Clear Bright - Qingming

(Here's the full scroll.)

Qingming (清明) literally means "clear bright." For those of you unfamiliar, today is Qingming, a special holiday where many Chinese visit their ancestral graves.  The living will visit the graves of their ancestors, give the gravestone a good clean, and offer food to deceased relatives.  And for the pyro deep within us, burn paper money.  It's a day of veneration, reflection, and catharsis.

Ritual gives us a set of instructions on how to act without breaking social convention. It simultaneously exposes our insecurity about a given subject.  I remember when my grandmother was will alive, I was always incredibly careful not to break little taboos.  The words number "4", "the world," and "yes" have the same homophone to death.  It also didn't help that "death" my dialect used "death" and an emphatic marker.  So if it the weather was hot, you might say, "YUAH SEE," or "hot as death."

My friends on the other hand have hilarious views of death.  One of my friends wants his bodies to be stuffed by a taxidermist so he can be placed on a rocking chair on his porch.  We all assigned each other a death letter, and would all agreed we would somehow die by that letter.  Mine was "p."  During one of my trips to New York, a pipe exploded in the middle of the street.  I was exactly on that street the day before it exploded because I recognized the picture on the New York Times.

I don't like the mainstream views of death. The Judeo-Christians construct the concept of "heaven," some distant place where the deceased are neatly tucked away in distant paradise.  They get an eternal version of Florida while God is the real estate broker.  Death becomes something distant from the living.  Oh, and there's hell if you didn't maintain your moral credit rating.

The west celebrates death with Easter, the death of Jesus, and Halloween, who knows what that is.  Halloween is the weirdest day on the calendar.  How did culture decide that children should dress up as demons and beg for candy from random strangers?  Maybe death wants sugar.

Chinese ritual denies death.  Ritual offerings are arranged such that the dead enjoy the feast set up by living descendants.  Burning paper money is to maintain a good standard of living in purgatory.  One of my cousins mentioned that if everyone sent money to their spiritual relatives, wouldn't there be massive spiritual monetary inflation?  I should burn a federal reserve along with the spiritual money.

We fear death because it forces us to examine it's antithesis, life.  Both Halloween and Qingming proffer living good deeds in in change for a good spiritual life.  Bad people go to hell, or have no descendants to provide credit for purgatory.  Let's face it, we will all have to die at some point in time.  For those who practice Qingming and are literally keeping in touch with death, I hope this ritual helps the living find clarity.

 

Dying Flowers

Unlike the rest of the country, living in Southern California enables you to prolong the heat of summer.  Sadly even the warmest of seasons fall victim to the periods of life and death.  As I was picking the last flower in my front yard, it reminded me of Lin Daiyu, a character from Cao Xueqin's The Red Chamber.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Red Chamber, it's a comprehensive book that saga that follows the rise and fall of an aristocratic Qing Dynasty family.  I initially interpreted Lin Daiyu as an overly emotional sick girl that complained to much.  But once I continued reading into her character and the movement of the story, I regretted my initial underestimation of her.

As the year 2012 is about to end, I couldn't help but not feel the present and it's ephemeral nature.  As Lin Daiyu feels pity for the fallen flower petals, she says in a few lines:

"儂今葬花人笑癡，他年葬儂知是誰?"

"As I bury flowers others laugh at my insanity, how will I know who buries me?"

"一朝春盡紅顏老，花落人亡兩不知!"

"Once spring ends the red face of youth ends, fallen flower and missing departed will never be known!"

The entire poem roughly translates to "Ode to the Flower Burial".   Here's a shortened English translation, and a the full Chinese text.

Death and endings are morbid truths that seems to have been erased, or at least blind-sighted by instant communication and high speed internet.  The internet is not a window into the future, or even the present. It's quick recall of information from the past.  Constant availability of quick information provides the illusion of power and immortality, but death and endings are truths that cannot erase.

Stop.  Smell the flowers.