On the 5th of this month I went with my wife to clean the tombs of her family and other late members of her village. It was hard work cutting back the vegetation and even finding some of the tombs amongst the undergrowth below the karst cliffs. It was interesting to visit a 300-year-old tomb belonging to the founders of my wife’s village.
[I have removed the tomb photo due to protests about it being impolite and in one case too scary.]
I felt I learnt a lot this Pure Brightness Festival (Qingming Jie) about my wife’s village and Chinese culture, but I still had a lot of questions. In particular, why are things always done in threes? Three bowls of rice and three cups or rice wine are always laid out in front of every tomb. Sticks of incense are planted in threes in the earth in front of the tomb. When incense is offered to the ancestor spirits, the villagers always bowed three times.
[I have removed the image of the character ling, meaning spirit, on request on the grounds of it being too scary and the source of nightmares. I find none of this at all scary myself.]
I originally thought it was because the old Chinese character for spirit has three mouths, and that ancient Chinese were aware of a triune God with a triune spirit who should be worshiped, as Christians like me do. However, I thought, this belief has got corrupted into the worshiping of ancestors.
I have just read (see http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/afs/pdf/a493.pdf) that there is a belief in Korea, and therefore probably in China too, that there are three spirits that reside in each human being. After a human dies one of these spirits goes to another world, one of the spirits will remain in the corpse and one will wander about our world.
Does anyone have any other explanation?
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