英文摘要 |
There is a wooden tablet of pine figurine used as exorcisms with more than three hundreds black ink Chinese characters in the Art Museum of Chinese University of Hongkong, dated the twenty-eighth year of the Jianxing reign period, found in Wuwei, Gansu Province around the 1990s. Quite a few wrong explanation, collation and sentence-by-sentence reading existed in the research papers among the mainland and Hongkong scholars who have published about it so far, and its character still remains obscure. The authors argued, however, that it should be an article replacing the dead or living in ancient Taoism religion, as recorded in early Taoist books and documents like Petition Almanac of Master Red Pine. Its use is to sever the calling and litigation in the nether world, dispel the demonic infusions, and eliminate the demons of tomb litigation and repetitious infusion, according to the recordation of the Rituals of the 1200 Offices that Petition Almanac of Master Red Pine cited. The purpose of putting a pine figurine into a tomb is to replace the death to bear punishment, and let the death gain release from culpability, and the purpose of putting a cypress figurine into a tomb is to replace the family dependants or relatives of and exorcise malefic influences for the living, according to the inscriptions on pine figurine itself. Such a kind of burial custom should originate from using infusion-dispelling lead figurine to replace the death, using infusion-dispelling ginseng to replace the living in the Eastern Han period tombs. The above-mentioned funerary object, as well as a great deal of clay 'dou vases', lead figurines, wooden figurines excavated from the tombs of Jin dynasties period in Dunhuang, reflect such a fact that Way of the Celestial Masters was rather prevailing in Gansu region of northwest China in the Wei and Jin periods. |