laoxiong Mountain is 23 meters wide, nearly 30 meters high and more than 40 meters deep, with an area of nearly 1000 square meters.
For more than 65,438+0,000 years, Miao people surnamed Liu in five local ethnic villages have placed the coffin of the deceased in a ventilated, dry and visible place in the cave according to the principle of kinship, as close as possible to the entrance of the cave. Coffins are placed regardless of gender and time of death, and some are stacked together, which can be roughly divided into four different areas according to the terrain and stacking methods.
The coffins here are not single rectangles, but different shapes. * * * There are six different shapes, namely square coffins, trapezoidal coffins, rectangular coffins, boat coffins, log coffins and modern coffins. The coffin is beautifully made and beautifully shaped, with ancient coins, longevity characters, auspicious characters, fish deformation and other patterns engraved on it. Most coffins are well preserved.
There are 560 coffins stored in this cave, which is the largest number of coffins in Guizhou Province. Because of its unique cultural tradition, this cave has been identified as a national key cultural relics protection unit.
Second, the dead buried in caves for thousands of years are struggling, and death is rest. The custom that Miao people have inherited since ancient times is to believe in ghosts. They sacrificed to the land and worshipped their ancestors. They don't believe in evil, they don't believe in God, but they are afraid of ghosts. They think that ghosts are the soul of people after death, and people who die unclean because of sudden death or sudden death will become evil spirits and will come out to make trouble. Such a dead man cannot be buried in a cave.
Only people who die naturally can be buried in caves. Miao people call the cave burial "Badongdu", which means "dead body in the cave". Cave burial is very grand and serious in the life of Miao people. It has a whole set of procedures, and all these ceremonies are in the charge of the "ghost master" in Miao village.
Ghost teachers have a high status, equivalent to priests and wizards of other nationalities, and are mostly ideological leaders and affairs coordinators of the whole village. Miao people have different mourning periods, some three days and three nights, some one day and one night, depending on the situation of each family. The family of the deceased invited the ghost master to preside over the ceremony.
Ghost owners will work with the whole team, which usually includes a drummer and an assistant. Their main job is to sing the guide song, that is, the ghost teacher will open the way for the soul of the deceased through certain singing and action ceremonies, and escort the deceased to the ancestral home to live with them.
When presiding over the ceremony, all members of the Ghost Division team must wear red silk robes and flower handkerchiefs. At the ceremony, the drummer played drums and the ghost teacher sang and guided the scriptures. One is to recite the genealogy of the ancestors who have passed down the clan completely, and the locals call it "thinking about ghosts." Then, it looks back on the parents' kindness in raising the deceased, focusing on praising the glorious deeds of the deceased before his death, especially the important things such as offering sacrifices to ancestors by cows.
In addition, it is necessary to list the sacrifices of the children of the deceased one by one to comfort their souls to leave safely, return to the ancestral team, and protect their descendants. In the end, it is necessary to guide the deceased through 32 thorny roads and let the deceased return safely to the land where their ancestors lived. After completing this series of complicated ceremonies, the deceased can finally be buried.
After nightfall, the young people in the clan carried coffins, and the whole village carried torches to send the dead out of the village. They must take a road that no one has ever taken, and they can only walk out of it by manpower until the coffin is sent to the cave of the dead. No one can look back at the dead again, and no one will go into the resting place of the dead again, unless the people are buried next time.
Third, the hope of ancestors returning to their hometowns Although Miao people are now ethnic minorities, their ancestors were the famous Chiyou in history 5,000 years ago. In those days, he led the Jiuli tribe to fight against the Huangdi tribe in the Yellow River valley, and they fought for the Central Plains. Although defeated, of course, we have to swallow the bitter fruit, so the whole tribe can only move south to the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and gradually settle down to form a new tribe, which is called "Three Miao" in history.
However, it has been raining. In the new round of competition for the world, the whole tribe faces the tribe with Yao, Shun and Yu as the core leaders. They were defeated again and had to migrate again. One of them moved to Guizhou to settle down. There are still many ballads about ancestors' migration among the Miao ballads handed down to this day.
Miao ancestors dreamed of returning to their hometown for generations, and the fallen leaves returned to their roots, so they had the custom of "cave burial". They told future generations not to bury the coffin underground, hoping that future generations could help them return to the north. Choosing cave burial is not only an expedient measure for Miao ancestors, but also because caves have extraordinary significance for Miao people who have lived in the mountains for a long time.
When the ancient Miao people just moved to Guizhou, they once lived in caves. In order to remember their ancestors and the hardships of the past, the Miao people set up their own special festival-"Dance in the Cave". Every year, the whole Miao people are having a carnival. The Miao people walk out of the hut and gather in the cave to dance Lusheng for the festival.
Caves also play various roles in the lives of local Miao people. It is not only a happy station for young men and women to fall in love, but also a quiet place for the dead to rest in peace. It has always carried the homesickness and yearning of Miao people.
Pingba County, a cave full of 560 coffins, is called Natural Coffin Museum because of its large number, rich shapes and long history, which has aroused the curiosity of people at home and abroad. And because the coffin is homophonic with "official" and "wealth", many officials who seek wealth have traveled thousands of miles and even Wan Li to watch it. Subconsciously, they hope to be lucky when they see the coffin and get promoted to a higher position.
Similarly, the coffin-carrying ceremony on the mountain wall of Longhu Mountain in Jiangxi attracted the attention of many people who wanted something, and the coffin was endowed with more cultural connotations and implications.
Life between heaven and earth is like a passer-by. Life is short and fleeting, and prosperity is changeable. Therefore, in any case, we must seriously enjoy real life and grasp the present to have a future.