Qingming and The Point of My Blog

The West views death as an act of completion, like a book that's been read and stored into the dusty archives of time.

I personally hate Halloween because is caricatures death as subhuman ghouls and spirits that are ravenous for human flesh or high fructose corn syrup.  It assumes that death is in need of something, what we call "undead."  The act of death becomes incomplete, an act of avoidance of what death is.  Dead.  Immobile. Non action.

The rituals behind Qingming tells us something different.  Families would gather food, offerings, and tomb cleaning equipment to a beloved's grave site.  After the gravestone is clean and the offerings in order, every living family member burns incense and kneels in front of the grave to recite a prayer.  Once the incense is placed in the incense pot, the surroundings and your living relatives remind the individual of one's place at the present moment.

(source ;  Northern Song Dynasty)

I remember one of the more recent times I lit incense was when I visited my great grandfather's grave.  When visiting my father's old village in Cambodia, my family bought a few apples from market and slowly drove through a dirt road.  Except for the occasional satellite dish and cell phone tower, only small houses on stilts and lush rice paddies surrounded us.

The grave site sat on another farmer's field.  We slowly meandered from his house and strolled down a narrow, winding footpath around various small pools.  We entered a small eucalyptus grove.  At the center was a tall Cambodia stupa, with winged apsaras lifting the spirit into the sky.  A midst the tropical oasis, the small sanctuary was a cool refuge from the world.  With death staring straight at me, I felt mindful of the past, present, and future.  My worries felt insignificant to the infinity of time.

In many ways my blog site has been about death.  My blog is about art, the antithesis of death.  I don't see living as the opposite to death because people can function physiologically without being conscious of the world they live in.  Art preserves the expression of another human being, so communication of another person lives so long as the artwork remains intact.  Or as Stephen Fry puts it, "history whinnies and quivers and vibrates in all of us."  My blog is about how Chinese literature expresses art and how it still reverberates through the modern consciousness.