[Online Chinese Festival Qingming]During the Qingming Festival, sacrifices to the deceased, civilized sacrifices are also mourning – China Daily Network

After thousands of years of development and evolution, the Chinese nation has gradually formed traditional Chinese festivals with various forms and rich contents. Each festival is different due to different solar terms, regions, and ethnic groups, forming a unique cultural symbol. As one of the “Twenty-Four Solar Terms”, Qingming Festival is also a traditional ancestor worship festival. It embodies the national spirit, inherits the sacrificial culture of Chinese civilization, and expresses people’s moral feelings of respecting their ancestors and following the record. Two connotations of nature and humanities.

In ancient China, in addition to ancestor worship and tomb sweeping, the cultural symbols of Qingming Festival also included many activities such as hiking, playing, wearing wicker to “drive away ghosts and warding off evil spirits”, swinging, cuju, and kite flying. Among the many activities of the Qingming Festival, sacrificial sweeping can be said to be the most important one. Worshiping and remembering deceased relatives is an excellent cultural heritage of the Chinese nation, and it is also the common guardian of human beings; it is an important part of inheriting good family traditions, consolidating blood ties, and building a harmonious society.

No matter how the times change and the society develops, there is no doubt that inheriting filial piety, inheriting family traditions, and cherishing deceased relatives are one of the important contents of life. For example, the “filial piety” that we often mention includes not only the support of elders during their lifetime, but also the worship and memory of their passing away. In 2006, Qingming Festival was included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list. In 2008, Qingming Festival officially became a national statutory holiday, which shows that we attach great importance to traditional festivals.

Chinese traditional culture attaches great importance to the harmony of yin and yang and the transformation of life and death. Our ancestors set up many festivals for fun, but also set up the Qingming Festival with mourning elements. This is to respect “death” and to transform the concept of life and death into philosophy an expression of thought. The ancients attached great importance to the sense of ritual of “death”. From ceremonies such as burial, funeral, burial and other ceremonies, to the first seven, anniversary sacrifices, tomb sweeping and other follow-up activities, there are a series of procedures and norms, which is not only respect for the deceased, but also for the living. psychological comfort. In contemporary society, both in terms of formality and psychology, people pay more attention to “life” than “death”, but the Ching Ming Festival provides people with a good opportunity to correctly face and think about the ultimate problem of life.

The Qingming Festival culture has been passed down for thousands of years, and its content and form have also changed with the development of the times. With the development of society, people have realized large-scale mobility, and more and more people may not have the conditions to return to their hometowns to worship. Therefore, how to realize ritual sweeping in a foreign land has become a major problem faced by contemporary people, and it is also an urgent problem to be solved in social management.

With the popularization of electronic equipment and the development of the Internet, the emergence of new methods such as “online sacrificial sweeping” has become a change and innovation of the Qingming Festival culture by contemporary people. In recent years, with the improvement of people’s cultural literacy, various ways of sacrificing and sweeping civilization have become a new social fashion. Changing customs and customs, civilized sacrificial sweeping is to connect the sacrificial sweeping activities with the inheritance of the excellent traditional culture of Qingming Festival, and cherish the deceased through tree planting, greening, remote sacrificial outing, and classic reading. In this way, the purpose of sacrificial sweeping is achieved, and it is also conducive to enriching the connotation of the Qingming festival. Not only that, but it can also organically combine the memory of the deceased with the promotion of good family education and family style, and transfer from the physical sacrifice to the spiritual and cultural inheritance of the deceased, which is more practical.

The dead are long gone, and the survivors are forever sad. Tomb-sweeping on Qingming Festival is not only a memorial and mourning for the ancestors, but also an inspiration and encouragement for the living, focusing on feelings. In short, during the Qingming Festival, we must express our grief in an appropriate form, inherit the fine family tradition, and be able to worship in a civilized manner. True filial piety is not restricted to form, but depends on whether the worshiper is truly devout. This is the true meaning of the Qingming Festival.

[Editor in charge: Lv Jiashan]