During the Qingming Festival, it was raining heavily, and pedestrians on the road wanted to die. This is a sentence written by Du Mu, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, more than a thousand years ago. Time flies like a white horse, but every Qingming Festival, the scenes in Du Mu’s poems always reappear endlessly. People cherish the important festivals of their ancestors to promote filial piety. Even after a thousand or ten thousand years, such scenes will still be passed down from generation to generation.
Qingming
The ancients believed that Qingming was a time when all things were full of vitality, and it was also a good day for outings to get close to nature.
Of course, sweeping tombs and worshipping ancestors during the Qingming Festival is the most important theme of this festival. In this ancient and solemn festival, there are many traditional customs. And taboos, there is a popular saying about the Qingming festival sweeping: one must worship the five generations when going to the grave, and the sweeping of the tomb cannot pass the time.
Qingming
The five generations must be worshipped when going to the grave. It means that when going to the grave to worship, one should go back to the five generations. The “five generations” refers to the five generations who are counted up from oneself. The order is father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and finally the great-grandfather. That is to say, according to tradition, we should start from the oldest ancestor (that is, the great-grandfather) when we worship.
Then why is it five generations, not eight or ten generations? This is because there is a saying in the past that “people raise their graves after five generations”, which was also discussed in our previous article, because in the past family ancestral halls, usually only the tablets of the emperor were placed at most, and the family’s cemetery , when the fifth generation is accepted, another ancestral grave must be raised.
Qingming
The ancients believed that the protection of the ancestors for their descendants was also limited to five generations. The descendants of the beginning do not need to worship the ancestors of the sixth generation.
This principle also applies to the Qingming Festival, so there is a saying that “the five generations must be worshipped when going to the grave”, but after entering modern times, The society has undergone earth-shaking changes. Today, even many ancestral graves of more than three generations have long since disappeared. They can only pay tribute to their ancestors while paying tribute to their relatives, which is considered to be fulfilling the responsibility of filial piety.
Qingming
Then, when sweeping during the Qingming Festival, we should pay attention to “sweeping the tomb cannot pass the time”, which is a taboo about the time of sweeping the tomb. In the future, the uncle is from 1:00 to 3:00 in the afternoon, also known as “Sunset”, that is, when the sun begins to set in the west. In the past, it was called noon, when the yang energy was at its peak.
Then after entering the future, the yang qi subsides, and it is not suitable for people to stay in a shady place like a cemetery. past time”.
Qingming
But such an explanation is inevitably a bit idealistic. In fact, the real reason is that most of the ancient cemeteries were buried in the mountains far away from human habitation, and the road up the mountain was often It is rough and bumpy. If you don’t return by 3:00 in the afternoon, you may encounter danger, so you generally choose to sweep the tomb in the morning, and try to return at noon. “Sweeping the tomb can’t be too late” is actually for safety reasons.
The Qingming Festival is approaching. I hope that everyone must protect the environment and protect the ecology during sacrifice and sweeping, and let us jointly advocate civilized ancestor worship.