【2022 (壬寅) Year Ofe-in-Law Celebration of the Ancestor of Chinese Humanities Fuxi Ceremony】
The historical inheritance and epochal significance of Fuxi culture
See Yi Pavilion inside the Tianshui Fuxi Temple
Portrait of Fuxi
Fuxi Story Comic Strip
Tianshui Guatai Mountain The pictures in this article are all data maps
Gansu Daily Special Writer Yong Jichun
Tracing the origin of Chinese civilization, there are many neolithic cultural relics as evidence, as well as the historical records of classics and the ancient history and legends that have been circulated in the folk for a long time. In the system of ancient history and legend, Chinese civilization was inspired by the era of the Three Emperors and Five Emperors. Fuxi ranks first among the three emperors and the first of the hundred kings, and it is said that Longshang Tianshui is the hometown of Fuxi and Nüwa, who married and multiplied human beings, promoted the continuous integration and strengthening of the tribes, and at the same time led the tribes to carry out a series of inventions and creations that benefited mankind in the process of understanding nature, adapting to nature, transforming nature and developing production and improving life. As a result, the Chinese ancestors bid farewell to the barbaric flood and began to enter the era of civilization.
Fuxi culture is the origin of the root culture of the Chinese nation. Excavating, developing, researching and publicizing Fuxi culture, carrying forward the creative spirit of Fuxi, and providing strong spiritual support for enhancing cultural self-confidence are of great practical significance.
Fuxi and the era in which he lived
History calls fuxi's mother Huaxu, who became pregnant by stepping on the giant's footprints in Leize, and "gave birth to Fuxi in twelve years" in Chengji. According to legend, Fuxi's birthplace is Chengji, which is today's Qin'an County in Shui city. The Tianshui area, centered on Qin'an, was once the main area of activity of the Fuxi tribe, and there are a large number of relics and legends and stories of the Activities of fuxi nuwa and her clan. The Guatai Mountain in the North Sanyang River of Tianshui City, also known as the Painting Guatai, is said to be the place where Fuxi painted Guatai, and at least since the Tang and Song Dynasties, There have been temples to worship Futai Mountain. Near The Guatai Mountain, there are also ruins related to fuxi paintings and surnames, such as the Dragon Horse Cave and the Fen (Wind) Heart Stone. There is a temple of Nüwa in Longcheng Town in the east of Qin'an County. According to folklore, Nuwa was "born in the wind ditch, grew up in the wind platform, and was buried in the wind". Longcheng still preserves the names of villages such as Emperor Huan, Longquan and Fengwei, as well as names such as "Wind Ditch", "Wind Blade", "Wind Valley" and "Wind Terrace" named after the surname "Wind". Before the Han Dynasty in Beishan, Longcheng Town, Qin'an County, there was a temple of Nüwa; In the yuzhong gorge in the north of the county, there are also remnants of the "White Snake Pillar" of the totem image relics of Fuxi and Nüwa. The Ancient Wind Terrace in Baijiawan Township, Gangu County, and the Qiuchi Mountain in Xihe County, Longnan City, are also said to be the birthplace of Fuxi. Today, the Fuxi Temple in the west of Shuishi City is the largest surviving Fuxi sacrifice building in mainland China. These relics and discoveries in the Tianshui area dating back 8,000 years ago in The Dadiwan, Xishanping and Shizhao Villages of the early new period cultures confirm that Tianshui and even the Gansu region are not only Xiliwa Township and ancestral hometown, but also played an important role in the origin of Chinese civilization.
For thousands of years, the legends and stories about Fuxi and Nüwa have been widely circulated in Tianshui folk and all over the country, and the themes are rich and diverse. There are mainly flood stories, opening the heavens and creating the world, brothers and sisters getting married, making people out of the soil, and making up for the heavens. These magical, beautiful, tortuous and mysterious legends and stories have left us with important historical information that Fuxi and Nuwa pioneered civilization and became the founding heroes of the Chinese nation, the ancestors of the nation and the ancestors of humanities.
