Dragon Boat Festival： Inheritance of Ankang Festival in Ruicao Dialect
Dragon Boat Festival is the most important traditional festival in summer. There are many nicknames for the Dragon Boat Festival, with different names in different places, such as Duanyang Festival, May Festival, Summer Festival, Noon Festival, Heavy Noon Day, Ai ‘er Festival and Daughter’s Day. It can be seen that the Dragon Boat Festival has a long history and rich connotations.
In recent years, there have been many new customs in traditional festivals. For example, how to "send blessings" on the Dragon Boat Festival has aroused widespread discussion. "Dragon Boat Festival is healthy" or "Dragon Boat Festival is happy", people are arguing, tracing back to the origin of festivals and exploring contemporary values.
Pick herbs to get rid of diseases.
Use fragrance to ward off evil spirits
Mid-afternoon, near the summer solstice, the days are extremely long, close to the peak of the sun in the "sky" in a year. "The day is long, Yin and Yang contend, and life and death are divided" (Book of Rites, Moon Order). At this time, the yang is at its peak, the yin will rise, and everything will grow vigorously. People’s greatest feeling is that the heat is unbearable. The ancients called this kind of physical feeling "evil", and thought that there was yin and evil gas invading the body in hot summer, or it was called poisonous gas and evil gas. The most effective way to fight against evil gas was to create "medicinal gas".
Collecting herbs on the Dragon Boat Festival, also known as "storing herbs", and "storing herbs on this day to get rid of poisonous gases" (Xia Xiaozheng), tells the truth that the ancients took everything from the law and resisted the change of nature with medicinal gas. As the saying goes, "before the Dragon Boat Festival, it was all grass, and it became medicine at the Dragon Boat Festival". Mid-afternoon is not only suitable for picking herbs, but also the most suitable for pharmaceutical production, which "can not stop smelling for a long time" ("Guang Ji He Zhu Yao"). During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, it was very common to collect herbs and medicines during the Dragon Boat Festival, and it was important to collect herbs at noon, such as "collecting herbs for medicine at noon" and "storing herbs for poison at noon".
Herbs are picked to eliminate all diseases, and wormwood and calamus are the most common. "Home has three years of moxa, and a doctor doesn’t need to come." It can be seen that wormwood is widely used. Acorus calamus, as an aquatic herb, is also very popular because of its pungent and warm taste, heat-clearing and dampness-removing.
The folk use of herbs varies from place to place. The "Dragon Boat Festival Scenery" in Suzhou is dominated by hollyhock, pomegranate, cattail leaf, mugwort leaf and Liuhua (Qing Jia Lu). Songyang’s "Dragon Boat Tea" is mainly composed of Litsea cubeba, Acorus gramineus, Ficus microcarpa, Lonicera japonica Thunb., Angelica sinensis and Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge. There are also other herbs, usually "one family and one party", and there is no fixed formula. It is mostly prepared according to personal physique and temperament habits, and a "fragrant" and "comfortable" Dragon Boat Tea is prepared according to certain experience and skills. There is a tradition of drinking Dragon Boat Festival tea in Yueqing, Zhejiang, Huaibei, Anhui, Ninghua, northern Fujian and Yongzhou, Hunan. Wenzhou also fried salt and herbs together to make "Dragon Boat Festival Salt", which is also called "Five Salts of Noon Salt and Tea". Zongzi wrapped in mugwort leaves and reed leaves is a kind of medicine tonic. Besides eating and drinking, medicated bath has the same effect. Qu Yuan’s "Nine Songs in the Cloud" talks about "bathing in orchid soup and nourishing fragrance", which means bathing in herbs. Therefore, the Dragon Boat Festival is also called "bathing in orchid festival" ("Notes on the Years of Jingchu"), and "Miscellaneous Notes on the Years of Jingchu" records that "the people in the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty used peaches and willows, and the soup was bathed, all of which were the legacy of bathing in orchid." In the Qing Dynasty, Ji Sheng at the age of Emperor Jing also recorded the tradition of bathing with Pu Ai on Duanyang Day in Beijing in the old days.Nowadays, many places still keep the custom of washing hair and bathing during the Dragon Boat Festival. In Hunan, there is a saying that "bathing in the Dragon Boat Festival will keep you healthy for one year". Hainan people call bathing in the sea water during the Dragon Boat Festival "washing dragon water", and Taiwan Province, a treasure island, takes water at noon during the Dragon Boat Festival and puts it in wormwood and citronella, which is called "clean water" to scrub the body smoothly. Wearing sachets and hanging mugwort leaves on the Dragon Boat Festival is to use herbs as a kind of ballast and seek good luck and ward off evil spirits with the help of the "fragrance" emitted by plants.
