Study On Bureaucratic Hierarchy’s Funerary Rites Before Kai Yuan Tang Dynasty

Epitaphs of Tang Dynasty are an important research data to study Tang society, which contains a large number of political and cultural, economic and military information for the study of Tang social system and cultural practices. This article explores the early Tang Dynasty funerary rites to examine the structure and concept of the Early Tang clan society organizations based on these epitaphs of Kaiyuan bureaucratic hierarchy’s in Zhou Shaoliang’s "Epitaph compilation of Tang Dynasty".This article is divided into three parts:The first part describes the overall funeral customs content embodied in the historical epitaph, including the burial forms, the superiority of some special official funeral, burial date, and so on.The second part discusses in detail the funeral rites of Kaiyuan before bureaucratic hierarchy’s in the "Epitaph compilation of Tang Dynasty", including four burial forms, three kind of the superiority of some special official funeral, burial date, and the relationship between the official rank level and the funerals in Tang officials.The third part studies that Early Tang society is not only full of the superstitious geomancy believing in the immortal soul, but also the kind of entrenched clan concept and hierarchy. All these are reflected by the early Tang bureaucratic stratum funeral rites according to this article above. And it explores further that early Tang bureaucratic stratum is a hierarchical system made up by a hierarchy of clan kinship from rite down to custom.