The first is the Creation Hero. The first part of the Warring States Middle and Late Chu Tomb excavated in Changsha in 1942 is fully documented. The content of the book is to the effect that when the heavens and the earth have not yet formed and the world is in a state of chaos, there are two gods, Fuxi and Nuwa, who are married, and four children become the gods of the four times. They understood the Dharma of the Participation of All Things and opened up the heavens and the earth. They trekked through mountains and rivers to observe the nature of mountains and rivers, and dredged the mountains and mausoleums, so that the mountains and rivers and the four seas could breathe, harmonize yin and yang, and make the heavens and the earth and stars operate in an orderly manner. There was no time sequence, so they drew up a calendar and had their four sons take turns to associate and represent the four hours. After another thousand and hundreds of years, Emperor Jun gave birth to the sun and the moon, and from then on Kyushu was peaceful and the mountains were peaceful. The four gods also made the canopy, made it rotate, and reinforced the canopy with the essence of the five-colored wood. Emperor Yan also asked Zhu Rong to help the four gods lay the four poles for three days and pay homage to the nine days in order to seek peace. Emperor Jun also formulated the rules for the operation of the sun and the moon. Later, gonggong also formulated ten dry days, four o'clock and leap months, divided into one day for supper, morning, day, and sunset, and the legislation was more accurate. Thus, the world of the Hundred Gods, the Order of the Sun and the Moon, the Wind and rain was formed.
Several ancient civilizations in the world have their own creation myths, Fuxi, Nuwa opened the heavens and the earth, participated in all things, xie yin and yang, fixed four hours, through the mountains and rivers, so that the chaotic and disorderly and desolate and silent world has an operational order and human beings, there is no doubt that Fuxi and Nuwa are the creation heroes of the Chinese nation.
The second is the ancestors of the nation. Legend has it that after a great flood, only Fuxi and Nuwa survived, and when they became adults, they married and multiplied human beings. In later generations Chinese the custom of marrying a woman to cover her head may have originated from Nüwa's "making grass into a fan to obstruct her face.". The "Customs and Customs" also leaves the story of Nüwa cutting the soil to create people: "It is said that the heavens and the earth have been opened up, and there are no people, and Nüwa has made people of the loess soil, and the drama is not enough to provide, but it is led to the mud and held up as a person." Therefore, the rich and the noble are also yellow earth people, and the poor and unworthy people are also poor people. Although the story of the ancestors "creating man" has different versions and many scenarios and ways, its essence as a breeding of human beings is the same.
Fuxi and Nüwa get married and reproduce human beings, Nüwa creates people by cutting soil, and Fuxi "uses the skin as a gift" as a marriage relic, "making marriage, the right surname" and "Nüwa prays to the gods, prays for the medium, because of marriage", as well as the legend of Nüwa as the god of high media and the god of fertility, jointly revealing that they are the ancestors of the Chinese nation and the founder of the marriage system.
Again is the ancestor of humanity. In addition to the above deeds, Fuxi and Nüwa record that they and their clans have many inventions and creations, mainly including painting gossip, making book deeds, knotting nets, taking fire seeds, raising sacrifices, making calendars, marrying marriages, creating ceremonial music, making nine needles, standing up the zhangzheng, setting up nine ministries, and taking dragon chronicles. These inventions involved many aspects of material culture, important areas of spiritual and social life and the germination of institutional culture. Chinese civilization and Chinese culture derive their origins from these inventions.
The long era in which Fuxi and its 15 generations of successors lived was the Fuxi era. In this era, from the sequence of the Three Emperors and Five Emperors and the era and invention of Fuxi and Nüwa, combined with Neolithic archaeology, it can be roughly determined that 6000 years ago, that is, the early Neolithic Period, Chinese civilization was based on the Fuxi Era.