Collecting herbs during the Dragon Boat Festival and the ancient tradition of catching toads at noon. "Huainanzi" contains "drum to build soldiers, live to the end of May." In the eyes of the Han people, the May toad has a mysterious power, but its use as medicine in later generations may be related to the myth that Chang ‘e swallowed the elixir and turned into a toad in the moon (Ling Xian by Zhang Heng). The process of catching toads at the Dragon Boat Festival in Beijing was recorded in the Ming Dynasty’s A Brief Introduction to the Scenery of the Imperial Capital. "On the fifth day of the year, Chinese attendants came to catch frogs with officials from the Imperial Hospital." "Officials from the Imperial Hospital advocated that they went to Nanhaizi to catch frogs and get toad venom. Its method: the needle jujube leaves stab the toad’s eyebrows and the pulp shoots on the leaves to cover people’s eyes and not hurt them. " Venenum Bufonis can be used as medicine to treat dermatosis, detoxify and reduce swelling. In the Qing Dynasty, the court specially made "Venenum Bufonis Ingot" and other summer medicines, and every year during the Dragon Boat Festival, the place was rewarded. The people have won this law, catching toads as medicine, and gradually there are folk proverbs such as "the toad can’t hide from the fifth of May". Some snake-producing areas in the south also pay attention to eating snakes during the Dragon Boat Festival to treat rheumatism and skin diseases. Before and after the Dragon Boat Festival, the number of snakes and insects increased, and people decorated the "five poisons" on various sachets. The most common one was a green toad-shaped sachet. Besides toads, snakes, centipedes, scorpions and geckos were decorated in five colors to fight poison with poison and repel pests.
In southern China, Guangxi, Yunnan, Sichuan, Hunan and other places also have the custom of "rushing to the drug market" during the Dragon Boat Festival. In the north, the Yaowang Temple Fair, which begins on April 28th of the lunar calendar, usually lasts until the fifth day of May. In addition to free clinic, there are also customs such as offering sachets and zongzi. The Yaowang Temple Fair in Anguo, Hebei Province also has the largest Chinese herbal medicine market in the north. Before and after the Dragon Boat Festival, both the north and the south were shrouded in the atmosphere of seeking medical advice and taking a full breath of all kinds of medicines.
It can be seen that the concept of Dragon Boat Festival medicine custom is the simplest philosophy of life formed by China people who conform to the weather and coexist with natural plants and animals. Mr. Zhou Xing, a folklorist, summed up this concept with "cosmic medicine" and thought that many material forms of Dragon Boat Festival medicine contained abstract power, which reflected the cosmological thought that China people followed Yin and Yang, and the weather was fine when they were old. This thought has deeply influenced the East Asian Han cultural circle. Today, Japan, South Korea, North Korea and Viet Nam all have the concept and practice of Dragon Boat Festival medicine customs, among which, both China’s traditional thought origin and localized diverse forms together constitute the Dragon Boat Festival cultural circle with the concept of medicine customs as its essence and the pursuit of contemporary well-being.
