Chinese Life in the Tibetan Foothills/Book 8/Things to be Avoided
BOOK VIII—SUPERSTITIOUS DREAD
Things to be Avoided (忌諱), chi wei
The first question of importance in Ssŭch‘uan is how to gain a livelihood; the people say that every thing else is false, hunger only is real. But next to satisfying hunger, comes the great art of appeasing and hoodwinking demons. There can be little doubt that superstitious dread haunts most people from youth to old age. A young woman well known to us happened to overlay her child in the night, and next day she showed no signs of grief or trouble; on being pressed for a reason, she replied, "Oh, we must cheat the demon;" the idea being that if she had shown any sorrow, the demon would have come and taken the other child also. Much of the callous exterior of this people is not real, but put on for fear of demons.
Lucky days are chosen for almost every event of importance in life; beginning an education, starting on a journey, opening shop at New Year time, marriages, funerals, changing houses, repairing or building houses, will not only be begun on a lucky day, but in a lucky year. It has seemed to me that the day of a person's birth and the day of his death are the only events which they make no pretence at controlling.
Odd numbers are more lucky than even ones; for example, an odd number of days must elapse between a death and a funeral, and every seventh day is observed by the women as a time for weeping till seven times is reached, and the mourning in many cases ended.
The first and fifteenth are the recognized days for worship in the temple and in the home. The seventh moon of each year is the most idolatrous of the twelve, when the spirits of the family ancestors are supposed to return and share the feast of meat and wine. The pagoda of each city, which is said to be built in the shape of a Chinese pencil and intended to govern the literary welfare of the city, has, as far as I have seen, always got an odd number of storeys. The Chinese are not without their superstitious dread of the foreigner. I have been asked many times if I could see three feet into the ground; and the call, Yang jên tao pao (洋人盜寶), indicates that they believe that our eyes have wondrous powers of finding treasure which they believe lies hidden in the earth. It is quite a common thing to meet a man on the road who will put his nose in his sleeve while passing lest he should smell the foreigner. The smell of the ink of a foreign book is unlucky in the house. The small print of foreign books will injure their eyes, foreigners' tea will bewitch them, etc. We shall now look at a few of the things to be avoided in classified order.