The cultural contribution of Fuxi and his tribe
As the ancestor of Chinese humanities, Fuxi and his tribe made many groundbreaking cultural contributions in the early days of civilization. Ru shu Bagua is the discovery and generalization of the dichotomy and variation of the world's yin and yang, and abstracted as the embodiment of symbols; The book-making contract is the beginning of writing, marking the end of the era of knotted rope memorization and the advent of the era of writing; The establishment of marriages, the setting of marriages and the fixing of surnames are the determination and standardization of the dual marriage system, and the great changes in the marriage system and the progress of society; Taking fire seeds to master the use of fire, knotting nets to hunt and fish, taking sacrifices for cooking, teaching people to cook food, making nine needles to cure diseases, etc., not only enhances and expands the production field and survival capacity, but also greatly improves the health status and life of the ancestors, marking that the Chinese ancestors bid farewell to the primitive life of burrowing in the wild and drinking blood; The calendar, ritual music and lizhan zheng standardize production and life, interpersonal relations and social operation, enrich emotional expression and aesthetic ability, and have the ability to predict profits and avoid harms; The establishment of the Nine Ministries, the Six Sakusa, and the Dragon Chronicle Officials are the germs of the division of the territory, the division to manage the people, and the establishment of official positions, and are also a reflection of the entry into the civilization of the chiefdom.
One of Fuxi's major cultural contributions was the beginning of the painting of gossip. Bagua summarizes the law of change of the infinitely changing world into the most basic two substances- the opposition of heaven and earth and the relationship between yin and yang, and thus derives and combines eight symbols representing heaven and earth, thunder and wind, water and fire, and mountains. They are both opposites and unity, interacting and influencing each other, and the changes are endless. As a result, the bagua symbol became the universal key for the Chinese ancestors to exhaustively study the heavens and the earth, explain the changes of all things in the universe, understand and guide social life. According to legend, King Wen of Zhou deduced from bagua into Zhou Yi, and stacked the bagua in pairs to form sixty-four gua. In fact, the "Zhou Yi" was formed on the basis of gossip by later generations, through the screening, sorting, arrangement and processing of a large number of zhengyi by the wushi. It was rearranged by Confucius and later listed by Confucianism as a scripture, constituting an important part of the "orthodox" culture in traditional Chinese culture. From Bagua to Sixty-four Gua and Three Hundred and Eighty-Four, this is not only a kind of symbol deduction from simple to complex, from thick and fine, it reflects the great progress of the ancient people's thinking ability, the unprecedented deepening of natural understanding and the expansion of vision. Therefore, Bagua and Zhou Yi are not only the living water sources of ancient Chinese philosophical culture, but also the treasure house of traditional Chinese culture.
History refers to the body of the snake on the head of the Fuxi and Nüwa, which indicates that the Fuxi tribe originally used the snake as a totem. With the migration and great intermingling of tribes, the Fuxi clan also partially integrated the tribal totems of gradual conquest and alliance into the snake totem, thus forming a dragon totem based on the snake body, with a multi-totem combination of bull ears and horse teeth, deer horns and shrimp whiskers, fish scale snake body, and lion-nose tiger claws. The dragon totem is a dragon that is transformed into a virtual creature by a biological snake composite and a mixed race, which is a typical embodiment of the ancient totem worship of the Fuxi tribe's conquest and fusion of various tribes to civilization. This totem worship custom and cultural psychology has been passed down from generation to generation, and in the depths of the Chinese nation's soul, the dragon has an irreplaceable solid position and is passed down from generation to generation. As a result, the sons and daughters of China are all "descendants of the dragon", and the dragon has been sublimated into the cultural identity, emotional bond and spiritual symbol of the Chinese nation.
The dragon is not only a national emblem recognized by the Chinese ancestors, but more importantly, it has penetrated into the society and the folk for a long time. Successive dynasties have changed dynasties, and the monarch who has ascended to the throne is the "True Dragon Heavenly Son", who wears dragon robes, sits on dragon chairs, and presents themselves as dragon sons and grandsons; The court palace is full of dragons. The "dragon" became a divinely conferred royal power, a symbol of divine and inviolable power. Palaces, temples and important buildings, most of which are carved, painted, decorated, and inscribed with dragons as graphics. In the vast land of Shenzhou, Longshan, Longgang, Longyang, Longyuan, Longchi, Longzhou, Longcheng, Longquan and other mountains and rivers named after dragons are countless; Dragon Hall, Dragon Wall, Dragon Ancestral Hall, Dragon Pavilion, Dragon Gate, Dragon Tower, Dragon Residence, Dragon Pagoda and other pavilions with dragons as the dragon abound, and dragon-related projects in civil society such as dragon boats, dragon lanterns, dragon flutes, dragon incense, keel cars, dragon tail stones, dragon chants, dragon claw books, etc. are numerous; There are dragons in the 12 Chinese zodiac signs, and the dragon character is more commonly used by ordinary people. In social folklore, the dragon is not only a folk symbol of auspicious and festive, but also a sign of the dragon's anger and floods, earthquakes, thunder and lightning, and the surrender of sins to sentient beings. It can be seen that dragon culture is deeply accumulated in many aspects of traditional Chinese culture.
