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[问题咨询] (节译)Susan Naquin:Funerals in North China: Uniformity and Variation

(节译)Susan Naquin:Funerals in North China: Uniformity and Variation

Susan Naquin:Funerals in North China: Uniformity and Variation  


韩书瑞

(节译)华北的丧礼:一致与变异

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       在华北的丧葬上,除了算命先生与风水先生,和尚与道士,还出现了第三种相当特殊的专家:他们是一群长于古典教育,只会被邀请而非被雇佣的人。总之,丧葬仪式既是生者又是死者的仪式。丧葬礼仪不止是为了给予因为死亡而产生的悲痛与困惑的感情一个正规的表达渠道,而且是为了接下来的关系的重组。我们可以看到许多仪式所表达的这些关切:哀悼者符合预期的丧歌与程式化行为;精心准备的不同等级间亲属的丧服制度;报丧的固定方式;举哀与致哀的仪式;对死者致祭和制作灵牌的过程。每一种仪式都有其复杂的形式和规定的行为,但是不在目前所讨论的专业人员的主题范围内。
      事实上,丧葬的这些方面很久以前就被古典儒家思想所明确地关注。丧葬是孝之精髓“孝道”、“孝亲”的表达,这种价值观在晚晴时期已经作为正统思想的核心被大部分中国人所接受。许多这样的仪式拥有相当久远的名字,它们最复杂的形式是建立在相当繁琐的古代仪式先例的基础之上的,而且被受过古典教育的精英延续了很多世纪。这些仪式反映了对妥善处理家庭与社会关系,以及在父系的世世代代、生者与死者之间建立和维持完整但是分等级的联系的深切关注,因为丧葬仪式的许多组成部分吸收了儒家正统思想,所以人们求助于文本和专家传统来获得正确的解说与程序就不让人惊讶了。
       丧葬仪式的基本权威是儒家经典。尤其是孔子本人已经建立了一般仪式与丧礼的重要性。《礼记》(仪式惯例的论述),《仪礼》(仪式与庆典的惯例)和《孝经》(孝道的经典)这些稍微晚出的著作已经成为仪式标准程序的知识库。几个世纪以来,学者钻研这些文本以理解与仿效这些古典模式。在清代(在二十世纪更多)精英分子有这些作品的许多好版本可用,但是他们的困境如同这些文本限制了读者在语言学上的训练一样。仪式大纲作为帝国仪式的指南也由清朝政府出面印刷,正如罗友枝在第10讲里所说,在帝国仪式上,治丧委员会的头头作为司仪,而翰林学者作为顾问。因此士大夫们带着他们通向古典时期的权力,表演着最真实的与精心准备的这些仪式。
       幸运的是,对于更多普通教育下的人来说,理学家朱熹所写的《家礼》(家庭生活的仪式)是一种更易被人接受的参考书。尽管这项工作的现存版本看起来相当学术,这本书的流传却似乎相当广泛。19至20世纪地方历史经常引用它,受过教育的人依赖于被加入的注释。许多其他的仪式手册,大多阐释、借用朱熹之名的威望和《家礼》的名头。这种更加流行的“家礼”类型包括简单地丧服与仪式用具、位置与行为的图片和地位显赫的人治丧所需要的许多书面形式的文本(挽联,讣闻,招魂,墓志铭等等)。清朝文人共同努力来广泛传播这些作品以阻止佛教的影响,改正被他们视为鄙陋的地方风俗。篇幅较少的《孝经》有时候在丧礼上被分发,而且它甚至可能得到了更广泛的采用。它提供的“伤心欲绝的孝子”的刻板的描述,或许已经激发了行为(而且在地方志里有时被替换为评论were sometimes substituted for observation in gazetteer accounts)。尽管在我们确定不同类型的读者阅读的版本之间有多少一致性之前对这些仪式书籍的文本和插图进行详细的研究显然是必要的,但是相当明显的是,这类书籍是精英的基本参考手册而且恰好能被提高。
       同样重要的是,它不仅仅是受过最高等教育的人所要求的丧礼仪式的口述部分。当关系到仪式的这些方面时它似乎被广泛地接受,甚至一个对古典教育一知半解的专家。卢公明(根据福州的经验)谈及一个挣了钱并受过教育的人在丧礼上作为“礼生”为普通百姓服务:“他们...必然是文人,和蔼可亲、举止文明,当环境需要时能有所担当,外表庄重严肃;泰然自若有权威性,另外他们不能忽视他们的主顾对他们“叫礼”活动的满意度。在清代,书院与考试制度吸引了来自帝国的富人并且训练他们在古典教育与举止上的绅士作风。尽管他们中的很多人从未在家乡之外有职业,他们仍然感到自己是这个国家精英的一份子。文本中的程序比如《家礼》提供给这些人一个一致性与持续性的源代码。依靠这种文本保证了精英近乎一个垄断者,通过他们自己的解说(而且明显被他人广泛共享)的丧礼是最有地位的,有教养的和讲究的。这些专家蔑视其他仪式专家,自豪于他们的业余的身份和从来没有为了钱而被雇佣。
        “儒家”方面的丧礼仪式的声誉甚至使他们对未受过教育的人也有吸引力。普通人当然可以仅仅依赖于家庭和共同体的成员之间口头传播的知识,因为这里传授给他们的最简单的仪式形式(磕头,献祭的程序,迎客等等)在日常生活中是最常用的,它们和关于家庭和等级制度的基本的“儒家”思想早已成为民间文化的一部分。部分识字者也可能致力于被包含在民间历书中的葬礼仪式的部分,它通常区分了分等级的悼文,描述了丧服和仪式本身,并为仪式的书写部分提供了简单的文本。这种历书据说在二十世纪甚至可能更早的时候被广泛使用。