A festival of communication
Emotional encounter
Dragon Boat Festival, as a traditional festival, has a new festival connotation in memory of Qu Yuan since the Southern and Northern Dynasties. Based on the tradition of boat racing in the southern summer solstice and offering sacrifices to the water god, the ancients combined the boat racing with the commemoration of Qu Yuan, just as the southern Liang Dynasty recorded in The Chronicle of the Age of Jingchu, "According to the fifth day of May, it was customary to vote for Qu Yuan as Miluo Day, hurting his death place, so he ordered a boat to save him." Since then, the race has become one of the core festivals of the Dragon Boat Festival. In recent years, some scholars have verified that the bird boat race is earlier than the dragon boat race. Wu Jun, a Liang native in the Southern Dynasties, said in the book "The Harmony of Continuation" that "Qu Yuan threw Miluo water on May 5, and the Chu people mourned it. So far, he has put rice in a bamboo tube to sacrifice it". Although the tradition of the ancients eating zongzi (corn millet) on the Dragon Boat Festival has long been mentioned in the local customs of the Western Jin Dynasty, the integration of the theme of commemorating Qu Yuan has further enriched the cultural connotation of zongzi. In the legend of the Dragon Boat Festival, Jiezitui, Wu Zixu, Cao E, Zhang Daoling, etc. have also become the objects of commemoration in various places because of their special personalities and noble virtues. Therefore, the Dragon Boat Festival always inherits the festival connotation of remembering the sages and pursuing the distance with caution.
After the Tang and Song Dynasties, the Dragon Boat Festival, together with the Spring Festival, Shangsi, Mid-Autumn Festival, Chongyang and La Ri, became an important festival in ancient people’s lives. Liu Yuxi, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, vividly described the dragon boat race in Yuanjiang, Hunan Province. In addition to the magnificent scene of colorful boats competing to fly, he also noticed the onlookers: "At this time, customs are as heavy as madness. Looking at the beauty of the river. The colorful flags are caught on the shore to illuminate the dumpling room, and the socks and Ling Bo are playing in the water. " The people’s true temperament is stirring in the surging crowd. By the time of Song Taizong, the race had become a water-playing activity, and the time was no longer limited to the Dragon Boat Festival, but it was held from February to March every year. The venue of the palace race was mainly in Jinming Pool. At this time, "the levee was like a wall, and the joy moved Jingchu every year." The art of "Jinming Pool Bidding Map" reproduces the scene of the official race, and this trend has continued to the West Lake race in the Southern Song Dynasty. The court loves to race, and this fashion has also led to the race being carried out on a large scale throughout the country. In the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Zhuzhi Ci also often described the lively festival of the Dragon Boat Festival. "I also bought a canoe from the river, and my children went to the rudder building one after another. Seeing the scenery is always risky, and the waves are like rain. "
Dragon Boat Festival celebration is indispensable for human relations and family ties. "Every family in the city closed their doors, and there was a lot of laughter." "Wanjia Cup celebrates Zhongtian, and Pu Jian often hangs with Ai Hu." "The dog barking in front of the door is very concerned, knowing that it is a neighboring aunt coming to worship." Relatives and friends get together, make merry with wine, and there is peace in the noise. "Sisters both go hand in hand, and the north city travels to the west city." "Who’s a good daughter in the city, and the north makeup is quite appropriate. The strange lang rushed out of the city and refused to take Nong to watch the water play. " Sisters are deeply in love, men and women love each other, and the bustling streets are more fragrant than zongzi. A ballad in Tongling, Anhui Province truly reveals the feelings of Lang in the Dragon Boat Festival celebration: "In May, Lang pinched Sister Ai’s head, and we drank a cup of realgar wine, holding two halves of Xiantao, and my sister came to Lang’s half, and I ate the fairy." Dragon Boat Festival is a festival of communication and emotional meeting.
In the fast-paced modern society, the Dragon Boat Festival holiday allows us to temporarily put off our work, go to nature wholeheartedly, return to relatives and friends, enjoy beautiful countryside leisurely, visit the great rivers and mountains of the motherland, immerse ourselves in diverse scenes and consume holiday goods instantly. The simplest blessing between relatives and friends is followed by love.
Although "Dragon Boat Festival is healthy" has no basis in history, it is consistent with the long-standing custom of "storing medicine and removing poison" in Dragon Boat Festival. The saying "Dragon Boat Festival is healthy" reflects the continuation of the traditional concept of medicine and customs and the concept of defending life, and reflects the contemporary China people’s pursuit of harmonious coexistence and conformity with the time sequence.
(Author: Wang Wenchao, Department of Philosophy and Culture Teaching and Research Department of Party School of Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China; Zhang Fenghao, a graduate student majoring in philosophy at the Party School of Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China)