Reflections on Tomb-Sweeping Day

Yesterday was the solar Chinese festival of Tomb-Sweeping Day (Qingmingjie 清明節). I didn’t have classes on account of the holiday, and it also happened to be the day that my wife passed her third round of content exams for state teacher licensure, so there was (and still is) much to celebrate. Unfortunately, the weather in Minnesota around the fifth of April this year was not particularly conducive to the traditional springtime stroll (taqing 踏青), and in any event there weren’t that many blossoms to be found this early. In addition, making the traditional sweet green rice-balls (qingtuan 青團) is a fair bit beyond my current competency as a cook.

Still, since becoming a teacher in China in 2012 – and well before I became Orthodox – there’s always been something quite charming to me about a spring holiday meant to commemorate the departed, and that charm has only deepened for me since becoming Orthodox. Tomb-Sweeping Day is a tradition which predates Confucius by a bit – instated by Duke Wen of Jin (Jin Wengong 晉文公), a state centred in the modern-day Province of Shanxi 山西省, during the Spring and Autumn period. Before his ascension to the lordship of Jin, Duke Wen – up until then known as Zhong’er 重耳, was the innocent victim of a succession dispute owing to his father Duke Xian 晉獻公, who favoured his foreign concubine Li Ji 驪姬 and her son Xiqi 奚齊 over the eldest (thus, rightful) successor Shensheng 申生. Forced to flee his home by his father and later by his half-brother Yiwu 夷吾 (Duke Hui 晉惠公), he lived much of his young manhood in exile before he was invited to return to Jin. His firm leadership and righteous cause in exile attracted a number of talented and principled men to his banner, including one such named Jie Zhitui 介之推, a nobleman and poet of the state of Jin who was particularly talented with the zither.

In addition to being a talented poet and musician, Jie Zhitui was also a skilled administrator and a conscientious official, having gained his first post at the age of fifteen, and a filial son who carried his mother on his back when she had to travel. However, when Zhong’er took over his brother’s office as Duke Wen of Jin, Jie Zhitui – having kept himself aloof from the other members of the court, whom he took to be greedy, grasping opportunists – found himself slandered at the Jin court and thus overlooked for advancement. In protest, Jie withdrew into the wilderness of Mount Mian 綿山, where he lived in such desperate poverty that it was said he and his mother had to live on stew cooked from the flesh of his own thigh.

In the meanwhile, Duke Wen began to understand his mistake in overlooking Jie Zhitui, and tried without success to persuade him to return to court. His wicked and jealous advisers, however, advised him to set fire to the woods of Mount Mian in order to smoke him out – surely he would flee the mountain, they argued, in order to save his mother. Duke Wen did this. Instead of fleeing, however, Jie Zhitui and his mother clung to an old willow tree as the flames raged around them – and they both perished in the flames. After the flames had died down and Duke Wen was able to climb the mountain, he and his retinue found Jie and his mother both dead – but to their amazement, the willow was still alive and showed no signs of burning. Duke Wen bitterly regretted his actions and mourned Jie Zhitui. He renamed the place as Jiexiu (介休, ‘Jie’s Rest’) and declared that every year on that day no fires were to be lit in the State of Jin. This was the beginning of the observance of the ‘Cold Food Festival’ (Hanshijie 寒食節), which later became the more general Tomb-Sweeping Day for honouring the dead.

Tomb-Sweeping Day is a festival – and like all Chinese festivals, it’s one of considerable amounts of food: originally, cold foods that could be prepared without a stove or a fire. But in spite of that, there is a certain Lenten-Paschal ‘reasoning’, both to the legend and to the modern observance of the festival. The occasion is mournful, and its primary purpose is in honouring the dead. And yet the willow lives; spring returns with its blossoms; even the dead are never truly gone. The history of Jie Zhitui and Duke Wen of Jin, when the burdens of didactic moralism are thrown off of it, would seem to indicate a kind of assertion of the immortal peering through the masque of death. Though there is as yet no understanding of the Resurrection, an idea which would be scandalous even to the Daoists, there seems to be something more than a bit premonitory in the way that Jie Zhitui met his end and the way in which he was subsequently remembered. It would be more than somewhat hackneyed to point out that the innocent Jie Zhitui died on a tree, and to belabour the symbolism there. But certainly the natural sentiments which should be evoked by Tomb-Sweeping Day to an observant classicist would be similar to those we are supposed to cultivate during Lent – the ‘sorrowful joy’ of the season. Yet without the person of Christ in the foreground, these sentiments are without a proper direction or purpose and remain only premonitory.

It goes without saying that the Chinese of the Spring and Autumn period were particularly attuned to the poetry of the seasonal cycles – much more so than we are today. Further, I would argue that they approached the rhythms of the year with an elegance, freedom of spirit, even vulnerability that seems to have gotten lost in the musty, didactic scholasticism of later days, when the Ru 儒 way was on the defensive against the burgeoning popularities of Daoist and Buddhist doctrines. Confucius would have agreed with Socrates and possibly also with Laozi 老子 in wanting us to be startled into wonder by the ways of nature and of human beings – this was the basis from which he had all of his students start, moving from the ‘rustic’ poetry of the Odes to the prescriptive Rites and finally to the ‘finishing’ touch of the classic of Music.

This attunement is something we Westerners need to recover. Not by accident, I find it is precisely this sense of wonderment evident in the homiletic meditations for the season in The Lenten Spring by Fr Thomas Hopko of blessed memory. To get there from here, the proper fixations of both our grief and our joy first have to appear to us in the fast and in the prayers of the Church. Christianity overturns the ‘natural sentiment’ and points it like a lance at where it falls short of its object. We do not use Lent to weep over the dead or over physical discomfort. We should weep insofar as we are able, with Saint Andrew of Crete, over that which subjects us to death: gluttony, greed, laziness, short-sightedness, judgementalism, the desire to be the centre of the world. But also not by accident, this is a wisdom that the Orthodox Church in her fullness shares with the classical Chinese: in that the Crucifixion, the storming of Hell and the Resurrection happen anew for us – not as mere memorial, not as a ‘teaching moment’, not as pageantry, not as a spectacle for the spectators, but as the reality at the basis of life – each year at this time. To get ahead of myself a bit here: we do not merely sweep the tombs – the one who tramples down death by death and bestows life upon those in them comes Himself to us. The willow tree upon Mount Mian was spared from fire – the world upon Golgotha.