Chapter 30 Chinese worship
There is only one small road into the mountain.Under the torrential rain for several days, several sections of the road collapsed, and my car got stuck in the middle of the way, stuck in the rolling mud. Later, with the help of two students passing by, I exited the desperate situation with splashes of mud and barely retreated. to a grassy slope.I abandoned the car and changed the boat, unloaded some items from the car, and moved them to Li Yougen's boat, and then went home first.
The road has not been opened for several days, and my car has been left in the wild for several miles.There are no shops behind Buba Village, and although there is a farmhouse nearby, no one lives there.Yougen asked me to rest assured that nothing would happen.But I was still terrified, always imagining the car being stolen or prized.Although it is an inconspicuous domestic Jetta, it is a considerable fortune after all. How can a piece of fat be left in a place where wolves and tigers come and go?The people who often pass by there are unpredictable and secretive in my imagination, wouldn't they be a little bit malicious?
I took a boat to check the scene once, and it was fine, and nothing unusual was found.It was not until half a month later that the rain stopped and the clouds cleared up and the road reopened that I drove home.Thankfully, a stone fell from my heart.Now I believe in the rooted words: Baxidong is really a safe place.
When I say this, I don't mean that everything is peaceful here.As far as I can remember, there have been many shocking things here in the past few years: two motorcycles were stolen from the school; several fir trees were stolen on the slope; During the meal, I found that the diesel in the box had been sucked up... But in all honesty, these crimes are not particularly serious.
Country people are also selfish, and some even do evil, but rabbits don’t eat grass beside their nests, and most of their misdemeanors happen elsewhere, such as going to the city to sneak through doors and pick locks, or even kill people and steal goods.As soon as they returned to their hometown, most of them returned to their former roles, becoming law-abiding people and loyal family heirs.Not to mention a car that I don't know how to handle, even a pile of wood and a few bags of feed on the roadside, I don't have much evil thoughts.I often see these things thrown on the side of the road at will, and they are ignored for many days, as if the road is not lost.
Why do criminals often exclude their hometowns from the crime zone?Perhaps, an anonymous identity and an unfamiliar environment are the most likely to cause the absence of moral monitoring, causing people's psychological constraints to disappear.On the contrary, people who return to their hometown are familiar with each other, know each other well, know each other well, see each other without looking up, the relationship between relatives and friends is intricate, and the invisible bottom line of life is not difficult to agree on.Slightly different from the city, the moral monitoring in the countryside also comes from the other side of the world: the tablet at home, the tomb at the intersection, and the genealogy that is circulated and continued from time to time, greatly expanding a diversified monitoring alliance.
Although the ancestors were still alive in a series of sacrificial ceremonies, some people needed to eat and drink (place offerings), need expenses (burning paper money), need respect (three kowtows and nine worships), and cultural entertainment (such as dancing knives and guns or playing with lions). The spiritual existence of the Nuo opera program playing dragons) is a kind of authority that is ubiquitous in the dark.The country people can tolerate being scolded by themselves, but they will never tolerate the humiliation of their ancestors. Once they contact the "eight generations of ancestors", they have to do their best, which shows that this kind of authority cannot be desecrated.Country people often say: "To be a man, one must be worthy of one's ancestors", which further reveals this kind of longing for authority from time to time.
This is the European equivalent of saying, "In the name of God..."
In this sense, the traditional moral monitoring of Europeans and Americans comes more from God; the traditional moral monitoring of Chinese people comes more from ancestors and history—if you leave other factors aside.
Many difficult confusions about right and wrong are more or less relieved once they are brought to the ancestral graves in the countryside.All moral questions do not need answers here, or already have answers.What to do for a father, what to do for a mother, what to do for a son, what to do for a daughter-in-law, what to do for a daughter, what to do for a son-in-law... everything is clear and natural, It is only right and proper.Because of this, all kinds of sacrificial rituals in the countryside, in my opinion, are just some Chinese-style church services, a kind of localized moral homework.
Perhaps, once the firecrackers for ancestor worship cease to sound, the silence will reveal more ominous.