With the strength and migration of the Fuxi tribe, they moved east into the Central Plains, establishing their capital at Chen (present-day Huaiyang, Henan), and their descendants spread throughout the Yellow River Valley and its northern and southern regions. As Wen Yiduo said, after the Fuxi tribe moved from the upper reaches of the Yellow River into the Central Plains, the ancient "Zhuxia" and a number of Yidi with the same surname were all descendants of the Dragon Clan, that is, Fuxi, such as the Yellow Emperor, Zhu Rong and many other leaders in the Five Emperors era, the Xiongnu in the north, and the barbarian tribes of Jingchu Wuyue in the south. Today's Mongolian, Manchu, Miao, Yao, Yi, Tibetan, Zhuang, Buyi, Wa, Li, Shui, She, and other ethnic groups all worship Fuxi and Nüwa as their ancestors. It can be seen that when the ancient nation sprouted, Fuxi was recognized by most ethnic groups, so Fuxi also became the ancestor of the common worship of the Chinese nation.
Fuxi culture and Chinese humanistic spirit
The deeds and legends of Fuxi began in the pre-Qin Dynasty, were incorporated into the ancient Chinese history system during the Qin and Han Dynasties, and were fixed as the head of the Three Emperors in the Tang Dynasty. Since the pre-Qin Dynasty, due to its unique status and extraordinary contributions, Fuxi and even Nüwa have become the objects of praise, praise, worship, belief, and root-seeking that have been passed down by word of mouth of the Chinese nation throughout the ages and seen in the classics of history. As a result, the sages and philosophers of the past generations and even the ruling class, based on the deeds of Fuxi and Nüwa and their cultural creation activities, re-enacted and processed and increased, coupled with the derivation and transmission of folklore, the infiltration and habitation of folk beliefs and customs, and gradually formed a Fuxi culture with a long history, broad content, profound connotation and rich connotation. The cultural wealth and spiritual genes contained in it have become the source of giving birth to and nourishing Chinese culture and national spirit. To sum up, the humanistic spirit laid down by Fuxi and its culture has five aspects.
The first is the spirit of exploration of the world. From the pioneering legends and a series of inventions and creations of Fuxi Nuwa, what we see is a vivid picture of them studying astronomy, exploring geography, opening up people's morality, and leading the people to bid farewell to the flood. The Zhou Yi Zhi Zhi Xia Biography records that "the king of the ancient Bao Xi clan, Tianxia Ye, looked up at the heavens, looked down at the law on the earth, watched the birds and beasts and the earth, took the bodies near and the things far away, so he began to make gossip, with the virtue of the gods, with the love of all things." As a knotted rope, it is a net, and a servant is fished, and a cover is taken away from it." It is precisely with this fearless and exhaustive spirit of exploration that the Chinese ancestors began to move towards the era of civilization.
The second is the fearless creative spirit. The many inventions and creations of Fuxi and his clan are the crystallization of wisdom that they pioneered through countless difficulties and dangers in the practice of cutting through hazel and creating a life. Once these inventions and creations appear, they become the basis and guarantee for the ancestors to understand, explore and conquer nature, improve survival, enhance quality of life, organize society, and create civilization, and are also the embodiment of their fearless creative spirit.
