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Post by helen on Jun 4, 2013 3:12:18 GMT -5
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Post by helen on Jun 4, 2013 3:15:32 GMT -5
Chinese grave shapes, furnishings, and their symbolic meanings have to be understood within the context of the Chinese world view and of Chinese mythical beliefs in the origin of human life. Christians believe that the universe was freely created by God "out of nothing." This varies from Chinese beliefs as follows: In prehistoric China, the concept of God as the creator was unknown. The belief of the traditional Chinese philosophers was that the universe was indeed created out of nothing. This nothingness was known as wu (literally meaning "without") ji (literally meaning "limits"), i.e., the boundless or the infinite. Out of this boundless nothingness, because of the movement of some mysterious forces, there evolved the dualistic elements of the yin and the yang. Upon their existence, the yin and the yang interacted and interchanged. As a result of these interactions and interchanges, similar to the way that live cells are produced and reproduced, more and more elements (including beings and non-beings) evolved and multiplied. To the Chinese, interactions between the yin and the yang are the basis of births, multiplication, and growth, including the conception and reproduction of human lives, as well as the generation and accumulation of wealth. The dichotomy of yin and yang covers the duality of all elements in the universe. The yin stands for the female; the yang stands for the male. Yin is the moon; yang is the sun. This dichotomy can be extended to include virtually all features in life and human experiences, such as cold-hot, night-day, soft-hard, invisible-visible; implicit-explicit, passive-active, hidden-manifested, covert-overt, earthly-heavenly, devilish-angelic, and dead-alive. The yin and the yang co-exist in the universe. A person, when alive, stays in the yang world. When they die, however, they depart from the yang world and enter the yin world. Both the yin world and the yang world are eternal and they never cease to interact with each other. To the Chinese, houses in the living world are known as yang houses, whereas those for the dead, i.e., graves, are known as yin houses. Moreover, as living people enjoy elegant and beautifully constructed buildings, they assume that spirits in the yin world have similar preferences. Because people in the yang world like money, yin spirits ought to like money too. To maintain harmonious interactions with the dead thus requires the living to respect departed spirits, and to take measures to enable them to live comfortably in the yin world. Such beliefs are further translated into the desire to construct elegant yin houses for ancestors, into the regular tending of graves, and into the showing of respect to spirits through the rituals of offering them food, money, and other objects that are believed to be pleasing for both the yin and the yang. There is, nonetheless, no way to know for sure that yin spirits are pleased. People have to infer and speculate. If things in the yang world appear to them to be fine as manifested by, for example, prosperity and growth in the family, people will attribute that to harmonious relationship between themselves and yin spirits. They would, therefore, try to maintain the status quo and to follow the rituals that have appeared to be successfully working for them. This belief, too, partly explains why purging other people's ancestral graves was regarded as a most severe form of revenge in historic China, and why disturbances to people's ancestral graves, such as the necessity for relocation due to public works projects in Hong Kong, have on countless occasions received strong opposition. If, on the contrary, people have run into troubles, suffered losses in finance, or experienced the death of some family members, they might relate that to disharmonies in yinyang interactions and look for remedial actions, by, for instance, reconstructing or even relocating the ancestral graves. Through years of experimental trial and error, part of the Chinese experience in yin yang interactions has been distilled into the theories and practices of fengshui the principles of locating, orienting, and designing yin and yang houses. When a person dies, his family members will often consult a fengshui master for advice as to where, how, and when the body should be buried, and how the grave ought to be oriented, designed, and constructed. The outcome of the fengshui, however, will have to be attested by the subsequent development of the family. When the family enjoys prosperity after the burial, the members conclude that the fengshuiof the chosen burial site is good. Otherwise, they would assume bad fengshui and would probably take action to correct it. familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/China_Cemeteries |
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