News here; I won’t reproduce it: http://news.qq.com/a/20071020/000050.htm
I hadn’t originally thought of commenting, but after seeing it reposted on the department board, and then reposted again to the Joke board, and seeing that classmates’ reactions seemed mostly displeasure or contempt, I couldn’t help but voice my opinion. Below is my reply on the department board:
(The person above said: “Reviving Zhou ritual is not something our department would get around to doing.”)
Do you all think it’s bad? I, for one, think it’s terrific! Absolutely terrific! This is far more meaningful than opening a traditional-culture class for CEOs.
If reviving ritual and music is not something our department is to do, then who exactly is supposed to do it? If the revival of guoxue does not begin with rebuilding ritual practices, and instead merely drills into scholarship and theoretical research, it will absolutely have no future. And among all forms of ritual, funerals are not only a supremely important part, but also the most ingenious breakthrough point for a traditional revival. Many people don’t care much about ritual in ordinary life, but when it comes to arranging a funeral they often take it extremely seriously. These days people buy houses based on location rather than feng shui, but when buying a burial plot they still insist on checking the feng shui. In short, in today’s China, the whole set of traditional ritual and cultural systems is in fact preserved most completely in funerary culture.
Only weddings and funerals are indispensable even among populations that otherwise resist tradition with all their might, and weddings have long since been thoroughly Westernized, while funerals today remain highly traditional. Traditional culture is most tenacious in the funerary sphere; can the revival of ritual and music find a more ingenious breakthrough point? Wonderful! Wonderful!
Who looks down on funeral work? Try arranging a funeral from start to finish yourself. There is far too much learning involved.
Mist then replied:
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: …….do you really think it’s so terrific?
: Then let me answer this way: I also know that there’s an awful lot of learning involved in the whole process of driving off zombies
: If something contains a great deal of learning and preserves ancient customs well, and if that can greatly help revive some “something or other,” then street-side fortune-telling in coarse hemp clothes is even
: more worthy of being listed as a certain “something or other” major
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My reply:
The reason it’s terrific is not merely because there is a great deal of learning involved, but because this is a crucial point. The soul of traditional ritual and culture is hiding right here. As for your examples of driving off zombies and fortune-telling, they are simply not comparable, because I am seriously saying that it is terrific, so please do not rebut me with a merely contentious attitude. Driving off zombies and fortune-telling are not “ritual”; perhaps there is an “ritualistic” element in exorcising zombies, and fortune-telling certainly contains many elements of culture and traditional thought, but their significance cannot possibly be compared with funerary practices. For an individual, for a family, there is no ceremony whose specialness can be compared with weddings and funerals, and in Chinese ritual-and-music culture, whose main trunk is Confucian, funerals come first of all; I trust you still remember Yang Zhu’s emphasis on funerals back in the day. The place of funerals in a cultural tradition can hardly be overestimated. What a funeral bears is the expression of many dimensions: views of life, views of death, views of ghosts and gods, views of the family, ethical views, and more; it is also a concentrated display of the science and technology and social system possessed by that civilization (note: think of the pyramids of ancient Egypt). A complete funeral ritual, the process from beginning to end, is almost like staging a concentrated rehearsal of the whole culture, presenting everything at once.
As a “ritual,” the status of funerals is unquestionably unique in the history of human civilization. Archaeological discoveries show that human beings began assigning meaning to funerals at the very beginning of their culture (for example, burying the dead in particular postures, adding grave goods, adding red pigment, and so on). It is not even too much to say that all human ceremonies and religions originated in funerals. Many animals also bury their dead in special ways; attention to death is eternal. No one can avoid funerals. Even scattering ashes in a river, or even “burning the dead and making fertilizer,” is still some kind of ritual, a display of one’s views of life and death, worldview, and values. Other rituals in human culture—whether sacrifices to Heaven, ancestral worship, festivals, and so on—are nowhere near as enduring and important across all human cultures and histories as funerals are. Throughout the entire process of a funeral—including from end-of-life care to comforting relatives, from the participants to the distribution of inheritance, from the worship ceremony to the burial rite, from the mode of burial to the manner of commemoration, from mourning period observance to offering condolences—the entire customs, ideas, temperament, philosophy, literature, ethics, technology, natural environment, and cultural lineage of that civilization are displayed in concentrated form, as if holding a military review. Among all the contents you can think of concerning a certain culture, what is there that does not exert an influence in a funeral? Behind a funeral lies not merely one side of traditional culture, but the whole thing!
October 21, 2007
Latest comments
- Passerby No. 1
2007-10-22 01:09:13 Anonymous 116.252.148.248
Profound, I’ve learned a lot….
- Gu
2007-10-22 17:28:12 Anonymous 125.34.46.31
The basis of ceremonies and ritual is “reverence” or “awe,” and the breakdown of ritual and collapse of music in modern society goes together with the retreat of “reverence.” But “reverence” still has one of its most stubborn strongholds: death. Modern people may not revere nature, may not respect teachers and elders, and may even refuse to revere life, but when faced with death, very few can continue to sneer and dismiss it. The awe brought about by death cannot be escaped. A family can say, we don’t celebrate holidays, don’t do birthdays, don’t have weddings—but a funeral, no family can get away from that (unless the whole family is wiped out)! You must properly deal with a relative’s body and the aftermath; the only question is in what form the funeral will be carried out. But if one wants to evade “reverence” at such a time, perhaps a very few individuals can, yet no matter how nihilistic society becomes, there is bound to remain one final stronghold here, where ritual and reverence are impossible to shake off.
When I previously discussed what “tradition” is, I said that tradition is the “thread” connecting the past and the present. Things that have utterly “broken” and lost their connection with history are no longer tradition. So if we want to revive tradition, we must first find tradition, find those things that are still alive, find those unbroken threads. But where is tradition? In our lives, it is hidden so deeply that it is almost impossible to find. But on the funeral front, tradition’s resistance is the strongest.
In other settings, modern people often despise or deliberately resist ritual; in funerals, however, people urgently need ritual—without ritual, those in grief will become even more flustered and at a loss. And the very existence of ritual is itself a comfort to the living, enabling people to express their reverence. Moreover, only here do people spontaneously resist novelty and fashion, because what is needed at such a time is solemnity and solidity. Now, this whole set of rituals is being passed down by those working in the funeral industry. Ordinary people, in daily life, generally do not (and do not want to) think about these matters, but when a funeral comes, they always obediently follow the arrangements of the funeral company. The power of reverence compels everyone to behave properly; even the most unruly child will not romp around
and frolic at a memorial service, and however atheistic a person may be, they can still sincerely light a stick of incense for the deceased. That is the power of ritual; ritual makes everything orderly.
Funeral companies always provide one-stop service; they provide people with this whole set of rituals, and what is needed here is by no means only equipment, venue, and procedures, but even more, the infusion of care and consolation. Funeral rituals can also never be fixed once and for all; they must both continue tradition and remain connected to the times (these two things are one and the same). But the task of reform and change still lies mainly with the funeral industry. Put simply, the funeral industry is not only a provider of technology and services, but also a provider of ritual and humanistic care. - Insect
2007-10-26 11:46:07 Anonymous 211.166.9.17
This is one of my future money-making ideas. Using the advantage of studying traditional culture, I’ll do ceremonial escort work for weddings and funerals in the city. Ah, someone beat me to it—the boss of the funeral parlor is really impressive.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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