An Research Of The 'Buddhist Funeral' Culture Of Tujia Nationality

Tujia nationality's culture of Buddhist funeral,as a tradition handed down from generation to generation, is formed during the long history of social life. It reflects many factors of Tujia culture, such as its history, its nationality feature and its district character. Funeral arrangement is always regarded by Tujia people as a very important part of life. The author of the paper , guided by the principles of ethnology, has researched for a long time the procedure of Tujia Buddhist funeral arrangements in HuaXiangyu village of Hongjiaxiang township, Sangzhi county, Hunan province.On the basis of the research, the author has noted down the whole process of Tujia Buddhist funeral in detail. According to the paper, Tujia funeral arrangements have the characters of ceremony, procedure and sorcery, which become the most outstanding features of it. In Tujia funeral, Taoist priests, filial sons of the death and the master of the funeral cooperate to complete the whole ceremony. During Tujia funeral, talking is combined with singing, and instrumental music is combined with vocal music to heighten the solemnity of funeral. If the death is female, a Buddhist story about Mulian, who tries his best to solves his mother's soul, will be introduced to the funeral. After analyzing the structure and the symbol meaning of Tujia funeral, and then studying the underlying culture of it, we can find out the importance of funeral culture custom in people's life. From this kind of custom, we can understand Tujia people's world outlook and the core of Tujia culture. The research of Tujia funeral can help us to recognize the rules that control the development of Tujia culture more easily.This paper can be divided into six chapters. In the first chapter, the author gives the outline of the information about Xiangyu village of Hongjiaguan township, Sangzhi county , including its nature, history, society, etc. .In the second chapter, the author describes Tujia funeral process with the order of time. The third chapter concludes the characters of Tujia funeral. In the fourth chapter, the author tentatively analyses the structure and the symbol meaning of Tujia funeral on the basis of actual examples. In the fifth chapter, the author deeply analyses the underlying culture of tujia funeral. And the last chapter is about the enlightenment the author gets from Tujia funeral culture. After studying the Tujia funeral custom of Sangzhi county, the author gets the idea that this kind of culture is the result of the interaction of many kinds of culture factors ,during which, Tujia culture develops from the slash-and-burn agriculture method to modern civilization.