         然而,地位显赫与仪轨复杂和它们的书面成分增加了精英成员指导的合理性。为了获得这些服务,人们被鼓励在他们的社区与知名人士建立庇护关系。本家庭的受人尊敬的和有经验的朋友被要求做丧礼的主持人。其他人应邀参加了仪式中对墓地的后土神的献祭然后参加一个表达感谢的宴会。理想状态下,充满声望的“点主”仪式要求儒生群体的一个人的短暂参与。灵牌用雇来的轿子盛放而且被死者的家庭谄媚地大张旗鼓的迎接,这个被点过的“灵牌”就这样确立他的优越的位置并加强了仪式的声望。


        帝国的科举教育系统提供了一个全国性的拥有仪式经验、专业知识和能阅读经典文本的“礼生”网络来保持一致性。男人训练行为上的古典风格对于仪式的这个部分来说代表了一致的力量。在精英阶层中,丧礼中的礼节将社会与家庭联系协调地结合起来,因而在帝国时代达成全国范围的相对标准化。但是这种标准化随着它被推向全社会而逐渐变得多样化。
一只从小对虾过敏的虾哥

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此为韩书瑞对华北丧礼上的儒家礼生的研究。我试着翻译了一下,发出来大家看看。文中的插入英文的句子是笔者不会翻译的,请大家指教。
一只从小对虾过敏的虾哥

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原文:
       A third kind of expert brought in at north China funerals in addition to the diviners and geomancers, the monks and priests, was of a rather different type: invited, not hired, this man's expertise was his classical education. Funeral rituals were, after all, about the living as well as the dead. Funerals were intended to give formal expression not only to the feelings of grief and loss that a death generated but also to the ensuing rearrangement of rela-tionships. We can see these concerns reflected in many strands of the rites: the ritualized wailing and stylized behavior expected of mourners; the elaborate system of mourning clothing that paralleled degrees of kinship; the fixed methods for notifying the community of the death; the rituals for presenting and receiving condolences; the offerings to the deceased; and the procedure for creating an ancestral tablet. Each had its fixed form and prescribed actions but was not within the purview of the professionals so far discussed.  


       It is with these aspects of the funeral that classical Confucianism had, in fact, long been explicitly concerned. Funerals were the quintessential expressions of hsiao, ''filial piety," "reverence toward parents," a value that by late imperial times was imbedded at the core of the orthodoxy accepted by most Chinese. Many of these rituals had names of considerable longevity, were based on ancient precedents quite complicated in their most sophisticated forms, and had been perpetuated by the classically educated elite for many centuries. These rites reflected a deep concern with the proper handling of familial and social relations, and with establishing and maintaining unbroken but hierarchical connections among generations. living and dead in the patriline. Because many strands of the funeral rituals drew on this classical Confucian orthodoxy, it is not surprising that people turned to the texts and experts of this tradition for correct explication and procedure.  

        The ultimate authority for funeral rituals was the Confucian Classics. Confucius himself had established the importance of ritual in general and funerals in particular. The Li chi (Treatises on ceremonial usages), I li (Rites and ceremonial usages), and Hsiao ching (Classic of filial piety) were somewhat later works that had become repositories of model ritual procedures. For centuries, scholars had studied these texts in order to understand and emulate these classical models. Fine editions of these works were available to the elite in Ch'ing times (and more widely in the twentieth century), but their difficulty as texts restricted their readership to the philologically trained. Ritual compendia were also officially printed by the Ch'ing court as guides to imperial ritual, and as Evelyn Rawski shows in chapter 10, at imperial funerals the president of the Board of Rites served as master of ceremonies, and Hanlin scholars, as consultants. Thus scholar-officials, with their access to the classical past, performed the most authentic and elaborate of these rites.  

