On May 7, 1947, three days after setting off from Wang’s house in Peiping, we took two buffalo carts and rushed to Wushan, a mist-filled place with clear water and many peaks. During this period, I couldn’t help but ask the driver about the local customs.
Wushan is an excellent place in terms of Feng Shui. It can absorb the atmosphere of Chongqing, Hunan, and Hubei, and gather the abyss of water hidden in the Three Gorges. Most burials here are dry burials, that is, hanging the coffin on the cliff. The purpose is to evaporate the water in the corpse to prevent it from mutating.
However, this hanging burial custom can only be afforded by wealthy families, because it requires a lot of labor. For example, there are mountain kings on some mountains. It cannot be arranged without spending some money. Ordinary people are still buried in the sand. Therefore, the Yangtze River In this area, corpse exorcism is also popular, driving the transformed corpses to dry places to settle down. When encountering troublesome blood corpses and drought monsters, they must be crushed with huge rocks.
For example, in the profession of driving corpses, there have been counterfeits throughout the ages. For example, those who returned to their hometown from a foreign land were not driven by people, but pulled by ox carts and horse carts. Some were simply smuggled by desperadoes.
During the Anti-Japanese War a few years ago, the nearby villagers had to hide in the mountains as a last resort. Some landowners did not hesitate to marry their daughters to the mountain king in order to survive. As if they were extremely poor, they simply packed up and joined the bandits. But there are also more young people who have joined the army and sent their parents directly to the mountains. Those mountain kings can escape, but the monks cannot escape the temple. They dare not cause trouble and bully those military families. If they go into the mountains to crack down on bandits in the future, those intruders will The children who went out to join the army might be able to bring back a message to remind them, so the parents of the young people who went to the battlefield were given preferential treatment by the mountain kings and local snakes.
But in fact, there are still a majority of people who are afraid of death. Those who stay and die on the mountain will eventually be unable to be buried on the mountain, unless it is a hanging burial. But for the authentic hanging burial, the best technique is undoubtedly the mountain-moving Taoist. Everyone within a hundred miles knew that the Banshan Sect was in Wushan, but no one had ever found it. They could only wait for them to go down the mountain to ask for help, and then they would do such a thing incidentally.
Poor families can only work together with their whole family to hire a cheaper corpse exorcist. The owner of the corpse exorcist is in Sichuan. They sell salt and sell tobacco. They have to go to the Three Gorges mouth to hand over the goods, and they must pass through the Wushan area on the way. By the way, they drove two wet corpses that had been raised, sealed their seven orifices and rushed to the place where the corpses were dead, and then built a jade-patterned sarcophagus to bury them in a grave.
Usually, when tomb robbers dig up a sarcophagus carved with jian patterns, most knowledgeable people will spit, indicating bad luck, and have to fill it back with soil.
When we got off the train, we all put on local plain clothes in order not to attract attention and attract criticism. Unexpectedly, these two coachmen talked to each other and sang harmoniously about these things along the way. They thought we would be scared, but the more we listened, the more energetic we would become. The two coachmen couldn't help but look sad.
Zhou Tianling sneered and leaned close to my ear, "Hey, these two coachmen are not good people. They are probably the spies on the hills nearby. They saw that we were young and fair and felt that we were intimidated, so we retreated in spite of the difficulties. , they can still make money again, if they dare to threaten later, leave it to me. After all, this is my territory, these dog teeth who usually occupy the top of the mountain and make themselves kings, and have more than shredded meat in the soup. , I’ve wanted to pull it out for a long time.”
