Page 19 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols 12
the clan are assembled together. Poor families make do with a small table placed against
the north wall of the living room and surrounded by incense burners and other objects.
The tablets are arranged according to position in the family hierarchy; and the tablet in
memory of a man is usually flanked by that of his principal wife. Homage is paid to
ancestors on certain days of the year, and people turn to them for help and advice. Family
pride in its ancestral line can be measured by the number of memorial tablets displayed.
In the case of a married daughter, her memorial tablet after death will be placed
next to that of her husband if he has pre-deceased her. However, a tablet referring to an
unmarried daughter cannot be placed among those belonging to her own family. In such
cases there are two possibilities: a so-called ‘nominal marriage’ (ming hun) can be
arranged – i.e. asking a family whose son has died before marriage to agree to a
retrospective marriage with the dead girl; alternatively, a living man can be asked to
marry her. He is then, in a certain sense, a widower and can take another daughter of the
family to wife. In these circumstances, the normal wedding gifts for the bride’s family are
dispensed with – on the contrary, the bridegroom is financially rewarded for his help in a
difficult situation.
There was a third possibility: the tablet could be placed in an area specially designated
for this purpose in a Buddhist temple, a procedure involving considerable financial
outlay. In the People’s Republic of China the ancestor cult in temples has been vetoed,
and it is being discouraged in private dwellings. Politically, this is a question of
strengthening state solidarity vis-à-vis family solidarity.

Angler

yu-fu

When the first Emperor of the Zhou Dynasty (c. 1050 BC) was looking around for a

wise counsellor, he noticed, so the legend has it, an old man dressed in very simple
clothes fishing on a river bank. This was Jiang Ze-ya (also known as Jiang Tai-gung) and
it is in this form that he is always represented. The Emperor-to-be ‘fished’ the old man in:
that is to say, he made him his chief strategist in his fight against the decadent Shang
Dynasty. The story is told in the novel Feng-shen yanyi, which appeared in the early 17th
century.