The third is the spirit of unremitting struggle for self-improvement. The Fuxi era was the time when mankind moved from the era of ignorance to the threshold of civilization, and Fuxi and his clans took the initiative to cope with, actively explore, self-improvement, and open up things in the face of the various challenges brought about by the magical and unpredictable world, the complex world, and the constantly strife of ethnic tribes. In dealing with the various challenges and problems that arise in the nature of heaven and earth and the tribal society, they have become more and more frustrated and indomitable, tempering their strong will and spiritual character of self-improvement, and supporting them to stand out in the midst of the tribes standing tall and the crowds.
The fourth is the flexible spirit of combining rigidity and softness. The bagua invented by Fuxi is not only a symbol or graphic, but also a numerical or information coding, which is a way of thinking and expressing objective things with abstract symbols. Bagua and its easy-to-learn system shine with the wisdom of yin and yang variation, dialectical thinking, logical deduction and neutralization, which profoundly affects the way of thinking and cultural process of the Chinese nation. This spirit of flexibility, which combines rigidity and softness, has had a tremendous impact on the emergence and development of traditional Chinese culture for thousands of years, on the spiritual growth, spiritual shaping, character cultivation, values, and thinking modes of the Chinese nation.
Fifth, the spirit of harmony of tolerance and seeking common ground. Fuxi and Nüwa are the founders of dragon totems and dragon culture. The dragon totem is a typical embodiment of the ancient totem worship of the Conquest, Absorption and Mutual Recognition of the Conquering Tribes and Their Cultural Customs in the process of conquering and integrating the various tribes of the Fuxi Tribe to become civilized and powerful, and conquering other tribes. Through the appearance of the dragon totem, it embodies the spiritual pursuit and value shaping of the Fuxi tribe to seek common ground while reserving differences, beauty and coexistence, harmony and harmony, and this spiritual force is not only a powerful support for the Fuxi tribe to continue to move towards strength, but also a source of strength rooted in the depths of the Chinese nation's soul.
The historical influence and epochal significance of Fuxi culture
In the historical memory and cultural inheritance of the Chinese nation, Fuxi and Nüwa are not only the founding heroes and ancestors of the nation, but also the founders of Chinese culture. Therefore, Fuxi culture is the foundation and source of China's excellent traditional culture, and its cultural genes penetrate into many levels and fields of Chinese culture, the formation of Chinese original classical culture, the background and tone of Chinese traditional culture, and the Chinese nation's integration from pluralism to cohesion, all of which originated from the ancestor Fuxi. Therefore, Fuxi and its Fuxi era are the initial memory of the Chinese nation's childhood history and ethnic culture, and also the source and basis for the formation of the Chinese national community consciousness.
The national spirit is rooted in the civilization and culture of a nation, and is the essence of civilization accumulated by a nation in the process of its civilization and the basic concepts, beliefs, principles and spiritual destinations that have been inherited and followed; It is the condensation of excellent national character, way of thinking, will character and cultural tradition, and it is also the spiritual characteristics and cultural character of a nation that distinguishes it from other nations. The humanistic spirit pioneered by Fuxi and his tribe has shaped the Chinese nation and become the source of genetic code and strength for the Chinese nation, Chinese civilization and Chinese culture to continue to grow, and to be constantly revived and full of vitality through hardships and tests.
The era we are in today is a new era for realizing the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Contemporary Chinese socialist advanced culture is not only rooted in the mutual learning and integration of China's excellent traditional culture and world culture, but also the essence of sublimation and innovation combined with China's national conditions and the development of the times. Cultural prosperity is the precursor and foundation for realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and vigorously developing advanced socialist culture requires us to inherit Chinese civilization, carry forward excellent traditional culture, invigorate the national spirit, enhance cultural self-confidence, and practice cultural consciousness. In our great journey of facing the future, moving toward rejuvenation and building a community with a shared future for mankind, the ancient Chinese civilization, excellent traditional culture and humanistic spirit created and laid by Fuxi are undoubtedly inexhaustible cultural treasures and spiritual sources that have forged the consciousness of the Chinese national community, realized the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and created a better future, have important contemporary values and practical significance, and are worth inheriting, excavating, and carrying forward.