        For the person of more ordinary education there was, fortunately, a more accessible reference work, the Chia li (Rituals for family life) attributed to the great Sung philosopher Chu Hsi. Although surviving editions of this work seem rather scholarly, the book appears to have circulated fairly widely. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century local histories refer frequently to it, noting the reliance placed on it by educated people.

      A great many other ritual manuals, many of them illustrated, borrowed the prestige of Chu Hsi's name and the "Rituals for Family Life" title. This more popular Chia li genre included simple drawings of mourning clothing and ritual paraphernalia, diagrams of positions and movements, and the texts of many of the written forms necessary for high-status funerals (testimonial banners, announcements, invocations, epitaphs, etc.).45 Ch'ing literati made concerted efforts to disseminate these works in order to check "Buddhist" influence and rectify what they perceived as vulgar popular customs. The shorter Classic of Filial Piety was sometimes distributed at funerals,46 and it may have been even more widely available. It provided formulaic descriptions of the "filial son lost in grief,'' which may have inspired behavior (and were sometimes substituted for observation in gazetteer accounts). Although a detailed study of the texts and illustrations of these ritual books is clearly necessary before we can ascertain how much consistency there was between editions for different kinds of reading audiences, it seems fairly clear that books of this sort were basic reference manuals for the elite and were promoted as such.  


       Equally significant, it was not just the most highly educated who were called upon to dictate portions of the funeral ritual. It appears to have been widely accepted that for matters relating to these aspects of ritual, even a smattering of a classical education produced a specialist. Justus Doolittle (drawing on experiences in Foochow) said of the educated men who made money serving as "professors of ceremony" for the "common people" during funerals: "They . . . are necessarily literary men, of respectable connections, of polite demeanor, able to assume, when occasion demands, a grave and dignified appearance; self-possessed and authoritative, else they could not discharge to the satisfaction of their patrons the function of their calling."47 During the Ch'ing, the academy and examination system drew in  the wealthy from all over the empire and trained them in a classical education and a refined style of behavior. Though many of these men never had careers beyond their native place, they still felt a part of this national elite. Procedures laid out in texts such as the "Rituals for Family Life" provided these men with a source of consistency and continuity. Reliance on this kind of text assured the elite a near monopoly on what, by their own definition (and apparently shared widely by others) was the most high-status, refined, and elegant funeral. These experts disdained other ritual specialists, prided themselves on their amateur status, and were never hired for money.  


       The prestige of these "Confucian" aspects of funeral ritual made them attractive even to the uneducated. Ordinary people could, of course, simply rely on the orally transmitted expertise of members of the family and community, for in their simplest form the rituals mentioned here (the kowtow, procedures for making offerings, receiving guests, etc.) were commonly used in daily life, and basic "Confucian" ideas about family and hierarchy had long since become part of popular culture. The partially literate could turn also to the sections on funeral rituals contained in popular almanacs, books that often defined the grades of mourning, described mourning attire and the ritual itself, and provided simple texts for the written parts of the ceremony. Such almanacs were said to be widely available in the twentieth century and may have been so earlier.


       Nevertheless, the high status associated with elaborate rites and their written components enhanced the desirability of guidance from a member of the elite. To obtain these services, people were encouraged to establish patronage relations with prominent individuals in their communities. Respected and experienced friends of the family were asked to serve as masters of ceremony during the funeral. Someone else was invited to the ceremony of making offerings to the spirit of the soil at graveside and thanked later with a feast. The prestigious ritual of filling in the ancestral tablet called for, ideally, the brief participation of someone of the scholar class. Conveyed to the funeral in a hired sedan chair and welcomed with obsequious fanfare by the host family, this "inscriber of the tablet" thus established his superior position and enhanced the prestige of the rites.

       The imperial educational system had provided a nationwide network of "masters of ceremonies" with ritual experience and expertise and access to classical texts, to maintain consistency. Men trained in the classical style of behavior represented the forces of uniformity for this part of the ritual. Among the elite, the formalities orchestrating social and familial relations at  
funerals were thus relatively standardized nationwide during the imperial period, but became progressively variant as one moved down the social scale.
一只从小对虾过敏的虾哥

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楼主好厉害。

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咱们坛子里需要更多这样的”语言学家“,哈哈~

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更正:作者名字应为“韩书瑞”。谢谢folkman的建议!
一只从小对虾过敏的虾哥

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